Mei-Fen Kuo

When Xu and her brother decided to come to Australia, Ying was dressed like a boy.

So Xu was 17 years old, a girl, but she decided to dress like a boy to Australia.

Also for Ying, because when they arrived in the golf field,

The harsh environment in the gold field was too difficult for a woman to survive.

So I think this novel is a very unusual story to talk about a Chinese woman come to the gold field in North Queensland as a boy.

Miriam is a servant for the other woman, and the other woman was a prostitute.

Mary, I think she is an Irish girl.

And from the novel, you can see how Mary did, you know, her daily life in the main town, in the gold field, and which was very different.

interest to read it in fact i really enjoy reading uh how this how the older right about mary and how she deal with her everyday lives and how he deal with you know he went to the shop

and how he cooked and how she did the laundry.

And every detail really brings us back to that time, how a female served life at that time.

And I find this character is very interesting.

And Mary also was a family story, so she ran away from the family in New South Wales.

And just like Le Ying and Lai Yun, like these two Chinese siblings, Mary also have a dream to save the money and return back to her own family.

But in the novel, you can see she also established a friendship with Le Ying.

This character also provides an insight to see how an Irish girl

She established a friendship with Ying at that time, but she didn't really understand Ying was a girl.

But Ying tried to tell Mary, she tried to tell Mary her true name in Chinese, but Mary didn't really understand what does that mean.

She didn't really see the name represented.

And also, I really like the way the author established their friendship.