Leonard Nimoy used to want to do a Chang Eng project but to my knowledge never did.
Chang and Sallie and Eng and Adelaide Plus Twenty One- has a ring to it.
“On tonight’s episode: When the twins brother Hu pays a visit the same day Eng buys a new slave named Watt and Chang’s wife gives birth to a new daughter named Winn, hilarity ensues!”
Their story has inspired a hit musical in Singapore (the wiki) that toured Hong Kong and other Chinese cities. (The Chinese accept C&E as well since while they were born in Thailand but were of Chinese ancestry.) I would love to see a version open stateside, but it being not terribly easy to get actors who are
1- Asian
2- identical twins (or at least look enough alike to be)
3- can sing
4- don’t mind being velcroed to each other
5- both want to be in show biz
6- can act
would probably be prohibitive.
HAHAHA! I just went to that very site; what with my curiosity piqued and all. Yep, now I no longer scoff at the “tune out” concept. :eek: But it does bring up some what ifs, though…what if one of the sisters had been much hotter than the other?
And because you were always pregnant or nursing, and sometimes both. After a while the thrill was gone.
Interestingly both brothers had daughters who were born deaf. I can’t think of any reason this would be related to their condition, but who knows.
The Mutter Museum has the plaster cast made of their bodies. You can see where they were taken apart and sewn back together. Speaking of plaster casters, they were sketched in detail including their private parts, which were normal but, strangely, each had gray pubic hair on the side facing his brother but dark on the other side.
The first time I saw the documentary about those two girls I had about 100 questions running through my head, mostly having to do with sex and reproduction. From what I understand they share one set of (fully functioning) reproductive organs. What happens when one of them starts dating and wants to become sexually active - especially if they other doesn’t want to? And if they do work out those details, what happens if they get pregnant - which one would be considered the mother? Just say one of them wants children but the other doesn’t? So many questions.
This is clearly an instance where BOTH girls would be mother to any child they have. Don’t try to assign it to one or the other - the fact is they share 1 set of female reproductive organs equally.
Legally one might be declared the mother and the other not, but the reality is they’re going to share sex and childbirth, if they ever have a child. No reason to think they couldn’t.
Although I’ve always found speculation on the future sexual habits of twins who, until recently, weren’t adults, to be a little… skanky. And I have to wonder how the girls take it, knowing that complete strangers they have never met know so much about their innards, and are speculating about their sex lives? I’m going to assume that they, like most teenagers, are on the internet and no doubt they’ve read what others have to say about them.
The Hilton sisters (not Paris and Nicky but the conjoined twins) had to spend a fortune in legal fees and court fees to get the right to wed. They were almost the anti-Chang and Eng: while the Bunker brothers had remarkably normal lives all things considered, the Hiltons had it horrible: a diabolical guardian who abused them as kids and squandered their fortune, unable to legally marry and have kids, and they died alone with no close relatives unlike the clans that C&E had.
They were working in a grocery store near Charlotte NC when they died, about 100 miles from where Chang and Eng had once lived. One would work the register while the other bagged the groceries. It’s been reported they died in poverty but the truth seems to be that they were just tired of touring and the sideshow and worked at the store by choice. Their house was no mansion but it was no shack either- pic- and people were so used to seeing them that they weren’t usually treated like freaks, so I think all in all they were content.
They appeared in FREAKS; their most famous scene is when the married twin is kissed by her husband while the other sister enjoys it.
Speaking of conjoined twins, can a woman give birth to a set of them vaginally, or does it need to be a c-section? I ask because on the page about the Hilton twins, it says that their mother’s boss assisted in their birth, and I bet she wasn’t a doctor.
Chang and Eng were born vaginally, as were most others prior to the 20th century. Chang and Eng had younger siblings who were perfectly normal, so apparently it wasn’t even a particularly traumatic birth. Ditto Elisa and Mary Chulkhurst, “the Biddenden Maids” who were connected at the hip in the 12th century (their substantial estate benefited the poor for centuries) and Millie and Christine McKoy, the slaves connected at the base of the spine in the mid 19th century who became the subject of a very public and very weird custody hearing (included a fraudulent mother and a fraudulent owner against the real mother and real owner in an English court), whose mother also had younger children.
I would guess that where and how they’re connected would be a major factor. Twins connected at the head were probably far more likely to die at birth if delivered vaginally.
Millie and Christine were born in North Carolina, and though they lived at the opposite end of the state it was widely rumored that they were the illegitimate daughters of either Chang and/or Eng Bunker. While there is of course nothing remotely hereditary about the condition and neither girl had anything like Asian features, you can understand how farmers who weren’t that familiar with No.Carolina geography and even less about genetics would make that assumption, especially considering that Chang and Eng were slaveowners and very fertile.
Millie and Christine started off very sadly due to their kidnapping and custody battle but ended up pretty well. For a slaveowning carnival barker their owner wasn’t a bad sort- he bought their mother to take care of them and later their other relatives, and he and his wife took very good care of them. They were extremely well educated for girls (possibly the best educated black women in the south)- they spoke and read in several languages, played numerous musical instruments, and had a huge repertoire of songs (Millie did melody and Christine harmony) and even after paying their master-turned-manager’s commissions they kept enough of their earnings to buy a large farm for their parents and to educate those siblings who were interested. They retired for many years and were active in their church where they were just Millie and Christine, but went back on the sideshow circuit in middle age to pay for the education of some of their nieces and nephews and to help their siblings buy homes; supposedly there are 3rd and 4th generation well to do black families today who owe their success to their grandparents or great-grandparents getting a major helping hand from the twins.
The one good thing about being a “circus freak” I suppose is you always have something to fall back on (and I’m not talking about a sibling). Just as Millie and Christine did when they needed money, Chang and Eng- who just like their neighbors were ruined by the Civil War- came out of retirement and did a couple of tours that put their accounts back in the black and left their family relatively well fixed after their deaths. They detested P.T. Barnum for various reasons but chose him to manage their return anyway since he had all the contacts in the world; they took a rotating selection of their kids with them as well since people then as now were fascinated by their productivity and one look removed any doubt that they belonged to the twins.
Both the Bunkers and Millie/Christine McKoy were in North Carolina when Sherman came through. It’d be interesting to speculate what a private in his army who’d never traveled far from the midwestern farm or Irish tenement where he grew up would have thought if he’d met both families while foraging (“Maw, you won’t believe how many people down there is two people”).
A pity that Jon and Kate Gosselin don’t have the class of the McKoy sisters or Chang and Eng.
On the topic of heredity and dominance of Asian features,this is a pictureof one of Chang’s daughters and her family. She is half-Asian and half-Euro, her children are 1/4 Asian and 3/4 Euro. They run the gamut but you can tell all of them had an Asian grandparent.
Chang and Eng’s Census rosters were also interesting; I’ve shown them to classes before when talking about the notions of race in antebellum America.
In one census the taker started to list them as one person, then “split” them, though he mentioned “Siamese Twin” as occupation. In another they were just listed as planters.
ALL of the Censuses I’ve found them in (1850, 1860 and 1870) listed them and their children as “W” for white. In Chang and Eng’s lifetimes however the only thing the Census generally cared about were W/B/M/I-White/Black/Mulatto/American Indian (though I have seen “Irish” listed as race in the 1850 and 1860 censuses). In the west where there were Chinatowns they’d usually write “Chinese” or Chi (I was disappointed they never called them Celestials) but for most of the nation where people had likely never even seen a Chinese or Asian person it was no big deal.
Later, starting around the turn of the century (by when the twins were long dead), there had been more and more non-white immigration to the US and xenophobia was growing and the Census reflected this. Not only were Asians no longer listed as white but they were listed by nationality and not just in the birthplace/parents birthplaces tabs: Fil for Filipino", Si for Siamese, “Ch” for Chinese, Hin for Hindu (aka Indian- I’ve seen guys named things like Abdul Muhammad listed as Hin for Hindu because they were from the Indian subcontinent), etc. I’ve even seen Unk for Unknown. I looked up a few of Chang and Eng’s sons and most are still listed as white but one had ‘Other’ and another had W with something scratched out next to it and Siamunderlined in “father’s birthplace” as if to show the Census takers frustration.
Seriously, Cat Fight. I read that, too, and had the same reaction.
What hell for Violet. Did she drag her sister’s corpse around? Or was she so sick from the same flu that she wasn’t mobile or even coherent enough to know her sister was gone?
She probably went into shock. Eng did when Chang died (or vice versa- I can’t remember which one died first).
Did anybody ever see the movie Stuck on You with Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear as conjoined twins? Quite possibly the stupidest idea for a movie ever to involve the level of talent it had: Kinnear isn’t a good enough actor to deserve better but it’s hard to believe that Damon, Cher and Meryl Streep all thought it was a good idea. Were it not for the hilarious scene of Cher bedding Frankie “Malcolm in the Middle” Muniz (which was in the credits) it would have been a total waste.
