Launch of Yunte Huang's (CCS Writing & Literature Faculty) New Book

You're invited to Chaucer's for the Book Launch of Yunte Huang's (CCS Writing & Literature faculty) newest book, Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History!

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 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, 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. This is the story of their rise from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to rich southern gentry; their owning of slaves; and their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children. With wry humor, Shakespearean profundity, and trenchant insight, Yunte Huang brings to life the story of America's most famous nineteenth-century Siamese twins.

Huang's sensational biography is a profound investigation into our penchant for finding feast in the abnormal and for tyrannizing the "other," which Chang and Eng were able to manipulate and ultimately subvert.

Yunte Huang is a Guggenheim Fellow and a professor of English at UCSB. He is the author of Transpacific Imaginations and Charlie Chan, which won the 2011 Edgar Award and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. Having come of age in China as a student in the time of Tiananmen, Huang now lives in Santa Barbara.

The Wall Street Journal's story The Amazing American Story of the Original Siamese Twins, which appeared in the March 31 print edition, was adapted from Professor Huang's book.