Not Your Grandma’s Western | How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang

Title: How Much of These Hills Is Gold
Author: C Pam Zhang
Published: April 7, 2020
Genre(s): Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
Page Count: 288
Rating:

Summary from Goodreads:

Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future.

Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and re-imagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it's about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.

Where is home? Is it a place you make for yourself? Is it inherited alongside other pieces of your parents and ancestors? If you’ve lost a home, what do you do next?

These are things Lucy wonders in the wake of her father’s death, as she and her younger sibling, Sam, look for a place to bury his remains. Though they (and their father) were born there, California Territory never seemed to welcome them. Home, like so many other pieces of their identity, seem lost to them. Lucy no longer remembers the name by which she should call herself, though the reader knows that word is “Chinese.”

How Much of These Hills Is Gold, C Pam Zhang’s first novel, is a gorgeously written, yet gruesome coming of age story, set during California’s gold rush era. The story winds its way back and forth across time, showing the various ways in which Lucy’s family has tried—and failed—to find a sense of belonging among their new neighbors. I loved this book.

The story is excellently crafted, from poetic descriptions of death and decay (metaphorical and literal) to the subtle way Sam, Lucy’s genderqueer sibling, is introduced in the first few pages. Like many of my favorite books, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is not a “fun” book to read—yet it is mesmerizing, haunting, grim. The story stays with me because it is rich and full of beautiful thoughts and uncomfortable questions:

How do you make a home in a place that does not want you?

Separately and together, Lucy and Sam grapple with the task of finding stability among an unwelcoming society, where the rules are changed on the whim of white people, always for their own advantage. Lucy tries to fit in, to acculturate herself; Sam defies convention. Neither sibling is wholly successful.

At the end of the day, the truth is this: for many, “home” is not a concept that will be gifted to you. Rather, you have to take hold of it—perhaps by force—and claim it against everyone who tries to say that you don’t deserve your own portion. And you will never feel secure, for at any moment, it might be snatched from you. In How Much of These Hills Is Gold, Zhang suggests that home is a concept afforded only to the privileged in our society; the rest are left to triumph (or fall) in the margins.