Bunker Chang - The Two: a Biography of Change and Eng--The Original Siamese Twins

Irving Wallace & Amy Wallace

Digital Edition Published by Crossroad Press

Copyright 2011 by Amy Wallace

Cover Design by David Dodd

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For Sylvia

With love and thanks

IRVING AND AMY

For my parents with love

AMY

What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

St. Matthew, 19:6

The year 1843 was not a notable year for news in the United States. The occupant of the White House, the nation's tenth President, was fifty-three-year-old John Tyler, who had taken office only two years earlier upon the death of William Henry Harrison. The most exciting event on his agenda was the dedication of a monument at Bunker Hill, where Daniel Webster delivered the keynote address. Members of Congress had bestirred themselves long enough to vote a $30,000 appropriation for the testing of the newly invented telegraph. Dorothea Dix, reformer, published a Memorial attacking the treatment of the insane in the twenty-six states. Edgar Allan Poe won a $100 newspaper prize for his short story "The Gold Bug," and William Hickling Prescott brought out his popular History of the Conquest of Mexico . John Fremont was in Kansas City mounting an expedition to explore the Oregon country. William Miller and his Millerites were preparing for the end of the world. In Nauvoo, Illinois, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith announced that he had received a revelation that sanctioned polygamy for true believers.

The most provocative news story of the year, as it turned out, one that would stimulate international interest and inquiry, was a brief marriage ceremony held in an obscure corner of the state of North Carolina.

The wedding took place, beneath a bower of roses, on Thursday, April 13, 1843, in the two-story private residence of a well-to-do farmer named David Yates, located on Mulberry Farm six miles northwest of the town of Wilkesboro. It was a double weddingthe two brothers, naturalized American citizens, were marrying two native-born Southern sistersand the Reverend James L. Davis, a minister of the Methodist Church, conducted the ceremony.

First, Mr. C. Bunker, age thirty-one, took Miss Adelaide Yates, age nineteen, for his wife, for better or for worse, to love and to cherish until death did them part.

Next, Mr. E. Bunker, age thirty-one, took Miss Sarah Yates, age twenty, for his wife, for better or for worse, to love and to cherish until death did them part.

The only problemindeed, the factor that made the occasion international newswas that when Miss Adelaide Yates accompanied Mr. C. Bunker to their home nearby at Trap Hill and then to their nuptial bed, she took with her not only her newlywed husband but also her brother-in-law, Mr. E. Bunker.

And when Miss Sarah Yates prepared to enjoy her honeymoon with her husband, Mr. E. Bunker, she knew that she would have to share it alongside her brother-in-law, Mr. C. Bunker.

If the marriages were solemnized until death did them part, it did not alter the simple, inexorable fact that in life the grooms also could not part, then or ever after. For Mr. C. Bunker and Mr. E. Bunker, who had married the Yates sisters that April day in 1843, were none other than Mr. Chang Bunker and Mr. Eng BunkerChang and Eng, the world-renowned original Siamese Twins.

Although distinctly two persons, Chang and Eng had been united as one in their conception and had remained united in the thirty-two years since their birth. On their wedding day they stood joined by a thick fleshy ligament resembling an arm, five to six inches long and eight inches in circumference, that connected them at the base of their chests. Adelaide and Sarah Yates were definitely two separate and normal young women, two of the six children of a five-hundred-pound mother (renowned in the community for her weight, most likely due to a glandular malfunction) and a prosperous Baptist father.

Despite the problem of the two husbands being one and the two wives being two, the marriages of the Siamese Twins to Adelaide and Sarah Yates lasted almost thirty-one yearsand produced a total of twenty-one children.

At the time of their marriage, the Siamese Twins were world-famous. Until the appearance of Phineas T. Barnum's twenty-five-inch-tall Tom Thumb the year before, the Siamese Twins had been the earth's stellar show-business attraction. For fourteen years they had been a focus of attention for the press and had attracted enthusiastic audiences throughout most of the United States, the British Isles, France, Holland, and Belgium. They had been called by a contemporary writer "the eighth wonder of the world."

Yet at the time of their marriagessurely few marriages in world history, before or since, have been as incredible as thesenot many could imagine that the bizarre saga of the Siamese Twins was just at its beginning.

For Chang and Eng, the actual beginning had occurred thirty-two years earlier, halfway around the world in a distant and exotic land named Siam, which would forever be known for three of its productsthe Siamese white elephant, the Siamese cat, and the Siamese Twins.

~ * ~

They were born on May 11, 1811, on a bamboo mat in a small houseboat afloat on the river in the village of Meklong, located sixty miles west of Bangkok, the capital of Siam.

Their mother's name was Nok, and she was three-quarters Chinese and one-quarter Siamese. Their father, a fisherman named Ti-eye, was fully Chinese, born and raised in his native land, from which he had migrated to Siam. A Westerner who later met Nok described her as being "about five feet seven inches in height, well formed, with large hips, and, for her country, a strong woman.... She was thirty-five years of age when her twins were born." Nok already had four children. The twins increased the brood to six. There would be nine in all before the father died.

The mother informed an American visitor later "that she suffered no greater inconvenience at their birth than at those of her other children; that they were born with the head of one between the legs of the other, and as infants were rather small."

Once delivered, they lay compactly fitted together but facing in opposite directions, and this excited some wonder among the attending midwives and neighbors. Wonder soon gave way to joy that they were twins (in a land where a woman's prestige was enhanced by the number of children she bore), that they were well formed, that their first sounds proved they were alive and healthy. Immediately, a midwife prepared to right the one who had come out head first, and to separate them and bathe thembut suddenly it was observed that they could not be separated.