Cross Tory Street head­ing toward Aro; ban­ish the Car­ri­lon’s long shad­ow behind the white-and-teal Bible Soci­ety on your left, Nurse Maude’s mosa­ic gaze upon your right shoulder. Point your nose toward Tara-Ngaki Street – “shin­ing moun­tain-peak” – and feel Hain­ing Street incline beneath your feet as Tory’s con­stant woosh recedes into urb­an din. The senses strain for a ref­er­ence worth savour­ing. In the right wind, L’af­fare’s rich gold-brown aroma will fol­low until salty-spicy Vivi­an Street unfurls on your left; but to the eye, Hain­ing offers little, Media and Image and Print waft­ing inky acrid­ity.

As the street’s mid-point lulls the tread gently down­hill, his­tor­ic notori­ety looms. Round eyes once squin­ted war­ily down Hain­ing; behind receded epi­c­an­thes were con­jured an air thick with opi­um, grubby gold, illi­cit sex. Here chil­dren were for­bid­den to play lest a Chi­n­a­man shad­ow them away. Here in Septem­ber 1905 – the Year of the Snake – gold­miner Joe Kum Yung began his long, lonely jour­ney home: his skull rup­tured, blood and brain leak­ing onto Hain­ing, head brought low by the met­al slug fired from Lionel Terry­’s gun.

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“A ser­pent’s tail will taint / the things we neg­lect / if we turn from instinct,” Chris Tse has the dying Kum Yung muse: one of the many ser­pent­ine ref­er­ences sign­post­ing How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes, Tse’s lyr­ic his­tory of Hain­ing Street’s defin­ing crime. Ser­pents stand for irre­press­ible reflex, anim­al cun­ning bur­ied with­in soft mam­mali­an mind; and for renew­al, the cast­ing of live skin into dead totem. Years of the Snake are times for action: “this is not a year for fence-sit­ters,” cau­tions Chinese astro­lo­gist Theodora Lau.

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Most of the actions in Kum Yun­g’s story as it’s told today are those of Lionel Terry. As the gun­shot echoed and cordite burned his nos­trils, Terry­’s feet must have throbbed relief. He’d walked all the way from Doubt­less Bay, on a puri­fy­ing mis­sion from the “Great Gold God” to whom he ded­ic­ated the open­ing pages of his ram­bling, racist con­spir­acy-tract, The shad­ow. The pamph­let, which Terry handed out freely on his pil­grim­age, is read­able at the Vic­tor­ia State Lib­rary. His self-por­trait – Dürer sil­hou­ette twis­ted by a rid­dling stare – can be viewed at Te Ara.

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But the skin Joe Kum Yee shed was sent back East, and we have few totems of the life he tried to make here. Tse plays the role of psy­cho­pomp: lend­ing Kum Yee’s spir­it voice as it strains against the ropes of his­tory, of cir­cum­stance, of ten­sions scarcely slackened in our time. Joe Kum Yee, who sought for­tune beneath for­eign moun­tains, was farewelled by lan­tern-light, far from Lionel Terry­’s asylum cell; but Hain­ing Street sits still in that same shad­ow.