Tag: siamese twins

New in the collection: Siamese-twin descendant pinback

Pinback button featuring photo of Alex Sink and the words "Governor 2016, Alex Sink."

“Born to Chinese parents in what is now Thailand, Eng and Chang Bunker became famous throughout the world as ‘Siamese twins.’ After years of being displayed at exhibitions, they settled in the mountains of North Carolina in the 1830s. They married two local sisters and had a total of 21 children.

“Adelaide ‘Alex’ Sink is the great-granddaughter of Chang Bunker. Sink was the chief financial officer of Florida from 2007 to 2011. She also ran for governor of Florida in 2010. She grew up in the Mount Airy home built by her great-grandparents Chang and Adelaide Bunker….”

— From ” ‘Siamese Twins’ Still Fascinate, Two Centuries Later,” a Tell Me More interview with Sink on NPR (June 5, 2013)

The North Carolina Collection includes holdings related to Chang and Eng Bunker and its Gallery includes a permanent exhibition on the Bunker twins.

Chang, Eng, Andy and ‘myth of old-timey homogeneity’

“When [author Yunte] Huang visited Mount Airy, or Mayberry U.S.A., he learned of a Chang and Eng exhibit kept in the basement of the Andy Griffith Museum. In other words, a shrine to an American myth of old-timey homogeneity was literally built on the more convoluted reality. Huang knew that the symbolism was almost too much to bear: ‘As Sheriff Andy says, “If you wrote this into a play, nobody’d believe it.” ’ ”

— From ” ‘Inseparable’ Finds Pride, Indignity and Irony in the Lives of Siamese Twins Chang and Eng” by Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times (April 4)

Limitless seems shelf space for biographies of the brothers Bunker. 

 

Who said it was OK to display Chang and Eng’s liver?

“Chang and Eng Bunker’s widows didn’t want to give away their husbands’ bodies after death, even when offered large amounts of money, even though they were left with many children to support. But the College of Physicians of Philadelphia convinced them it was ‘a duty to science and humanity that the family of the deceased should permit an autopsy,’ so the widows allowed the postmortem on the condition that the band between the brothers not be cut….

“If you go to the museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia – the Mütter Museum – today, you can see the conjoined livers of Chang and Eng displayed right below the plaster death cast the college made of their bodies while they were briefly in its possession. It isn’t clear if the Bunker widows knew that the livers would be taken, no less displayed. One of Eng’s descendants asked me, years ago, if I could help her figure out if there had, in fact, been permission from the Bunkers. She had been to the museum and found it a little strange to have people making fun of her ancestors’ organs. Not disgusting or upsetting or anything – just strange….

“I asked the descendant what she’d want to do if we did find evidence that the Bunker widows explicitly did not want the livers kept by the college. She laughed…. Should it be buried, she asked me rhetorically, at the gravesite containing the bodies, in Mount Airy? Should it be passed around the hundreds of living descendants, displayed on various mantels around the country in turn?

“I pictured an old conjoined liver treated like the Stanley Cup….”

— From “Visiting your leg” by Alice Dreger at Aeon (Nov. 16, 2016)

 

The sex lives of conjoined North Carolinians

“Typically, people who are close to conjoined twins come to adjust and see them as different but normal; they seem fairly untroubled by the idea of conjoined twins pursuing sex and romance. But those who are watching from afar cannot abide.

“The best example would probably be the story of Chang and Eng Bunker….  One April day in 1843, Chang married Adelaide Yates, while brother Eng married sister Sallie Yates. Based on the fact that Chang and Adelaide had 10 children, and Eng and Sallie 12, it’s fair to say the brothers had sex.

“At the autopsy of the Bunker twins, one of the anatomists opined that their active sex lives ‘shocked the moral sense of the community’ — even though the truth is that the Bunkers’ neighbors appeared to have just accepted the situation. A little known fact is that the Bunker wives’ father originally objected to his daughters marrying the twins not because they were conjoined, but because they were Asian. (This was, after all, the antebellum American South.)

“Yet in the 19th century, when doctors discussed whether the twins Millie and Christina McCoy could marry, one spoke for many: ‘Physically there are no serious objections … but morally there was a most decided one.’ When, in the 1930s, Violet Hilton sought to get a marriage license while conjoined to her sister Daisy, she was repeatedly refused.”

— From “The Sex Lives of Conjoined Twins” by Alice Dreger in The Atlantic

Yes, the Bunkers, the McCoys and the Hiltons all were either born or died in the Siamese Twin Capital of the World.

 

Occupy Wall Street movement spreads to link dump

—  “Yes, Dear, a Battleship; No, Dear, I’m Cold-Sober”

— Ken Burns missed quite a scene at the Eureka Saloon.

— $30 for a year’s worth of “Freedom, Sacrifice, Memory.”

— Memphis, Gibson. Nashville, Fender. Asheville, Moog.

— “We wish to negotiate with you about the Bodys of the twins….”

 

 

Barbecue, basketball… and Siamese twins?

What is it about North Carolina and Siamese twins?

First came Chang and Eng (1811-1874), who were born in Siam, now Thailand, [corrected] and died in Surry County.

Then Millie-Christine (1851-1912), who were born and died in Columbus County.

Most recently British-born Daisy and Violet Hilton (1908-1969), who lived out their last years  weighing produce at a Charlotte Park-N-Shop.

This celluloid mirror is from an earlier stop in the Hiltons’ heartbreakingly checkered show business career.

Storm warning in Florida: Here comes Kester Sink

Mt. Airy native Alex Sink, 62, is the Democratic candidate for governor of Florida. This account appeared in the St. Petersburg Times during her successful 2006 campaign for state chief financial officer:

“Sink is the great-granddaughter of ‘the twins,’ as she calls them. She grew up in the house Chang and Eng built….  She speaks of their commitment to education, intellectualism and the business savvy for a couple of P.T. Barnum circus attractions to decide to cut out the middle man to make enough money to become farmers….

“Strangers would come to see her house growing up. On the streets of Mount Airy, people would sometimes stop and ask the little girl with the hint of oriental features, ‘Are you one of the Bunkers?’…

” ‘We didn’t talk about it a lot. I grew up in a puritan age and there was always the sex thing,’ she said, referring to twins’ nearly two dozen children. Then there’s the pride in community: ‘Here are these two circus attractions who ended up settling in redneck North Carolina and were accepted in the community.’

“Sink’s father, Kester Sink (a very un-PC pistol we last saw ogling waitresses at a West Tampa campaign event during her husband Bill McBride’s gubernatorial campaign in 2002 —  precisely why, Sink says, he’ll be kept out of sight in this campaign) still lives in the Eng/Chang home and talked to National Geographic:

” ‘Sink, a successful businessman who owns the largest chunk of Bunker land, does not suffer fools and ferociously protects the Bunker legacy. “They were not freaks,” he says with a stare that dares you to think otherwise. “They were human beings who had a tremendous physical adversity to overcome. They left their home in Siam, their mother and family, and immediately picked up the language, mores, and manners of their adopted country. They were gutsy, smart, and self-confident.” ‘ ”

This just in from the Mt. Airy News: Kester Sink, now 86,  “so far has only participated in [Alex’s] campaign from a distance [but] is planning to journey to Florida as the governor’s race hits the home stretch.”