The attention must have been similarly shocking. But unlike so many nineteenth-century “freaks,” Chang and Eng parlayed celebrity into a private and prosperous American life. Quickly dispatching their exploitative management, they had earned enough by 1839 to stage a Jeffersonian second act, establishing themselves as gentlemen farmers in Traphill, North Carolina. Quite a distance from their hardscrabble origins in a Chinese-Siamese family of fishermen, Chang and Eng would live to see themselves landowners, husbands, fathers, citizens, slaveholders, and honorary whites.