The Lives of CHANG and ENG : Siam's Twins (Siamese Twins)

Looking for a freak show? This isn't it. As you might tell from the publisher (University of North Carolina) and the corrected subtitle ("Siam's Twins" not "Siamese twins"), Joseph Andrew Orser's book is a serious undertaking.

It has to be; there's usually no intimate revelations from hidden diaries or outrageously erotic love-letters when it comes to famous figures of the 18th or 19th century. A letter to the wife of Chang or Eng asking for "how is it done...does the brother close his eyes...") would not likely get a detailed reply.

Instead, author Orser fills his 280 pages with rich detail on the obvious (the origins of Chang and Eng and the sideshow career that gave them the money to settle down and raise families) and the uproar (just how do freaks from Siam fit into white rural North Carolina?)

Most books on sideshows, freaks, or "very special people" simply devote a few pages to a photo of the twins and the amusing details of births (between them, they had 21 children) and death ("Then I am going," Eng logically said, after his brother's heart stopped beating).

Orser's book studies the sociology of the times. When Adelaide and Sarah Yates married Chang and Eng in 1843, the girls' neighbors "threatened to burn down [their father's] crops if he did not promise to control his daughters." Cries of bestiality went up, and the town was labeled "a community sunk below the very Sodomites in lasciviousness." It was well enough for people to gawk at the twins up on a stage as freaks of nature...but the idea that they could marry...raise families...come and live among ordinary people? They were, after all, "monsters!"

Much of what went on inside the households remains private, although we do know some of the logistics, for example, that Chang and Eng alternated and stayed with one wife and family for half the week, and then the other wife and family. There are also some details on the nature of their physical connection (and how if Chang was tickled, Eng would also react). The fascination here is how the strangest couple of all time, from the other side of the world, came to adjust to North Carolina living. Freaks? Well, they considered themselves higher up the social ladder than that, and even owned slaves.

In handling the story of the twins, Orser strikes a necessary balance between the curiosity factor of their physical existence and the reality of their daily lives in North Carolina.