This is supposedly the fictional biography of a street storyteller by the name of Ah Sin, active during the gold-digging days of the 1850s and 1860s in Victoria, Australia, told by Zhang Baohui, a mainland Chinese student working on a PhD thesis in creative writing. As Baohui delves deeper into Australia's past, he weaves the story of Ah Sin with his own by turning the academically required exegesis into a hodgepodge of his thought bursts, diary entries, carefully reported memory lapses, mini-historical stories, fragmentary pieces of poetry, philosophical musings on history and fiction, and his own story of illness, sexual ambiguities, and love or impossibility of love.