Ah Sook—Anna Wetherell

Ah Sook and Anna Wetherell’s relationship is a companionship formed around shared opium use, sustained by quiet routines and mutual recognition, then unsettled when Anna stops using the drug. Their closeness offers each of them company within an isolation that neither can readily escape; her sobriety breaks the routine that had brought them together, revealing how much of their intimacy depended on the pipe and how differently they respond to its absence.

A companionship formed at Kaniere

Anna had visited the opium den in Kaniere regularly, and Ah Sook came to expect her there. Their meetings were not conversational: they lit the lamp, prepared the pipe, and waited in silence as the resin softened. Sometimes Anna filled Ah Sook’s pipe and held it for him. He would smoke and later wake to find her lying beside him. Their shared practice had its own understood rules, including the silence, which neither needed to propose or explain.

The narration presents this routine as more than a convenience between two people who used the same drug. Ah Sook was very fond of Anna and believed she felt fondness for him, too. At the same time, he understood their closeness as a form of shared isolation. Their meetings gave them company, but opium also held each of them in a private relation to the drug that could not simply be made communal. The bond therefore carried both tenderness and distance: they could tend to one another within the ritual, but they did not speak openly about what it meant.

Ah Sook’s attention to Anna was evident in the care he took before she arrived. He arranged the cushions, tidied his belongings, put his clothes in order, and tied his pigtail. As she slept, he sometimes watched her and fixed her image in his memory. These acts show how much he valued her presence, although his feelings remained largely unspoken. Their established intimacy did not depend on declarations; it was expressed through repetition, preparation, and their shared hours at the den.

Dependence and Anna’s absence

The relationship was bound to their dependence, but the novel distinguishes their responses to it. Ah Sook hated his enslavement to opium, and that disgust did not dissolve his craving. Anna also loathed her habit. Her dependence became more desperate after she became pregnant, her trade in Hokitika dwindled, and she spent extended periods in a drugged haze. Ah Sook knew that her child had died, but he did not know how it happened and had not asked. Their closeness therefore had limits: he shared the pipe and her company, yet remained outside important parts of her suffering.

After Anna’s opium overdose on 14 January, Ah Sook was furious when Joseph Pritchard sought the remaining resin from the den for examination. He suspected Pritchard had played a part in engineering the overdose and refused to cooperate with him. His anger helps explain the intensity of his concern, but it does not establish that Anna’s overdose was deliberate or that Pritchard caused it. Pritchard, for his part, doubted that Anna had intended to die and wanted to question her himself. Their competing suspicions placed Ah Sook’s attachment to Anna amid a wider uncertainty about what had happened to her.

Anna’s absence made that attachment newly visible. She did not return to Kaniere for more than a month, although the half-ounce of resin Ah Sook had given her would ordinarily have lasted only about two weeks at her usual rate of consumption. He waited for her each afternoon and could not explain why she had stopped coming. He considered that she might have stopped using opium or might be obtaining it directly from the chemist. The second possibility troubled him because of his suspicions about Pritchard, but the prospect that Anna had become free of the drug was harder for him to accept. He had tried to quit for more than a decade without success.

The meeting at the Wayfarer's Fortune

On the afternoon of Lydia Wells’s séance, Ah Sook went looking for Anna at the Gridiron Hotel. Edgar Clinch directed him across Revell Street to the Wayfarer's Fortune, where Anna was now staying. The meeting was a striking reversal of their old routine: instead of Anna arriving at the edge of the Kaniere clearing to share the pipe, Ah Sook had to seek her out at her new lodging.

Anna opened the door quickly. She had recently turned away callers who wanted to buy her drinks and persuade her to return to the saloons, but she reacted to Ah Sook with surprise and opened the door wider. He, too, was startled by how changed she seemed. She was sober, her eyes brighter and more alert, and the dreamy quality he associated with their afternoons at the den was gone. Her new appearance made the distance between past and present visible to him; he recognized the person before him, but not the familiar version of her he had kept in memory.

When Ah Sook asked why she no longer came to Kaniere, he could not say plainly that he missed her. He remembered arranging the room for her and watching over her at the den, but his question was the only direct expression of that absence. Anna told him she could not come to see him anymore and made clear that she had stopped smoking and would not return to Kaniere. Her decision set a boundary around their former companionship: she was not merely away for a time but refusing the practice through which they had been together.

A changed bond

Ah Sook struggled to read Anna’s sobriety. He had once understood her expressions through the haze that accompanied their shared drug use; now her clarity seemed to him almost like detachment, and he wondered whether she regarded herself as above Chinese society. The narration leaves room for the possibility that this impression came from his unfamiliarity with her sober face rather than from any change in her regard for him. His response registers the loss of a familiar mode of intimacy, but it does not show that Anna has rejected him as a person.

The difference between them is sharpened by Ah Sook’s awareness of his own failed efforts to quit. Anna’s recovery brings him astonishment and bitterness alongside his longing. Her changed condition is an achievement he cannot share, and the end of their smoking routine removes the private setting in which he had felt closest to her. The bond thus becomes a test of whether companionship can persist after the habit that organized it has ended. The evidence does not resolve that question into a restored friendship; it shows affection and separation at once.

Even so, Anna does not simply exclude Ah Sook from her new life. She explains that Lydia Wells is willing to pay him to contribute to the séance and helps communicate the offer. Ah Sook agrees to attend, partly for Anna’s sake, although he suspects he is being asked to play a part in a staged performance and does not fully understand what will happen. He also wants the opportunity to speak to Emery Staines, whom he expects to be present. The invitation gives him a reason to return that evening, but their exchange remains formal: Anna answers his bow with a shallow curtsey and turns back to her task, while he leaves with the impression that she is markedly changed.

Narrative significance

The relationship makes opium both a shared practice and a barrier to fuller knowledge. The pipe gives Ah Sook and Anna a repeated, silent form of companionship, but it also binds their closeness to dependence and leaves important matters unspoken. Ah Sook can remember Anna with tenderness and worry about the circumstances of her overdose, yet he does not know how her child died or why she stopped using. His affection is real, but it does not make him omniscient about her life.

Anna’s sobriety alters the relationship without erasing its history. Ah Sook remembers the rituals and prepares for her return long after she has stopped coming; Anna, meanwhile, maintains her decision not to resume smoking while still allowing him a place in the séance gathering. Their story therefore avoids a simple contrast between a former friendship and a clean break. The old intimacy cannot continue on its former terms, and the new encounter offers no promise that it will be replaced. What remains is an unequal but recognizable care: his longing for the lost routine, her firm boundary, and a limited invitation that lets them meet again without returning to the den.