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Book Cover for: Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History, Yunte Huang

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

Yunte Huang

Paperback
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Finalist:National Book Critics Circle Award -Biography (2018)
In this "excellent" portrait of America's famed nineteenth-century Siamese twins, celebrated biographer Yunte Huang discovers in the conjoined lives of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874) a trenchant "comment on the times in which we live" (Wall Street Journal). "Uncovering ironies, paradoxes and examples of how Chang and Eng subverted what Leslie Fiedler called 'the tyranny of the normal' " (BBC), Huang depicts the twins' implausible route to assimilation after their "discovery" in Siam by a British merchant in 1824 and arrival in Boston as sideshow curiosities in 1829. Their climb from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to rich, southern gentry who profited from entertaining the Jacksonian mobs; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children; and their owning of slaves, is here not just another sensational biography but an "extraordinary" (New York Times), Hawthorne-like excavation of America's historical penchant for tyrannizing the other--a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
  • Publish Date: Apr 9th, 2019
  • Pages: 416
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.40in - 1.20in - 0.70lb
  • EAN: 9781631495458
  • Categories: • United States - 19th Century• Cultural & Ethnic Studies - American - Asian American & Paci

About the Author

Huang, Yunte: - Yunte Huang, a Guggenheim Fellow, has taught at Harvard and the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is a Distinguished Professor of English. The author of the Edgar Award-winning biography Charlie Chan and Inseparable, both NBCC finalists, Huang speaks frequently about American popular culture.

More books by Yunte Huang

Book Cover for: Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History, Yunte Huang
Book Cover for: Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History, Yunte Huang
Book Cover for: Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics, Yunte Huang
Book Cover for: Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature, Yunte Huang
Book Cover for: Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics, Yunte Huang

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In the follow-up to his Edgar Award-winning Charlie Chan biography, Huang uncovers ironies, paradoxes and examples of how Chang and Eng subverted what Leslie Fiedler called 'the tyranny of the normal.--Jane Ciabattari
Engrossing.... give[s] an unvarnished look at the degradation and disparagement the brothers had to endure.--Jennifer Szalai
Chang and Eng waltzed, arm and arm, indivisible, across a brutally divided America. Huang's spellbinding account tells their story with a complexity, and sensitivity, with which it has never been told before.--Jill Lepore, author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman
Excellent.... Mr. Huang compellingly makes his case that racism was a factor in these two self-made gentlemen land owners still being considered, late in life, as nothing more than a Barnumesque "freak show".... It's not difficult to find in this, as Mr. Huang most definitely does, a comment on the times in which we live.--Melanie Benjamin
Inseparable, Yunte Huang's exuberant and vivid account of the 'original Siamese twins, ' examines 19th century American attitudes toward race and sex that resonate today -- a time when immigrants, people of color, those with disabilities and others are denied their stories and denied their humanity.... By sharing his own experiences, [Yuang] reveals the poignant commonalities of immigrants across time and place, strangers making sense of a strange land, determined to make a better life for themselves and their children.--Vanessa Hua
Inseparable tells an astonishing story, by turns ghastly, hilarious, unnerving, and moving. Huang is a dazzling writer, bold, energetic, and intellectually alert. His gripping account of the lives of the celebrated Siamese twins Cheng and Eng not only richly illuminates the past of P.T. Barnum and Mark Twain but also probes the racial and sexual politics of the present.--Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

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