This dissertation examines the cultural and social spaces that conjoined brothers Chang and Eng Bunker occupied, interrogating the insights their lives offer into nineteenth-century ideas of race, class, gender, and respectability. Chang and Eng were conjoined twins of Chinese descent whose stage name, the Siamese Twins, derived from the country of their birth. The brothers toured the United States as "Oriental" curiosities from 1829 to 1839, and then settled in North Carolina as farmers, becoming slaveholders, marrying white sisters, and eventually fathering twenty-one children between them. In 1849, the twins returned to touring, this time taking two daughters along with them; until their deaths in 1874, Chang and Eng exhibited themselves and their offspring, touring as the Siamese Twins and Children.
Through promotional literature, personal correspondence, visual images and newspaper reports, this work traces the evolution of public discourse about the twins and their families, contributing to other considerations of the twins and the course of American Orientalism. My dissertation goes further, however, by introducing early Asian Americans to considerations of the turbulent terrain of class and respectability in the 1830s and 1840s; the increasingly divisive debates over slavery, nativism, and sectionalism; and the tensions of national reunion in the years following the Civil War. I supplement this cultural analysis with an exploration of the social world of the rural North Carolina communities they settled in, using census data, government records, and family papers to explain the strategies the twins used to form connections with local residents and thus forge a space for themselves in these southern communities.
Chang's and Eng's claims to normative whiteness and southern middle-class respectability succeeded, to some extent. But the very process of claiming this space undermined their efforts. Placing the children on exhibit served as much to highlight the family's difference as it did to display the children's proper upbringing and the twins' virility. Additionally, the twins' embrace of a southern culture of slavery and their support of the Confederacy further alienated them in the eyes of many northerners. And, outside of the twins' control, their Asian origins carried increasingly negative connotations as a virulent anti-Chinese movement grabbed hold of Americans. Ultimately, the nation's shifting landscapes of race, class, gender, and respectability proved exceedingly tumultuous, undermining the twins' attempts at negotiation.