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is the stereotypical Ah Sing, but Polly calls him the equally stereotypical nickname for the
Chinese, John. It may have been that Ah Sing was beyond her capacity to remember or
pronounce, but Broinowski notes in The Yellow Lady how it was believed as late as the 1920s
that the Chinese language caused madness in foreigners (Broinowski, 1992, 36). Something
similar seems to happen to Ah Sing whose ridiculous pidgin English comes out of a mouth
which is ‘stretched’ in a too large grin, and, though his vegetables are indeed better than those
of the white man, his sales technique is rather too insistent:
The Chinaman jog-trotted towards them, his baskets a-sway, his mouth
stretched to a friendly grin. ‘You no want cabbagee to-day? Me got velly
good cabbagee,’ he said persuasively and lowered his pole.
‘No thank you, John, not to-day.’
‘Me bling peasant for lilly missee,’ said the Chow, and unknotting a dirty
nosecloth, he drew from it an ancient lump of candied ginger. ‘Lilly missee
eatee him … oh, yum yum! Velly good. My word!’
Polly accepts the gift—though to her niece Trotty, for whom the ginger candy is
intended, the Chinaman is a bogeyman—with an imitated version of his English: ‘Me takee
chowchow for lilly missee’. She relishes ‘such savoury moursels’, but still refuses to buy
anything, even after his offer is repeated ‘with the catlike persistence of his race’(FRM, 171),
as though there would be some guilt in eating delicacies made by less than entirely human
creatures.
An excellent example of the earlier writing about the Chinese in Australia is the Henry
Lawson short story ‘Ah Soon’, first published in Lone Hand in 1911 and reprinted in the
Picador Henry Lawson. Lawson opens his narrative by admitting to anti-Chinese and White
Australia sentiments, but proceeds to relate a tale of a Chinese gardener and his son, who are
very much the image as presented by Henry Handel Richardson, and of the hard work,
generosity and honesty which Lawson said was typical of the Chinese in Australia. The story
combines criticism of the white market gardeners of the day with praise and admiration of the
Chinese, even though clothed in the trappings of casual racism—which Bennett calls the ‘usual
habit of thoughtless generalisation’ (Bennett, 1991, 188). Lawson makes fun of the way the
Chinese dress, speak, and run around selling their vegetables, but points out elements of their
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