Peter Carey - Illywhacker

My bedroom was on the other side of the muddy courtyard, a long lean-to made from corrugated iron with an earth floor. I could not shut my eyes. Hing coughed all night. His nephew snored. I cried in the dark, assailed by garlic and the sweet smell of Hing's evening pipe.

When, at last, I did sleep, I dreamed the Chinese came and ate my hands.

The herbalist was Mr Chin, the uncle of the Mr Chin to whom I would later sell my snakes. He was very handsome with his blue waving hair and his gold tooth but when he saw me his forehead scarred itself with a frown as messy as a bulldog's. Goon Tse Ying listened to what Mr Chin had to say and then he explained to me that I would not be permitted to sit in the consulting room. This was because all of Mr Chin's patients were English gentlemen and ladies and they would be embarrassed, Goon told me sternly, to repeat their complaints in front of a boy.

So I never learned the art of herbalism, nor, for that matter, did I master any of the five languages Goon had promised, although I did learn to count from one to ten in Hokein.

Goon was neither embarrassed nor apologetic about this setback. He announced that I was to return to the Eastern Markets and learn about vegetables. He himself had been a hawker in the Palmer River rush in Northern Queensland.

It is the nature of childhood to continually encounter things one does not understand, to be thrown here, to be put there, to offend without meaning to, to be praised without understanding why, and I do not remember being unduly unhappy to be sent to the Eastern Markets.

I remember the cold, the paraffin lamps in the early mornings, the chatter of Wong Li Ho, the spitting of Nick Wong. I remember the red-faced Scot with big ears who roared the virtues of his cabbages from dawn till afternoon, the gaunt women with red fingers protruding from their dirty mittens. I remember knocking my chilblains against boxes of cauliflowers. I remember bags of potatoes I could not lift. But most of all I remember that no one hit me and that when noon arrived I was permitted to depart and then I would walk up through the busy streets to Nicholson Street in Carlton and wait for Goon Tse Ying. When the last consultation was finished he would take me by the hand and escort me back to the cafe within whose walls, it seemed, there was contained everything in the world I would need to know.

In the muddy courtyard, amidst indignant hens, he not only taught me how to fight with my feet but also how to skin a crow by putting a nick in its neck, inserting a bamboo rod between skin and flesh, and blowing. Both of these skills were useful to me in later life. He took me to the kitchen and showed me how to make soup from the crow. He sat me on his knee while Hing butchered a pig and showed me how every part of it could be used for food.

He took me to the front office to instruct me in abacus, but, finding Wong busy with it, demonstrated the pressure points of the body instead, showing me how these could be used to immobilize an opponent. While Wong entered the single men's wages into his ledger, Goon Tse Ying taught me to stand in such a way that I would appear bigger than I was, or, conversely, how to appear smaller. Wong did not complain once. There was such clutter in this dark front room, such a tangle of rope and canvas, incense for jossing, shoes for horses, even a monkey foetus in a bottle of green liquid whose purpose I never discovered, such a disorder of goods, such a tangle of raffia, that the presence of a noisy rich man and a quiet sharp-faced boy did nothing extra to distract him from the wonderful order of his ledgers.

In the dark passage, looked upon by the alien visage of the King of England, Goon taught me the different accents of this King's language and how to use each one. He also instructed me in the importance of clean shoes and how a pair of very shiny shoes can give the appearance of great wealth even if the rest of one's clothes are nothing but rags.

And in the steamy dining room, with rain combing the brick-damp air outside, he taught me history and geography.

"Roll up," he called to the other Chinese. "Look at them, they grin, they do not know. If they were at Lambing Flat they would be dead men. They would hear the English calling to each other: roll up, roll up, and they would go on with their work. What is Lambing Flat, little Englishman?"

"I don't know."

"Of course you don't know. Lambing Flat is near Young in New South Wales. It was a big rush. I was there. We were all there. Roll up, roll up, that is what the English miners called to each other. May you never hear it. May you die never having heard the English come in their horses and carts. They carried the English flag, an ugly thing. They had a band. They had pipes and drums and they came in their thousands. They did not like the Chinese, little Englishman, because we were clever. They sold us their old mines. They thought they would cheat us, but we made money. They drew a line across the diggings and said we must not cross it. Still we made money. We worked hard, even us children. My father was sick. He had ulcers on his feet, and still he worked. My mother worked too, alongside the men. Her feet had been bound. They were tiny pretty things, but she carried rocks in baskets and helped make the big water race. But the Englishmen thought it was all their country and all their gold and they played their band and came out to get us. They drove the Chinese down the river bank. They had axe handles and picks. They ran over my uncle Han in a cart and broke his leg and they broke my father's head open with a water pipe. You will meet people who say that none of this happened. They will say they gave John Chinaman a fright, but they are liars. Roll up, roll up," he bellowed, "roll up. Kill John Chinaman," he roared at the Wongs, the Wongs' giggling children, the dark-eyed single men with no backsides in their English trousers. "My father's brains," he whispered while the thin hair lifted in the draught from the courtyard, "like in the pig Hing cut up. Pour me brandy. What would you do?"

"I would run," I said.

"My uncle Han ran. They had horses and carts. They ran their wheel across him."

"I would hide."

"They would burn down your tent."

"I would fight them."

"There were too many. What would you do?"

I was caught in the terror of Lambing Flat which I imagined to be a great wilderness of rocks as sharp as needles. I had no trouble imagining the terror, the bands of men with my father's merciless eyes.

It was quiet for a moment in Wong's. Hing's mah-jong tiles stood in an unbroken wall.

"Do you know what to do?" he whispered.

"No."

"You disappear," Goon Tse Ying hissed, his great hand totally enclosing his glass. "Completely."

In the courtyard, old Mrs Wong wrung the neck of a Rhode Island Red and in the dining room Hing spat and broke open the wall of mah-jong tiles. I could not take my eyes from the glass that peeked through the fingers of Goon's hand. I did not doubt he could disappear.

"I will teach you too, little Englishman. It will do two things of great merit. The first of these things is to make you safe, and I do this for goodness, because I care for you, because you have no father to help you. But I do it also to show you the terror of we Chinese at Lambing Flat. Because it is only possible to disappear by feeling the terror. So I tell you now that I am giving you this gift as revenge. Are you old enough to understand what I am saying to you?"

"I am ten."

"Why am I telling you?"

"So I can feel the terror." I shivered.

"It is a magician's gift," Goon Tse Ying said. "It is both good and evil. It is because I love and hate you. Will you accept it?"

"I am only ten," I pleaded.

"It is old enough," Goon Tse Ying announced. "We will start tomorrow."