Title: Gold Mountain Author: Betty G. Yee
Published: April 5, 2022
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 288
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Growing up in 1860s China, Tam Ling Fan has lived a life of comfort. Her father is wealthy enough to provide for his family but unconventional enough to spare Ling Fan from the debilitating foot-binding required of most well-off girls. But Ling Fan’s life is upended when her brother dies of influenza and their father is imprisoned under false accusations. Hoping to earn the money that will secure her father’s release, Ling Fan disguises herself as a boy and takes her brother’s contract to work for the Central Pacific Railroad Company in America.
Life on “the Gold Mountain” is grueling and dangerous. To build the railroad that will connect the west coast to the east, Ling Fan and other Chinese laborers lay track and blast tunnels through the treacherous peaks of the Sierra Nevada, facing cave-ins, avalanches, and blizzards—along with hostility from white Americans.
When someone threatens to expose Ling Fan’s secret, she must take an even greater risk to save what’s left of her family . . . and to escape the Gold Mountain alive.
There is a special kind of disappointment when an author has a wonderful idea for a book but is simply not good at writing in a technical sense. Gold Mountain, Betty G. Yee’s young adult historical novel about a Chinese girl working as a “coolie” for the Central Pacific Railroad should have been great. At first blush it promises so much—a story about a “lesser known” demographic in a “lesser known” time period. The potential for excellence screams in 500-point neon font. And at a personal level, Gold Mountain is right in my area of interest, as exploring the complex truth behind Manifest Destiny propaganda is one of my particular armchair-historian sub-specialties. I read the jacket copy and hoped desperately for a readalike to Stacey Lee’s Under a Painted Sky and/or C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold, two excellent “pioneer” books about Chinese immigrants, not to mention two of my favorite books in general.
Alas, alack, etc. My hopes were for naught, my expectations were unfulfilled. Within a few chapters, it became imminently clear that no matter how promising her premise, Yee simply does not have the writing chops to tell this story as it deserves to be told. As I continued to read, I was forced to conclude that Gold Mountain is a progressively worsening object lesson in how to utterly neglect the fundamentals of effective fiction writing.
Think of the elements that a successful novel needs. Prose that is clear and coherent yet stylized enough to gesture toward the vibes/aesthetic the author wishes to evoke. Fully-developed, three-dimensional characters whose goals and inner processes are understood by readers. Detailed and specific world-building. Realistic conflict that is appropriate to the characters and setting and which does not constantly remind the audience that there’s a puppeteer tugging strings behind the curtain. Convincing dialogue, character growth, the presence of an authorial vision and/or purpose. Y’know, all the stuff they teach you in creative writing programs.
In my opinion, Gold Mountain has approximately none of the above-listed elements.
This book’s most critical failure is that it isn’t meaningfully grounded in the historical period and culture Yee chose to write in. World-building is necessary for all genres of fiction, but it’s particularly important when the story takes place in “another world.” That may be the world of small, furry-footed travelers unexpectedly tasked with defeating a primeval villain; or it may be the world of an upper-class Han Chinese girl who finds herself pretending to be a boy in order to work as one of the thousands of exploited Chinese workers on the Transcontinental Railroad.
Although I fully credit that Yee did a great deal of research prior to writing Ling Fan’s story, the author’s knowledge base is not presented on the page. In her depiction of 18th century China and Chinese-American immigrants, there are no cultural, geographic, or historic touchstones presented. There are generic references to foot binding and the Taiping Rebellion, but even those are surface-level only. Yee does not mention—much less delve into—the ethnic and economic tensions present in Late Qing China which drove so many to perform backbreaking labor across the Pacific. She does not discuss the concepts of family honor and filial piety, ideals that should have been at the forefront of Ling Fan’s motivation throughout the text. In the latter portions of the text, both the treatment of Native Americans by white colonizers and the impact of the opium trade (not to mention white Europeans’ role in it) are not dealt with thoughtful nuance. Yes, this is a young adult book and not a 1,000 page historical epic, but clearly if Stacey Lee can do it, it can be done.
The second glaring issue with Gold Mountain is that Yee does not adequately develop her any of her characters—particularly her protagonist, Ling Fan. The book is written in superficial third-person narration that describes Ling Fan’s actions and her in-the-moment decision making, but doesn’t examine who Ling Fan is as a person or what her strengths, weaknesses, and flaws are. She is a name on the page, but not a fully-realized person.
Yee’s lack of depth in characterization is accentuated by the structure of her narrative. The plot of Gold Mountain happens to Ling Fan, and her choices are always a reaction to another character’s. Ling Fan has no agency of her own, and, indeed, she appears to wait around for another character to arrive on-scene and do something—as if she’s constantly waiting for a cue from her stage director. And since the reader doesn’t have a strong grasp on Ling Fan’s personality, she ultimately looks foolish, naïve, and weak. Bad guy after bad guy after bad guy takes advantage of her, she never seems to learn to look out for herself, and she never shows an ounce of intuition or forethought.
Betty G. Yee clearly wants this to be a book about a girl taking charge of her own life, but she doesn’t appear to comprehend that in order to make that narrative believable, she has to write and present her story in a particular way. The way you frame events matters.
I could go on, but in general, Gold Mountain lacks a cohesive conflict and vision. The plot is choppy and awkward, the focus is blurry, and the author’s attempts to “educate” about history are clumsy and underdeveloped. Ling Fan inhabits the book like an afterthought rather than standing out as the star. Yee’s writing is unpolished and stylistically inferior.
Writing is hard. It’s skill that can be learned, but it’s also a talent that some people simply do not possess. I don’t know why, but the fact is that Betty G. Yee does not have the chops to pull this book off. I tend to write one-star reviews only when I encounter books whose theoretical framework or message I find to be objectionable, but this is the rare case where the premise is fine, but the execution is so poor that nothing can be redeemed for me. Gold Mountain deserves to be better than it is.
