AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
In a cemetery in Mount Airy, North Carolina, there's a headstone for Chang and Eng Bunker, the famous conjoined twins, and their wives, who were sisters. But only three people were laid to rest there.
CHRISTINA BAKER KLINE: Sarah, the wife of Eng, chose to be buried in an unmarked grave on her own property, along with the four daughters who died before her and the formerly enslaved people who after the Civil War came back to the farm. Nobody really knows why.
RASCOE: This got author Christina Baker Kline thinking of the reason Sarah might have separated herself in death. And she began to write a novel about the lives of Chang and Eng and Adelaide and Sarah called "The Foursome."
BAKER KLINE: (Reading) Sinful. Perverted. Mad. Those were some of the things people said about us. When word spread that the four of us shared one bed, our good neighbors' imaginations ran wild. Rumors flew about incest, unnatural relations, adultery, all kinds of depravities. No respectable woman would permit such an abomination. No God-fearing family would allow it. Eventually, our neighbors got used to us. They stopped asking questions. Even so, we were never fully accepted. We existed in an uneasy in-between on the fringes of polite society, yet bound by its rules.
RASCOE: Who were Chang and Eng Bunker? 'Cause these were real people. What is actually known about them and their lives?
BAKER KLINE: Chang and Eng Bunker were born in 1811 in a small fishing village in what was then Siam - Thailand. Both had two arms, two legs, two heads, and were joined simply by a band of cartilage right below their ribs on one side. So Chang and Eng happened to be joined in a way that enabled them to go fishing and to build houses and to hunt and to earn a living in all kinds of ways. They were acrobats. They did backflips and somersaults and all kinds of stuff. So they were very savvy, by the way. Very smart, very charming. Everyone loved them. And this British merchant was sailing down the river and he saw them from a distance, and I think he immediately saw dollar signs. And he spent the next few years convincing their mother and the king to let them go with him so that he could take them all over the world.
He paid their mother more than she could have seen in a lifetime. And they quite quickly realized that they were being taken advantage of. And it really wasn't that long before they wrested their lives away from this manager who was, you know, traveling first class while they were in steerage, and they began taking control of their destiny. And they made a lot of money. They retired at the age of 29 to northwestern North Carolina.
RASCOE: And that's where they meet Adelaide and Sarah - who's known as Sally - the two sisters that they marry. They're actually your distant cousins.
BAKER KLINE: Right.
RASCOE: What motivated two white, conventional women to marry outside their race in the South in the mid-1800s? Was it the money?
BAKER KLINE: Honestly, that was such a huge question for the book. And there are many factors. Sarah and Adelaide were in a funny position. They grew up on a plantation. The pickings around them were slim. And Adelaide, in particular, who was a renowned beauty and very kind of charming and sophisticated - like Chang, one of the brothers - the two of them immediately had a spark. The problem was that it was considered bigamy if Eng didn't marry Adelaide's sister or some other woman. But essentially, Sarah was coerced into marriage by her sister. All the way along, she was reluctant about it. But eventually, she came to see the benefits of being in this unconventional situation and made her way in it. I found her a really interesting narrator for the book because she, like the reader, comes into it with a lot of skepticism.
RASCOE: Obviously, you have the story of the twins and the sisters, but then you also have this parallel story, which is the story of their slaves. Chang and Eng were slave owners. They didn't see the irony in that, but do you see that? And how should the readers feel about that?
BAKER KLINE: Yeah, the fact that the brothers became slaveholders and that they seemed not to recognize the irony of it after their mother was paid a sum for them to be taken away was shocking. But what I came to kind of understand about them is that they came to this country with nothing. In fact, they weren't supposed to be allowed to even become citizens or marry as Asian men. But in North Carolina, there was a loophole because that law was only applied to free Black people. So - free Black men, I should say. There was also a lot of anti-Asian sentiment that they dealt with on their tours. And I think they moved to North Carolina and saw that their route to respectability and power was by adopting the habits of that place.
RASCOE: By subjugating others...
BAKER KLINE: Yes.
RASCOE: ...Because that's what everyone else was doing, that gave them a position.
BAKER KLINE: Right, and a foothold in that society. And in real life, there was a woman named Grace Gates who was raised with Sarah and Adelaide, and then their father gave Grace to Eng and Chang as a wedding gift. And Grace ended up living with Eng and Sarah for the rest of Sarah's life. And I knew that they were very close, and I felt that that was another kind of clue to the story.
RASCOE: The Bunkers had 21 children, and you're in touch with some of their descendants. Have they read the book?
BAKER KLINE: So three of them have read the book so far. A lot more will soon be reading it (laughter). The three who read it were super helpful. They read it early. They read a manuscript. They had comments. But they do understand that I'm going to touch on some touchy subjects, and also that it's a novel and this is my interpretation of events. And so I think they're pretty clear on that.
RASCOE: You know, history often flattens characters. It could reduce Chang and Eng to just conjoined twins and showmen. What do you want people to come away understanding about them and their lives and also about Sarah and Adelaide?
BAKER KLINE: Chang and Eng were extraordinary. They were sort of the prototypical American success story in that they were immigrants who came over with nothing - absolutely nothing - and they made their own way through a combination of intelligence and savvy. They were complicated men. They were fallible. I hope, too, that what people come away with is that they see them as individuals. They were very different from each other. Chang's personality and Eng's - I think by the time you get maybe a third of the way through the book, you're very clear (laughter) on who each one of them is. And the same with Sarah and Adelaide. Those two sisters were extremely different from each other.
What I want people to come away with about the sisters is, by the end of the book, I hope you understand how this situation could possibly have happened and how these two women navigated it in a way that made it feel like normal life. There's a line in the book where Sally says even the most extraordinary life feels ordinary when you're living it. And I wanted readers to feel so immersed in their story that they understood at every turn how it happened.
RASCOE: That's Christina Baker Kline. Her new novel is "The Foursome." Thank you so much.
BAKER KLINE: Thank you so much for having me.
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