Chapter Twenty-Four
been ten years since they’d officially retired from show business, and they swore they would never return. But with our growing
families spread across two large properties, and heavy investments in new equipment and supplies, the farms no longer brought
in enough to cover expenses.
Eng and I now had four children: Katie, at five, watchful and stubborn, like her father; four-year-old Julia Ann, still delicate
but growing stronger; Stephen, three, full of questions; and baby James, teething and fretful. Addie and Chang had three—Josie,
Christopher, and Nancy—and she was heavily pregnant again. With forty miles between us and so many small children to tend,
we rarely saw each other. When we managed to write—passing letters back and forth through our husbands—our notes were hurried,
full of baby milestones and worry about unpaid bills.
The brothers stayed up late at night, fretting over ledgers. No matter how they tallied the sums, the losses mounted.
Their new manager, a man named Edmund Doty, negotiated excellent terms: eight months on the road, an $8,000 annual payment
meted out weekly, all expenses paid, no night travel, first class only, a six-hour workday.
With the resignation of men who’d run out of better options, they signed the deal.
“There’s just one thing,” they said. “Doty wants us to bring Katherine and Josephine. People are curious, and the girls are attractive and obedient. He thinks they’ll reflect well on us.”
“They’re still so little,” I protested.
“We’ll take good care of them, don’t you worry,” Chang said.
I did worry. I worried about jostling carriages and rattling train cars, about long days in crowded halls under hot lights,
while their fathers were gawked at by strangers. Would the girls be part of the spectacle, dressed up and paraded for the
amusement of the crowd?
I looked at Eng, hoping he might share my unease. But he only shook his head. “They’ll be fine,” he said. “They’ll see new
places. Meet interesting people.”
That, too, disturbed me. To our daughters, their fathers’ condition was normal. They had never heard the leering jokes, the
crude speculation, the whispers of disgust. They didn’t yet know that the people who came to stare were not seeking understanding,
but entertainment. Would they understand when the attention stung, when curiosity soured into cruelty?
“Besides, they’ll be with us the whole time,” Chang said, as if that settled the matter. And it did.
Whether I liked it or not, the decision had been made.
Eng and Chang returned just six weeks after they’d set out, with nothing to show for it but an IOU. The tour had been a bust.
Their fame had waned. On the exhibition circuit, they’d been eclipsed by the newly celebrated Tom Thumb, a twenty-five-inch
showman with a miniature gilded carriage and a flair for spectacle.
Audiences no longer responded to the world-famous Siamese Twins as they had when the brothers were raven-haired acrobats in their prime.
Age had altered them. Newspapers remarked that they looked more “Asiatic” than ever.
And they were too proud, too weary, to play the roles expected of them.
They had grown accustomed to being respected for what they did, not merely what they were.
Now, when spectators stared or reached for the ligament, when questions turned crude or curiosity bordered on cruelty, the brothers bristled. They no longer had the patience for it.
For much of their adult lives, they had been in control—choosing when and how to exhibit themselves, commanding high fees,
earning the respect (if never quite the acceptance) of a society that once saw them as little more than curiosities. But the
world had moved on. They were relics now, reminders of an older, coarser era of spectacle. Worse, they had become objects
of ridicule.
“Never again,” Eng said.
He reported that Katie and Josie had carried themselves well—they were patient and composed through the long train rides and
the jostle of restless crowds. But I saw the change in my daughter when she returned. The bright, curious child who had left
came back guarded and watchful. She told me about men who pressed coins in her hand and asked if she, too, was “attached”
to anyone. She described the dirt and stench of exhibition halls, the discomfort of being stared at, the exhaustion of travel.
I’d seen the penny papers. One writer remarked on the girls’ “swarthy” skin and black hair. Another noted, “Katherine looks
sad and unhappy, as if she’d rather have her liberty than be surrounded by people all day staring at her, and asking her questions,
as it seemed a great effort for her to behave as she evidently had been instructed to do.”
She had indeed been instructed. To smile, to curtsy, to answer politely no matter how inappropriate the question. To pretend
not to notice when people whispered about her parentage or pointed at her features. At five years old, she had been asked
to perform not just the part of a well-behaved child, but of an emissary, an ambassador for her father’s dignity.
I hadn’t wanted her to go, but Eng and Chang insisted. As I had feared, the weight of her father’s difference had shifted onto her small shoulders. And I, who should have protected her, had sent her out smiling into the teeth of the crowd.
After the tour, Eng and Chang were restless and irritable at home. Their emotions, never quite aligned, now clashed constantly—one
was brooding when the other was willing to joke, one eager to start the day while the other dragged his feet.
For years, they had fought to be seen as gentlemen. And for a time they’d succeeded in shaping their own story. But on the
road, faced with dwindling numbers and leering stares, the illusion shattered. Rejection stung. And the worst of it: they
couldn’t avoid their failure, because it lived beside them, fused at the ribs.
With nowhere else to put their frustration, they turned on each other.
Every small irritation—too much salt on the eggs, the wrong coat for the morning frost—became an argument. Every task a struggle
for control. Eng buried his disappointment in rigid routines. Chang went looking for something to break.
They could not outpace each other; one could not leave the other behind. So they fought. Because what else was there to do?
At breakfast, Chang reached for the coffeepot just as Eng lifted it, and coffee splashed across the table.
“You’re always in a rush,” Eng groused.
“And you’re so damn slow.”
Minutes later:
“Mending the fence should be first on our list this morning,” Eng said, shoveling eggs into his mouth.
Chang shook his head. “The barn door’s a bigger priority.”
They clashed over how to raise the children. Chang loudly cleared his throat when the noise in my house rose. Eng’s shoulders tensed when he thought Chang too harsh.
One night at supper several months after returning from tour, Eng was cutting meat for four-year-old Stephen while Chang scowled
across the table. “Let him do it himself. He’s old enough.”
“He’s my son,” Eng snapped. “I’ll decide when he’s ready. And you’re supposed to be silent, remember?”
Chang’s hand tensed around his glass. “That boy needs to start doing things on his own.”
Eng hesitated, then laid down the knife. But more and more, even the smallest decisions—where to store firewood, how much
molasses to order—became contests of will.
To win favor in the community, the brothers donated a plot of land on their Surry County property for a Baptist church. Though
not religious themselves, they offered to build it to foster goodwill. They cut trees, hauled logs, and sawed boards with
a team of field hands and day laborers. They even crafted a special pew for themselves with two seats.
One humid afternoon, while hammering roof slats, Eng clipped Chang’s thumb. He claimed it was an accident, but all morning,
Chang had been criticizing his spacing of the nails, his pace, his humming.
Chang lunged, grabbing Eng by the collar. They grappled in the sawdust, fists flying, torsos jerking in opposite directions,
legs entwined as they tumbled off the half-built roof and landed with a thud in the dirt. And still they fought—punching,
cursing, twisting awkwardly as they rolled, raising a cloud of dust.
The other workers, hardened to rough behavior, backed away, uncertain. This was no ordinary scuffle. It was a private war,
waged within the confines of a single body. But at last a couple of men stepped forward—hands on shoulders, voices raised—and
did what they could to break the momentum.
Chang shook with rage. Eng sat dazed, brushing grit from his face.
Moments like this were becoming increasingly common.
Chang’s temper simmered just below the surface, ready to erupt at the slightest insult. He smashed crystal and broke chairs
when he lost at board games. He picked fights out of boredom. Eng had no choice but to follow as he paced and fumed. One night,
as they stood in their bedroom arguing over the sale of a dozen acres, Chang yanked the feather bed off the bed frame and
stuffed it into the hearth. The fire caught quickly, smoke curling up toward the rafters before Eng and I managed to douse
the flames.
That night they slept on a pallet in the parlor, the scent of scorched feathers lingering in the air.
Another time, after losing at poker and drinking too much, Chang hurled a crystal glass into the fireplace. The sound woke
the children, who stumbled into the hallway, panicked and blinking.
Eng’s instinct was to ignore or concede, but even he had his limits. Sometimes, like a cat poked too often, he struck back.
More than ever, I saw how tightly the band bound him to his brother. What had once been a tether now felt like a shackle.
One evening in the parlor, with Chang dozing off drunk beside him, Eng gave me a long look. “When we were in New York, we
met with a team of surgeons,” he said.
I straightened. “You’ve been back for months. Why did you keep this from me?”