C Pam Zhang’s debut novel “How Much of These Hills Is Gold,” redefines the idea of the Western. Instead of gunslinging cowboys, two Chinese American orphans take center stage of this story; the white male protagonist of popular fiction that depicts the American West has finally been unseated. Zhang carves a new path with this tale that diverges from the much-traveled road of pioneer-oriented literature. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that it is “likely to be the debut novel of the year.”
The book begins abruptly: ”Ba dies in the night.” Readers immediately crash land in the hardship-ridden reality of those who sought prospect out West during the California gold rushes of the mid nineteenth century. Protagonists Lucy and her androgynous younger sibling Sam are desperately trying to fend for themselves without parental guidance — both just shy of their teenage years. The second part of the book’s inaugural sentence may be more revealing, however– “prompting them to seek two silver dollars.” The rapid shift from the death of a parent to the search for sufficient funds is jarring, and yet, it sets the tone for the raw realness that this work contains.
“How Much of These Hills” is no rose-colored imagining of the historical era in question. The rough ways of the American West are familiar in the realm of popular culture, however. What makes this piece unique is the way that it explores the issue of race through a timeless framework.
Take, for example, the racist American myth of the “perpetual foreigner.” This is the idea, as defined by the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, that this “stereotype posits that members of ethnic minorities will always be seen as the ‘other’ in the white Anglo-Saxon dominant society of the United States.” Zhang explores this idea through writing about Lucy and Sam’s search for feelings of belonging. Zhang writes that “All those years and still Lucy can’t grasp the thing called home…What’s home mean?” Lucy and Sam were subject to Ba’s search for gold; “He aimed to find his fortune in one fell swoop, and all his life pushed the family like a storm wind at their backs. Always towards the newer. The wilder. The promise of sudden wealth and shine.” Not only is the myth of the perpetual foreigner still haunting many Americans today, but so is the quest for wealth and shine.
When most of us imagine the American West in the 1800s, white men almost definitely come to mind. Contrasted with this idea of the exclusively white journey West is a more diverse reality. Most relevant here are the 15,000 Chinese immigrants who worked on the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s —90% of the workforce that built the Central Pacific line. These immigrants, like so many in American history, were brutally discriminated against and almost completely written out of history. Zhang herself felt this erasure strongly, and “How Much of These Hills” is largely derivative of that whitewashed national mythology. In a recent New York Times profile, Zhang described herself as “a fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder and John Steinbeck,” before stating how she longed to create “a great American epic” in which her own identity was reflected. This goal is no small feat, but it is hard to argue that Zhang comes up short.
Written word in this country is in desperate need of diversity. With “How Much of These Hills Is Gold,” important steps are made in that direction. The Minneapolis Star Tribune perhaps said it best in describing the book as “a visionary addition to American literature.”
