How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020)
C Pam Zhang (1990)
272 pages
Stories set in the American west of the nineteenth century tend to feature unyielding gunslingers, dogged cowboys and rapacious businessmen doing battle in morality plays pitting good against evil. In such stories, the rest of the population, those who came to the west seeking work and a better life, often serve merely as props around which the main events occur. The spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood are perhaps the most iconic examples; and even when Eastwood himself sought to present a more complex portrait in his movie Unforgiven, the plot still culminated in dramatic gunfights.
Author C Pam Zhang’s debut novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold, however, turns these conventions of the genre on their head; though set in the far-western American frontier of the mid-1800’s, cowboys and gunslingers make no appearance. And, while profit-obsessed business owners provide the larger context for the story, they remain largely invisible – powerful, implacable figures beyond justice or mercy. Zhang, in fact, builds her story around the lives of those who came to the west and ended up working for these men, the daily fight for survival of those at the bottom of the social order, scraping by on subsistence wages by mining for ore or laying track for the trains.
By focusing on deeply disenfranchised and often itinerant laborers, and by tending to identify the places in her novel more by their natural and human geography than with specific names, Zhang manages to evoke the eternal struggle of migrant, and particularly immigrant, communities. Through the specific characters of her novel, she evokes the struggle that has been waged throughout history up to the present day by so many to build a viable life.
As Zhang’s story opens, Lucy and her sibling Sam, twelve and eleven years old, respectively, find themselves orphaned – their Ba has passed away in the night, and their Ma already having gone some years earlier. Determined to give their father a proper burial, the pair pack his body into a trunk, steal a horse, and set out from the repurposed chicken coop that had been their home on the outskirts of a coal mining town in the mountain west. Traveling across the mountains, they search for a proper burial spot for their father, and some money to bury with him for the afterlife.
Wrestling with the challenges that their Chinese ancestry presents for them at seemingly every encounter, their journey becomes an attempt to make sense of the history that brought their parents to this place, and what it reveals about how their parents raised them. And, as they come to understand better their parents’ past, it begins to inform their own relationship to the American west, and the question of whether there is a future for them within it.
Out of this search for meaning and answers, Zhang brilliantly weaves together a story that explores many of the ongoing complexities of human experience, including: immigrants who come looking for a better life, but find themselves shoved aside at nearly every turn; minorities who, though second-generation Americans who’ve never known anywhere else, find themselves treated as second class citizens, both by attitude and often by law; and, women and girls who find themselves repeatedly at risk in a male-dominated world. Attempting to incorporate so many cultural challenges into one novel could have easy slipped over into becoming a disjointed laundry list of a story; Zhang, however, subtly integrates these issues and others into a profoundly moving narrative that evokes them within the context of the day-to-day lives of her characters.
It is one of those serendipitous events that happen to readers that I began Zhang’s book immediately after finishing poet Cathy Park Hong’s essay Minor Feelings: An Asian American Experience. The two books deal with many of the same themes, if one in a fictional setting and the other autobiographical: the question of what it means to be a minority in the United States; how someone who is born a minority in the Unites States must constantly deal with the majority culture’s assumptions about them and their ancestry; how such a person thinks about the land of their ancestors and the land of their birth; and, not least, the challenges woman face in the pursuit of equality – at work and in the culture at large.
One can argue, even just from the portrayals in these two books, that much has changed for the better with respect to these issues in the century and half that lies between their settings. On the other hand, it’s hard to not be left with the dispiriting realization that somehow so little has in fact changed – that so much work yet remains to achieve the kind of fundamental cultural awareness and understanding that is needed to achieve a more fully developed community of equality and justice in the United States.
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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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