Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History

Yunte Huang

2018-07 · Highbridge Audio · Skaito P.J. Ochlan

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Nearly a decade after his triumphant Charlie Chan biography, Yunte Huang returns with this long-awaited portrait of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), twins conjoined at the sternum by a band of cartilage and a fused liver, who were "discovered" in Siam by a British merchant in 1824. Bringing an Asian American perspective to this almost implausible story, Huang depicts the twins, arriving in Boston in 1829, first as museum exhibits but later as financially savvy showmen who gained their freedom and traveled the backroads of rural America to bring "entertainment" to the Jacksonian mobs. Their rise from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to rich southern gentry; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children; and their owning of slaves, is here not just another sensational biography but a Hawthorne-like excavation of America's historical penchant for finding feast in the abnormal, for tyrannizing the "other"-a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself.

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Yunte Huang, a Guggenheim Fellow, has taught at Harvard and the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is a professor of English. He is the author of Inseparable and the Edgar Award-winning biography Charlie Chan, both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists. He lives in Santa Barbara.

P. J. Ochlan, an Audie Award-winning and multiple AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator, has recorded hundreds of audiobooks. His acting career spans more than thirty years and has also included Broadway, the New York Shakespeare Festival, critically acclaimed feature films, and regular roles in television series.