Our fascination with Chang and Eng Bunker—the eponymous “Siamese” conjoined twins who died more than 140 years ago—seems to have no end: Were they sideshow “monsters” who fell victim to greedy opportunists? Or smart, hardworking businessmen and dedicated family men who gave back at least as much as they gained to their hometown in Surry County, North Carolina?
Walk down Main Street of Mount Airy, North Carolina, and you’ll think you’ve made a wrong turn into the past. Floyd’s Barber Shoppe with its striped pole and “Two Chairs—No Waiting.” Snappy Lunch, featuring its world-famous pork chop sandwich. Wally’s Service Station, with one Regular and one Hi-Test pump minus the credit-card slots. The Mayberry General Store and numerous ice cream, gift and t-shirt shops.
And if you get tired of walking, you can tour the town in a 1962 Ford Galaxy replica of the Sheriff’s Car from “The Andy Griffith Show.” Griffith grew up in Mount Airy, and the town was the model for Mayberry, synonymous with small-town America.
As the sign at the foot of the bronze Andy and Opie statue outside the Andy Griffith Museum and Theater puts it, you’re in “a simpler time. A sweeter place.” The rural South of the late 1950s and ‘60s…before Civil Rights, and Vietnam, and gas lines and 9/11.
Mount Airy is small—just over 10,000 people live there. It lies neither here nor there in North Carolina, part Piedmont and part Blue Ridge, in the shadow of Pilot Mountain and about as far north as you can go before you cross the Virginia line.
But don’t sell the town short. It has produced a disproportionate number of notables. Besides favorite-son Griffith, there’s also country singer/songwriter, Donna Fargo. Old-time musicians Tommy Jarrell and Benton Flippen. Major League baseball players Chubby Dean, Ron Blackburn and Ben Callahan. Virginia Tech Football’s Frank Beamer.
Mount Airy is also home to the most famous conjoined twins in history, Chang and Eng Bunker…labeled “more famous than Lincoln” and “the Elvis Presley and Madonna of their time.”
How the Siamese twins—born in Siam (now Thailand) just a few decades after the American Revolution—held court around the world, then settled in the wilds of northwestern North Carolina and became in short order the wealthiest plantation owners in antebellum Surry County is a fundamentally American story, in all its paradoxical beauty and horror.
You have to hold both sides of the story in your heart to understand the controversial 200-year history of the Bunker family. Because, in addition to the beautiful possibilities of the American Dream, as historian Joseph Orser puts it, “Siam’s twins reveal America’s monsters.”
Begin at the beginning. Chang and Eng Bunker (born Jun and In) came into the world in May, 1811, born to a Chinese father and Chinese/Malay mother about 60 miles outside of Bangkok. The labor and delivery were unexceptional. But the resulting twins were very exceptional: the attending midwives drew back in horror when they saw that the infants were bound together at the bottom of the sternum by a sturdy, five-inch tube of cartilage that turned them toward one another.
As they grew, and with their mother’s help, the boys taught themselves to move in graceful tandem—running, turning summersaults, swimming.
Which is what they were doing when, in 1824, Scottish merchant Robert Hunter saw the 12-year-old twins in the river and thought they were “some strange animal.” It took Hunter and his partner Abel Coffin no time at all to realize that the boys could “prove profitable as a curiosity.”
But it took the two men considerably longer to convince the boys’ mother, Nak, and Siamese King Rama III to let them set sail to America under a three-year touring contract. Nak, whose husband and five of her children had died in a cholera epidemic, relented out of financial necessity, allegedly receiving $500 of the $3,000 promised. The Siamese king—who had also seen the possibilities of the twins, sending them in 1827 to Indochina as representatives of Siam—received a telescope and a band of temple dancers from Hunter and Coffin.
Chang and Eng landed in Boston aboard Coffin’s merchant ship The Sachem in 1829, already able to speak English, to begin their lives on tour as The Siamese Double Boys.
First, however, they were examined by American doctors (a practice that continued through the twins’ touring lives, largely to arouse curiosity and prurient interest in their physical conjoinment, as well as to certify they were not imposters). Pronounced safe for women and children to peruse “without harm or offence,” they were off to the races. In no time at all, Chang and Eng found themselves in Europe, touring the Continent, received by royalty…and making a tidy sum for their “managers.”
Word is that their early performances played to stereotype—they dressed in Chinese costume with their hair braided into long pigtails—and included physical stunts such as somersaults and strong-arm demonstrations using audience members as weights.
Gradually, however, the twins incorporated more question-and-answer discussion about life in Siam, played instruments and chess for their admirers, and told clever stories. Although the titillation factor of their conjoinment—the visible cartilage tube that bound them (in adulthood the thickness of a child’s arm), and all it suggested about their private/unprivate lives—was always the initial draw, customers must have increasingly felt they had attended a salon and been in the presence of two civilized gentlemen.
Which was, I suspect, exactly what the smart and enterprising twins were hoping for as they eyed their futures as free agents. In 1832 they returned to America, 21 years old and of legal age, their three-year contract finished. Chang and Eng severed ties with Coffin and Hunter; hired a new manager, Charles Harris; took charge of their own touring schedule; and oversaw the writing of a new exhibition pamphlet, “An Account of the Siamese United Brothers, by Themselves.”
It appeared the twins had had enough of being told what to do—and true to the American Dream, they became agents of their own destinies. For seven years Chang and Eng toured extensively throughout the eastern United States as well as Cuba and western Europe.
By 1839, however, they’d had enough of stage life, being on the road, and being stared at. At 28, it was time to settle down. With a joint accumulated fortune of $60,000—the equivalent of $1.5 million in today’s dollars—they traveled with Harris to remote Wilkes County, North Carolina, where hunting and fishing, solitude and the wilderness waited. Like Huck Finn, Chang and Eng lit out for the territories.
Here’s where things get interesting. Over the next five years in North Carolina, the twins managed to do the following:
1. Become naturalized U.S. citizens—thought to be, if not the first, among the first Asians to receive citizenship in an era when the 1790 congressional act granted the privilege only to “free white persons.”
2. Buy 150 acres of land at Traphill near Wilkesboro, as well as a mercantile, from which they sold necessary goods to their neighbors.
3. Build and furnish an elegant home that, by the early 1840s, was among the three highest-valued estates in the district.
4. Meet and marry Adelaide and Sarah Yates, two sisters of a highly respected—and white—Wilkes County family. Although initially resistant to the marriage, the girls’ parents relented, and Baptist wedding bells rang at the Yates farm on April 13, 1843.
5. Began their days as slaveowners, receiving Aunt Grace as a wedding gift and going on to own, by 1860, 28 slaves.
The twins’ marriage was the subject of much criticism and speculation. Northern newspapers labelled the marriages “an enormity” and “bestial.” Another wrote it off as “incredible,” asking, “What sort of women can they be who have entered into such a marriage? What sort of father to consent? What sort of clergyman to perform the unnatural ceremony?”
The brides’ family home was pelted with rocks the night before the wedding. (And one can only imagine the gossip that flew during the Bunkers’ long courtship of the Yates sisters.)
But in short order, the Bunker families were ensconced in Wilkesboro society (and shortly thereafter, in Mount Airy society, when they purchased more land and built two homes for the expanding families).
How? Remember that Chang and Eng were skilled performers. They had built their considerable reputation and fortunes based on their congenial social interactions with their audiences. Should it surprise us that the Yates sisters and their neighbors were over time captivated by the charming, bright and very wealthy twins, the likes of whom had never been seen in remote Wilkes County?
Was it the physical conjoinment of the twins—and the resulting sexual images it brought to mind—that initially caused resistance to the engagement? According to many, the Bunkers’ physical anomaly took a back seat to their racial identity. The twins were Asian in the Antebellum South…maybe not considered as “inferior” as black slaves…but still dark-skinned. Not white. (Remember that the North Carolina miscegenation law wasn’t overturned until 1967.)
“It would be the same response here today,” asserts one Bunker descendant in the documentary film shown at the Chang and Eng “Siamese Twins” exhibit in Mouny Airy. “We’re not New York City.”
In the Siamese Twins’ exhibit in the basement of the Andy Griffith Museum complex, you’re about as far from New York as you can get.
Visitors wander through the room, looking at the sepia photographs and documents on the walls. No one seems especially engaged—more, perhaps, embarrassed and uncomfortable as they read that the twins and their wives had 21 children (“OK, I don’t want to go there,” one woman says); were highly productive, wealthy, and physically active farmers; eventually moved their wives into separate houses and spent three days each week with each wife (“I get that,” a woman’s male companion muses.)
There is a fair amount of joking. One visitor begins to sing “We are Siamese, if you please” from Disney’s “Lady and the Tramp;” another asserts that the twins must have been champions in three-legged races, until his companion points out that both Chang and Eng had two legs and thus had no advantage.
There is also some pondering. “I reckon,” says a woman standing in front of a photograph of Chang and Eng with Adelaide and Sarah, “it was like those women were married to two people.”
Chang and Eng were, indeed, two very distinct individuals. Chang was usually portrayed as the more outgoing of the twins, and also the more volatile. In his August 1952 Life magazine article, Archie Robertson reveals the story of Chang hitting a man who had squeezed his hand too hard after a Philadelphia salon exhibition. The man filed assault and battery charges against Chang—charges which he promptly dropped when the judge pointed out that he would likely have a false imprisonment charge leveled against him by Eng. After all, if guilty-as-charged Chang went to jail, so did his innocent brother.
Over the four decades of intermittent touring, the twins fell victim to a number of indignities, some of them verbal taunts, others outright violent. There’s record of a mob attack in Massachusetts. A label of “slaves” by the Virginia state assembly.
Occasionally, the twins lost their tempers when provoked. During an exhibition in Alabama, a physician whose request to examine the twins was denied accused the men of being imposters, pickpockets, and “a set of grand rascals.” The twins threw a dagger and swung a club, threw an andiron and tossed hot coffee into the crowd. Subsequently, they returned admission fees to the crowd.
But standing their ground, the twins then oversaw the publication of a letter in the local newspaper, in which they stated that “there is a point at which forbearance must cease.”
It was said that Chang turned to alcohol in later years, yet Eng was unfazed by his brother’s intoxication. However, Eng’s vice—late-night poker marathons—kept Chang awake until the wee hours of the morning, creating loud arguments.
The fact was…the twins were getting older, and the intermittent exhibition tours they put together were less lucrative. In 1870, returning home from a European engagement, Chang suffered a stroke, which left his right side—the one closest to Eng—partially paralyzed. For almost four years, until their deaths in January, 1874, Eng worked to keep his brother “in good spirits,” supporting his brother’s leg in a sling as Chang leaned heavily on a crutch.
Early in the morning of January 17, 1874, Chang Bunker died of a blood clot to the brain; Eng followed a few hours later of what Eng’s great-great granddaughter Tanya Jones calls “exsanguination (bleeding to death) without bleeding.”
Jones, the executive director of the Surry Arts Council and overseer of the Bunker exhibit, cites neurosurgeon Eben Alexander’s March/April 2001 issue of the North Carolina Journal of Medicine on the cause of Eng Bunker’s death, long thought to have been from fright.
Alexander states emphatically that Eng Bunker’s death within hours of his conjoined twin’s was unavoidable.
“The vascular connection between the two may not have been very large, but we know that Eng’s heart was still beating after Chang’s had stopped, and the connection was sufficient to let Eng’s blood drain away in the two to four hours it took him to die. It seems clear: Eng died of blood loss.”
(It should be noted that Chang and Eng had arranged with their local physician and friend, Dr. Joseph Hollingsworth, to separate them when one twin died—but Hollingsworth arrived too late to save Eng’s life.)
Acknowledging that the 19th-century physicians did not have the imaging capacity nor knowledge to comprehend the details of the twins’ conjoinment, Alexander concludes his article with a rather startling claim: “From the autopsy findings, it appears that all the eminent consultants of the 19th century were wrong; it is obvious Eng and Chang could have been separated easily, just by cutting the band connecting them.”
Is Alexander correct? Maybe so. But more to the point is whether Chang and Eng would have chosen separate lives. Throughout their lives, they consulted with physicians regarding separation surgery. Each time, they were told that the procedure was too dangerous, with too many unknowns. Shortly before their marriage, Chang and Eng seriously pursued separation, ready to go forward—but Adelaide and Sarah convinced them the risk was too great.
On the other hand, the conjoinment of Chang and Eng is the very fact that brought them to America where they became naturalized citizens; traveled the world and amassed a fortune; then become landed gentry in the highly stratified antebellum South. It enabled them to support large families (those 21 children) after the economic devastation of the Civil War. To adapt to conjoinment, the twins used their native intelligence, industrious creativity and energy to become quintessential Americans—in a time and place when non-whites were fully disenfranchised.
Would separation have been expedient for the pragmatic and determined twins? It’s something to think about. But the bottom line is this: Either way—separate or conjoined—Chang and Eng Bunker were men to be reckoned with.
Kester Sink, imposing at 92 and radiant in a bright red sweater vest, sinks into a wicker chair on the porch of his farmhouse outside of Mount Airy. His black lab, Bunker, stays close.
Sink looks at me appraisingly. “Why are you here?”
I am on his front porch because Tanya Sent Me. That’s how the Bunker family network operates. I am on his front porch because it used to be Chang Bunker’s front porch. Because Kester is Chang Bunker’s grandson-in-law, who was married to Chang’s granddaughter Adelaide and has lived in the Bunker homeplace since 1947. Because, although he is not blood kin to the Bunkers, Kester Sink is an unforgettable character in his own right who’s proud of his connection to the Bunker family, and who within a few seconds has begun to remind me very much of his Bunker grandfather-in-law.
I take a chance. “I’m here to find out why you’re here.”
Kester Sink begins his story. “My father-in-law, Albert Bunker, was Chang’s son. After his father died, Albert returned to the farm to take care of his mother. Which he did until her death.” Albert, he says, was a man known for his intelligence and generosity. “He held the mortgages on a number of small farms around here, and during the Depression the farmers defaulted. Albert refused to take the deeds from them, telling them to keep working. Most of them did.”
Listening to Sink talk about his own farming adventures is like listening to the history of Southern agriculture. With a degree in agricultural economics from N.C. State, Sink began hybridizing corn and marketing it to distributors.
“I did all right. I made a living,” he says with obvious understatement. Recognizing his limits when corn genetics became more complicated, he bought up tobacco allotments, getting “pretty heavy into it.” Then it was hogs and beef cattle. And plasticulture—strawberries.
Adelaide Bunker Sink—Kester’s wife and Chang’s granddaughter—died of cancer in 1968, still a young woman. “She left everything she had in this world to me,” Sink says. “And she made me promise two things: to take care of our two daughters, and to keep the homeplace in the family. ‘Don’t let it turn into a showplace property,’ she said.”
Kester Sink has kept his word. His daughters are both successful women (one, Alex Sink, ran for governor of Florida in 2010), and his farm is meticulously kept and carefully low-profile.
I pose a question that gives him brief pause: “There’s been a whole lot written about the Bunker twins…” He nods dismissively…it’s clear that the ongoing flow of books and plays about Chang and Eng are irrelevant to him. (See sidebar.)
“So I’m wondering…what’s left to say about Chang and Eng Bunker? What would you most like people to know about them?” I finish.
He looks out over the front field and thinks. “The twins adopted to the mores of this country. They treated people fairly. I’m proud to be part of that.”
We should all be so fortunate to have our lives summed up so succinctly, so beautifully.
In fact, maybe that’s precisely what we should remember about the famous Siamese Twins, in spite of the many paradoxes in their lives. Celebrate their successes as human beings, rather than count the curiosities of their existence.
Yes, they were called medical “monsters”—yet they married well-bred Southern women and fathered 21 children.
Yes, they were born in Siam to a poor Chinese fisherman and his Chinese-Thai wife—yet they were models of antebellum Southern gentility.
And yes, they were farmers—yet they were also world-travelled performers who read Shakespeare and smoked the finest cigars.
They were sideshow exhibits—and also the wealthiest citizens in Surry County.
And they were born Buddhist, carried a Palm Leaf Buddhist manuscript with them from Siam and on all their tours, and reportedly believed in karmic reincarnation—but they were married and buried Baptist, with Eng’s last words about as orthodox Christian as you can get: “May the Lord have mercy on my soul.”
Perhaps most paradoxically…Chang and Eng were Asian landowners at a time when Asians were imported as low-level laborers—and themselves owned slaves.
Like most of our stories, Chang and Eng’s is rife with paradox. And as such, it is an American story in the most fundamental way. It is the story of two men determined to thrive in a land where hard work was a given. Who wanted what most of us want: love, and family, and security, and belonging. And they succeeded in a time and place—the rural antebellum and then Reconstruction South—when there was every reason for them to fail. They played to their strengths—a strong work ethic, high intelligence, fairness, and persistence. They married well and long and reproduced fruitfully, leaving behind some 1,500 ancestors, among them an Air Force major-general, and a past president of the Union Pacific Railroad.
It seems fitting that the twins took the surname Bunker—a southern appropriation of the French “Bon Coeur.” Good heart.
Maybe that’s the appropriate Last Word on the Bunkers.