In 'The Foursome,' conjoined twins marry two sisters — and that’s just the beginning

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2026

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

In 1839, conjoined twins and famous showmen Chang and Eng Bunker — native to Thailand, then called Siam — took a break from touring, settled in North Carolina, bought a slave plantation, and married two American sisters. The interracial union caused a public scandal for more reasons than one, and their story is the inspiration for Christina Baker Kline’s novel The Foursome. In today’s episode, Baker Kline, who is a distant cousin of the twins’ wives, speaks with NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe about exploring the complexity of the foursome’s place in a society that both feared and fetishized them.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Melissa Nadwarnie, and this is NPR's Book of the Day. This next book is wild. It's fiction, but it's based on a true story. It's about conjoined twins and their wives, who are sisters, hence the title, The Forsum. The sisters, who are actually distant relatives of the author, Christina
0:22.6	Baker Klein, married the famous twins from Siam, which is now Thailand, in the 1800s. The novel
0:29.4	spans five decades and imagines what their story was. Baker Klein spoke with Weekend Edition's
0:36.1	Aisha Roscoe.
0:43.1	In a cemetery in Mount Airy, North Carolina, there's a headstone for Chang and Ang bunker, the famous conjoined twins and their wives who were sisters. But only three people
0:50.3	were laid to rest there. Sarah, the wife of Eng, chose to be buried in an unmarked grave
0:57.9	on her own property, along with the four daughters who died before her and the formerly enslaved
1:06.1	people who, after the Civil War, came back to the farm.
1:11.8	Nobody really knows why.
1:14.0	This got author Christina Baker-Kline, thinking of the reason Sarah might have separated herself
1:19.9	in death.
1:20.9	And she began to write a novel about the lives of Chang'anang and Adelaide and Sarah, called
1:26.4	The Forsome.
1:27.9	Sinful, perverted, mad. Those were some of the things people said about us.
1:35.0	When words spread that the four of us shared one bed, our good neighbor's imaginations ran wild.
1:42.9	Rumors flew about incest, unnatural relations, adultery, all kinds of
1:49.5	depravities. No respectable woman would permit such an abomination. No god-fearing family would allow it.
1:58.4	Eventually our neighbors got used to us. They stopped asking questions.
2:03.6	Even so, we were never fully accepted. We existed in an uneasy in-between, on the fringes of
2:10.9	polite society, yet bound by its rules. Who were Chang and Ang Bunker?
2:18.9	Because these were real people.
2:22.5	What is actually known about them in their lives?
	...

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