In 1997, a musical called "Chang & Eng" made its debut on the stage of the Victoria Theatre in Singapore.
The musical, which toured for seven years across Asia, was based on the true story of Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined twin brothers who came from the Kingdom of Siam, or present-day Thailand, to the U.S. in the early 1800s. It covers their journey to the states and being exhibited around the country. Then, the entire third act takes place in Mount Airy, North Carolina, where the two men settled down, got married, and raised a family.
That's right — Chang and Eng Bunker, also known as the famous Siamese Twins, lived in North Carolina. And they were very likely the first Asian immigrants to live in the state.
Now, many of their descendants still live in North Carolina, and they're still telling the story of their famous ancestors to this day.
"I'm proud that I'm a Bunker," said Eng Bunker, a great-grandson of the twins who lives in Mount Airy. "I'm proud of my heritage."
How Chang and Eng came to the U.S.
The two brothers were born in 1811 and grew up in a village along the Mae Klong River. One day, a British merchant saw the two boys swimming in a river — a chance encounter that would change their lives.
"He became intrigued by their possibility. In his mind, this was a great opportunity to take them on tour in the West and to get rich off of doing that," said Joe Orser, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and the author of "The Lives of Chang and Eng."
The merchant and his business partner, Abel Coffin, eventually booked the twins' passage to America. Coffin would become their manager. It was often reported that the twins were Coffin's slaves, but Orser said they entered into a contract that was more similar to indentured servitude.
Exhibitions of foreigners and so-called human oddities known as freak shows would later become regular parts of traveling circuses throughout the United States in the late 1800s. However, in the 1820s, exhibiting humans in this way was uncommon enough to be a spectacle, Orser said.
"It was kind of a big deal when Chang and Eng came to town," he said. "Doctors would come to inspect them and the doctors would kind of crowd around them, ask them questions, poke and prod. This was done in part for science in an attempt to study these conjoined twins."
"This was the first pair of conjoined twins that,t for all of these doctors, they had had the opportunity to examine," Orser continued. "And throughout history, there were very, very few who had reached this age. When they went to the United States in 1829, they were 18 years old. (In) every city, their first day was spent in these medical exams where they were poked and prodded, and the twins came to despise this. They didn't like that at all."
At shows, Chang and Eng Bunker walked, talked and took questions from audiences. They even performed some minor gymnastics.
"People marveled at the graceful nature that they had, the way they were able to coordinate their movements together and to put their bodies and their minds on display," Orser said. "To a large extent, the twins didn't seem to object to this that much. They enjoyed meeting people. They enjoyed talking to people."
However, these interactions with the public weren't done on the men's own terms – the two were constantly on display, constantly othered.
"That identity is a kind of negotiation between the individual and others around them, that no single person has sole control over what their identity is," Orser said. "They may identify as one thing, and other people see them and treat them as something else. That, in the abstract, I think that's a really kind of important lesson here, and we also see over the course of their lives, as their influence, as their success grows, that at different times in a person's life, they can exert greater influence over how they see themselves and how they demand that others see them that way as well."
In 1832, the twins' contract with Abel Coffin expired. Although they were pressured to stay, the twins decided to set out on their own. They toured independently and amassed a fortune along the way. Then, they decided to settle down in North Carolina.
Becoming Southerners
According to some accounts, Chang and Eng Bunker passed by the area near Mount Airy while touring and found it beautiful, said Orser. They decided to settle there and connected with important people. It also helped that they were rich, famous, and not Black.
"In the Southern context at this time, race appears to have been understood as Black and white," Orser said. "So they did everything to signify, 'We're not Black and therefore we must be white.' And that's in fact how they were labeled on the census records of that time as well."
The two men also obtained U.S. citizenship in 1839, which at the time was limited to white free persons only, making them quite possibly the country's first Asian American citizens.
The Bunkers also married two white sisters, Sarah and Adelaide Yates, which spurred a national media frenzy.
"The national press had a field day with their marriage and all sorts of speculation," Orser said. "It was a marriage between two conjoined brothers and two sisters and that meant at all times, in all circumstances, behind closed doors, you're going to have three people, and that offended a lot of folks. It tickled a lot of folk,s too. Initially, people understood this to be a joke, some sort of publicity stunt."
"And it wasn't until a year later that the first babies were born that people began to really understand that this is real, that they were actually married, and that they were having actual sex and producing actual babies. That added a certain level of gravity to the conversations that were had of the twins."
The lives of the Bunkers were otherwise relatively peaceful. They owned hundreds of acres in Wilkes and Surry counties, and by many accounts, they assimilated into the local community.
But like many southern landowners, they also acquired dozens of enslaved people. Their first was a woman named Grace, who was a wedding present from their father-in-law.
" I think that they adopted the mindset of the American South at that time, or at least the white American South," Orser said. "They had each had sons that fought on the side of the Confederacy. One was taken as a prisoner of war. I think, as evidenced by the fact that their slave holdings grew during this time, they remained invested in the slave economy and the institution of slavery. And whenever newspaper reporters did find their ways to their plantation and interview them during the war, they made clear that they were Southern patriots."
After the American Civil War ended and their slaves were emancipated, Chang and Eng Bunker were nearly ruined financially. Just days after the Confederates surrendered, the twins announced that they would be touring again. But Orser noted that the announcement was not well-received. The tours were not successful and the public discourse was very negative about the twins.
"Here are these two former slave owners, kind of asking for us to donate money so that they can rebuild the plantations that they lost because they were slaveholders? This is what people were writing, and so it didn't go well," he said.
Audiences in Europe were only slightly more receptive, but they did recoup some of their fortune before ill health permanently sent them home to North Carolina. And that's where they died at age 62 — first Chang and then several hours late,r Eng — in 1874.
The two brothers raised 21 children between them, and over time, that has amounted to many descendants. It's estimated there are more than 1,500 of them, and a fair number still live in the Mount Airy area.
Keeping Chang and Eng's story alive
For as long as she can remember, Tanya Jones has always known about her ancestors, Eng and Chang Bunker. Jones, 76, is a great-great-granddaughter of Eng, and grew up riding bikes with her brother and grandfather around the Bunker property.
"I heard about them from my grandfather, Albert Bunker," she said. "He was very proud and wanted me to know about the twins very much."
Jones recalled that when she was in elementary school, her grandfather would hand her a stack of lithographs, or very old images of the twins.
"He said, 'Take care of these,'" she said. "That was the first thing he ever gave me."
It would become one of many items Jones collected that belonged to or related to the twins. As the executive director of the Surry Arts Council, she developed and oversees the Siamese Twins Museum in Mount Airy, which opened in 2024 and showcases a large collection of artifacts that belonged to the twins, as well as many photos and videos to help tell their story.
Jones is also in the process of getting many of the family letters transcribed, which she said helps tell a more authentic story of the twins. Over the years, there's been much misinformation as well as sensationalist narratives about who they were and how they lived their lives.
"I think we're up to over 300 pages of original letters," she said.
Upon entrance to the Siamese Twins Museum, one of the first things that visitors see is a video about the making of "Chang & En,g" the musical, which Jones said used to play on Singapore Airlines flights. The production had played a large part in connecting Jones to the place where her famous ancestors were born. Someone had given her a CD from the production and thought she would be interested in hearing it.
"I sat in my car until the whole CD played," Jones said. "I was just thinking, this is Broadway musical kind of stuff."
She faxed the number on the back of the CD, asking to receive more copies. A month later, she received a response from renowned Thai film and theatre director Ekachai Uekrongtham, who directed the musical. Upon learning about Jones and her connection to the twins, he invited her to see the musical in Singapore.
"When I got there, he said, you can't leave without traveling to Thailand and seeing the place where your ancestors were born," Jones recalled.
So she traveled to Thailand, to Samut Songkhram Province, where Chang and Eng Bunker were born. When she arrived at the twins' home village and saw the Mae Klong River, where they were born, she cried.
"It was emotional for me," Jones said. "I knew a good bit about the story … they were born on the river in a boathouse, they sold duck eggs in the floating market when they were little."
There was also a bronze statue of the Bunker brothers in the home village, which Jones saw contained an image of Eng's home in Mount Airy.
"When I first saw the statue, I (said), that's in Mount Airy, that image on the base of the statue," she said. "It was surprising to me. I had not internalized that Thailand was so connected to the twin that they had honored them."
Over the years, Jones became very active in telling the story of the twins and organizing the annual descendant reunions. She also facilitated the Thai ambassador's visits to Mount Airy, and was integral to establishing Mount Airy and Samut Songkhram province as sister cities in 2019.
Reckoning with the twins' complicated history
Like many descendants, Jones has fielded questions about how the twins owned slaves and had sons that fought on the side of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Jones acknowledged that it's a difficult concept and said that the men had to make these choices as southern landowners.
"They lived in the South, they were part of the community in the South," Jones said. "I view it as a part of adapting to the culture … You wouldn't have lived in Surry County and been a farmer, then joined the Union Army if you wanted to live."
She added that Grace and her two sons continued to stay at the Bunker farm as paid workers after the Civil War. Jones also recalled that one of Grace's descendants attended a Bunker family reunion and had questions about her ancestry, since some of Grace's children identified as mixed race in some government records.
"In some letters … the twins would talk about gifts they were bringing to their children, but they also brought gifts to some of the enslaved people's children," Jones said. "I think of it as it was part of the culture they were living in and trying to be successful in."
"Proud that I'm a Bunker"
Among the documents in the museum, there are photographs of a particularly rare item: A roughly two-century-old palm leaf manuscript. It was one of the few possessions that Chang and Eng Bunker brought to the U.S., and consist basically of long pieces of paper with ancient script printed on them, and strung together in a way that makes it look like a fan when it's opened.
It's not clear why the twins had this document or why they brought it with them, but it's believed that this may have been the first Buddhist document brought to the U.S. In a video that plays in the museum, scholar Ryan Pino, who is also a descendant of the twins, speculates that the twins may have been young monks in training, like many boys were of their time, and that could have been how they acquired the document.
The manuscript currently belongs to 85-year-old Eng Bunker, who resides in Mount Airy. Bunker is named after his great-grandfather because he and his brother, Chang, were the first twins to be born after the famous twins themselves. When they were children, the more recent set of twins were featured playing outside in a 1950s Life Magazine spread about the original Siamese Twins.
"Everywhere I go, somebody knows who I am. They say, 'You're a Bunker, aren't you?' (I say,) I hope so," he said.
Eng Bunker is among various descendants who have the "Bunker look," a euphemism for appearing Asian. While he noted that he and his brother were very proud of being Bunkers, there were times when it created conflict in their lives.
"A lot of people can tell I'm a Bunker from my eyes," he said. "When I was growing up, they'd call me different names, you know. I got mad when they call me Chinaman. I'd get mad as a wet hen. Me and my brother we'd fight all the time. But after you get old and people say funny things, like slurs to you, you just get over it, you know?"
Eng Bunker inherited the palm leaf manuscript from his father and often refers to it as the "Bible." He also owns the twins' deathbed, and said he plans to give the bed to his eldest daughter and the manuscript to the youngest daughter.
"You don't let things get out of your hands," he said. "It's got a lot of history behind it, you know?"
