The Lives of Chang & Eng

The Lives of Chang & Eng PDF Author: Joseph Andrew Orser
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469618303
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Lives of Chang and Eng: Siam's Twins in Nineteenth-Century America

The Lives of Chang & Eng

The Lives of Chang & Eng PDF Author: Joseph Andrew Orser
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469618303
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
Lives of Chang and Eng: Siam's Twins in Nineteenth-Century America

The Lives of Chang and Eng

The Lives of Chang and Eng PDF Author: Joseph Andrew Orser
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469618311
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Connected at the chest by a band of flesh, Chang and Eng Bunker toured the United States and the world from the 1820s to the 1870s, placing themselves and their extraordinary bodies on exhibit as "freaks of nature" and "Oriental curiosities." More famously known as the Siamese twins, they eventually settled in rural North Carolina, married two white sisters, became slave owners, and fathered twenty-one children between them. Though the brothers constantly professed their normality, they occupied a strange space in nineteenth-century America. They spoke English, attended church, became American citizens, and backed the Confederacy during the Civil War. Yet in life and death, the brothers were seen by most Americans as "monstrosities," an affront they were unable to escape. Joseph Andrew Orser chronicles the twins' history, their sometimes raucous journey through antebellum America, their domestic lives in North Carolina, and what their fame revealed about the changing racial and cultural landscape of the United States. More than a biography of the twins, the result is a study of nineteenth-century American culture and society through the prism of Chang and Eng that reveals how Americans projected onto the twins their own hopes and fears.

The Lives of Chang and Eng

The Lives of Chang and Eng PDF Author: Joseph Andrew Orser
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781469642338
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Lives of Chang and Eng: Siam's Twins in Nineteenth-Century America

Chang and Eng

Chang and Eng PDF Author: Darin Strauss
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101538074
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This stunning novel combines fiction with astonishing fact to tell the story of history’s most famous conjoined twins. Born in Siam in 1811—on a squalid houseboat on the Mekong River—Chang and Eng Bunker were international celebrities before the age of twenty. Touring the world’s stages as a circus act, they settled in the American South just prior to the Civil War. They eventually married two sisters from North Carolina, fathering twenty-one children between them, and lived for more than six decades never more than seven inches apart, attached at the chest by a small band of skin and cartilage. Woven from the fabric of fact, myth, and imagination, Strauss’s narrative gives poignant, articulate voice to these legendary brothers, and humanizes the freakish legend that grew up around them. Sweeping from the Far East and the court of the King of Siam to the shared intimacy of their lives in America, Chang and Eng rescues one of the nineteenth century’s most fabled human oddities from the sideshow of history, drawing from their extraordinary lives a novel of exceptional power and beauty.

Inseparable

Inseparable PDF Author: Yunte Huang
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0871404478
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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 by a band of cartilage and a fused liver, 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, arriving in Boston in 1829, 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. Their rise from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to rich southern gentry; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children; and their owning of slaves, is here not just another sensational biography but a Hawthorne-like excavation of America’s historical penchant for finding feast in the abnormal, for tyrannizing the “other”—a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself.

Mobituaries

Mobituaries PDF Author: Mo Rocca
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501197630
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
From popular TV correspondent and writer Rocca comes a charmingly irreverent and rigorously researched book that celebrates the dead people who made life worth living.

Chang and Eng Reconnected

Chang and Eng Reconnected PDF Author: Cynthia Wu
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781439908686
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Considering Chang and Eng's body in America from the nineteenth century to the present

Wild Swans

Wild Swans PDF Author: Jung Chang
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439106495
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author. An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.

Written on Water

Written on Water PDF Author: Eileen Chang
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681375761
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Now back in print, these witty, insightful ssays on fashion, cinema, wartime, and everyday life demonstrate why Eileen Chang was and is a major icon of twentieth-century Chinese literature. Eileen Chang is one of the most celebrated and influential modern Chinese novelists and cultural critics of the twentieth century. First published in 1944, and just as beloved as her fiction in the Chinese-speaking world, Written on Water collects Chang’s reflections on art, literature, war, urban culture, and her own life as a writer and woman, set amid the sights and sounds of wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong. In a style at once meditative and vibrant, Chang writes of friends, colleagues, and teachers turned soldiers or wartime volunteers, and her own experiences as a part-time nurse. She also reflects on Chinese cinema, the aims of the writer, and the popularity of the Peking Opera. Chang engages the reader with her sly and sophisticated humor, conversational voice, and intense fascination with the subtleties of everyday life. In her examination of Shanghainese food, culture, and fashions, she not only reveals but also upends prevalent attitudes toward women, presenting a portrait of a daring and cosmopolitan woman bent on questioning pieties and enjoying the pleasures of modernity, even as the world convulses in war and a revolution looms.

Before I Die

Before I Die PDF Author: Candy Chang
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1466857315
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
After losing someone she loved, artist Candy Chang painted the side of an abandoned house in her New Orleans neighborhood with chalkboard paint and stenciled the sentence, "Before I die I want to _____." Within a day of the wall's completion, it was covered in colorful chalk dreams as neighbors stopped and reflected on their lives. Since then, more than four hundred Before I Die walls have been created by people all over the world. This beautiful hardcover book is an inspiring celebration of these walls and the stories behind them. Filled with hope, fear, humor, and heartbreak, Before I Die presents an intimate portrait of the dreams within our communities and a chance to ponder life's ultimate question.