The migration process makes you adept, Kim Cheng Boey remarks, in coded language. The first poem he wrote after settling in Sydney recalls an exhibition in the Queen Victoria Building about the Chinese tea entrepreneur Mei Quong Tart, whose clan name is the same as the Boey family’s. His daughter, pointing with her small finger, decodes the character mei, meaning ‘nothing’, a negative prefix that also signifies bad luck.

Three generations ago, around the time when Quong Tart sailed from Canton to Australia, Boey’s people left for Malaya. Observing the tea merchant’s success in Sydney and the honours he received on visits to China, Boey speculates that they may be related. How different, he thinks, his father’s life might have been if his ancestor had gone on to Sydney with Quong Tart. But dukes, as the proverb goes, don’t migrate.