The Luminaries

that were termed, upon the merchandise inventories,
Chinoiserie
. He saw Carver only infrequently over this period, for the latter was often at sea, but their interactions, when they happened, were always cordial: it was their custom to sit upon the wharf together and share a bottle of liquor, gazing out over the estuary as the water turned from brown to blue to silver, and finally to black, whereupon Carver would rise, clap his hand upon Ah Sook’s shoulder , toss the empty bottle into the river, and depart.
    In the summer of 1854 Carver returned to Kwangchow after several months’ absence, and informed Ah Sook—now a man of nearly thirty years—that their agreement was finally to come to anend. His lifelong ambition to one day command a trade vessel had at last been realised: Dent & Co. was to establish a trade run to Sydney and the Victorian goldfields, and his father had chartered a handsome clipper ship, the
Palmerston
, on his behalf. It was a fine promotion, and one that Carver could not ignore. He had come, he said, to bid the Sook family, and this era of his life, goodbye.
    Ah Sook received Carver’s farewell with sadness. By this time his mother was dead, and the opium wars had given way to a new rebellion in Kwangchow—one that was bloody, and incensed: it promised war, and perhaps even the end of empire. Change was in the air. Once Carver was gone, the warehouse sold, and the relationship with Dent & Co. dissolved, Ah Sook would be severed from his former life completely. On impulse, he begged to be taken along. He could try his hand on the Victoria goldfields, to which place many of his countrymen had already sailed; perhaps, he said, he could forge a new life for himself there, as they had done. There was nothing left for him in China.
    Carver acquiesced to his suggestion without enthusiasm. He supposed that Ah Sook could come along, though he would be required to pay for his own ticket, and keep well out of the way. The
Palmerston
was scheduled to break her journey in Sydney, spending two weeks loading and unloading cargo at Port Jackson before continuing on to Melbourne in the south; during these two weeks, Ah Sook must keep to himself, and not bother Carver—henceforth styled ‘Captain’—in any way. When the
Palmerston
landed at Port Phillip, they would part as amicable strangers, owing nothing, expecting nothing; thenceforth, they would never see each other again. Ah Sook agreed. In a frenzy of sudden excitement, he relinquished his few possessions, changed his meagre savings into pounds, and purchased a standard ticket in the highest class of berth that Carver would permit him to occupy (third). He was, he soon discovered, the ship’s only passenger.
    The journey to Sydney passed without incident; looking back, Ah Sook remembered it only as a static, nauseated haze, slowly brightening, like the onset of a migraine. As the craft made her long approach into the wide, low throat of the harbour, Ah Sook,weak and malnourished after many weeks at sea, struggled from his berth at last, and ventured topside. The quality of the light seemed very strange to him; he felt that in China the light was thinner, whiter, cleaner. The Australian light was very yellow, and there was a thickened quality to its brightness, as though the sun were always on the point of setting, even in the morning, or at noon.
    Upon reaching the mooring at Darling Harbour, the ship’s captain hardly paused to exchange his sea legs for a steadier gait: he walked down the
Palmerston
’s gangway, along the quay, and into a dockside brothel, without so much as a backward glance. His crew was fast upon his heels; in no time at all, therefore, Ah Sook found himself alone. He left the ship, committing the location of its mooring to memory, and promptly set off inland—resolving, somewhat naïvely, to get a measure of the country in which he was to live.
    Ah Sook’s English was very poor, simply for the reason that he and Carver had always conducted their conversations in Cantonese, and he was not acquainted with any other English-speaking men. He looked for Chinese faces on the docks, in vain; venturing further inland, he walked the streets for hours, looking for a painted sign—even a single character—that he could understand. He found nothing. Presently he ventured to the customhouse, where he produced one of the banknotes that he had folded inside the band of his hat, and held it up: perhaps the money could speak where he