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There is perhaps no subset of literature that feels more emblematic of the white male literary canon than the classic American western novel. In her Booker Prize nominated debut, How Much of These Hills is Gold, C Pam Zhang brings the western novel into a new century. The novel begins with the death of Ba, the father of Sam (11) and Lucy (12), which leaves the two girls orphaned after the death of their mother a few years prior. The girls go on a quest to bury their father in the hills of California, where he had spent the entirety of his life mining or prospecting for gold. Traveling these hills together, Sam and Lucy are haunted by the memory of their father, running away from their lives as impoverished children of Chinese laborers struggling to make ends meet and build a life in a landscape populated by racist and manipulative white settlers drunk on the concept of European superiority and manifest destiny.
Sam and Lucy are a fascinating duo: despite their closeness in age, the two share very little other resemblance. Sam has made herself into the son her father always wanted, she is tenacious and stubborn, with an appreciation for the land and the labor it takes to cultivate it. Sam however looks more like her mother, with a striking physical beauty and confidence that Lucy refers to as her “shine”. While Sam was undoubtedly closer with Ba, Lucy shares much of her personality with her mother, a formidable intellectual interested in culture and the cultivation of a strong mind. Her mother was also a listening ear for Lucy, someone whom she was able to discuss her feelings with, and her death was a striking loss, as Lucy became an outsider in her own home. The novel switches between the timeline that begins with Ba’s death, and the origin story of how Ba and Ma met, started their family, and encountered tragedy after tragedy. This backstory offers an interesting mirror to the present timeline, providing insight into crucial events in the family’s past.
The novel is a beautifully crafted testament to the majesty of nature, and the tragedy of human intervention in nature. Zhang presents the stark contrast of the hills that were once populated by buffalo and other creatures, which are now “A land stripped of its gold, its rivers, its buffalo, its Indians … its birds and its green and its living.” The novel is a constant push-pull of putting things into the land and taking them out, a meditation on the increasingly parasitic relationship between humans and the land.
Inseperable from Zhang’s meditations on nature is her consideration of the immigrant experience. There is a prevailing sense that the white settlers have robbed the land of its natural beauty: they have killed both the humans and animals that were inhabiting it peacefully, and have bled dry its every resource that they could turn a profit off of. And just like the white settlers have gouged the land for its advantages, so too they manipulate and steal from the immigrant workers who are doing their labor. Ba is exploited by the white prospectors, Lucy is exploited by the village schoolteacher who wants to include her in his monograph as an example of an exotic savage turned cultured. Everywhere they go, non-white individuals are treated as outsiders, like they have no claim to the soil, even if the white settlers arrived on the land after them.
This is a novel about belonging: what it means to have a home, to make a home, or to be an outsider in your own home. The characters are constantly searching for ways to coexist with the land and honor it. Before Ma’s death, she spoke constantly of returning to her homeland, of bringing her family back home to China. Lucy is hurt by her mother’s obsession, confused why her birthplace is not an adequate homeland for her mother, unsure of her true place in the world. The novel grapples with this concept of honoring one’s homeland, and the great romance that people can feel for the place that they were born or raised. Zhang has crafted a sensitive and thoughtful narrative surrounding the difference between belonging and ownership.
Further Reading: If you’re interested in the predecessor’s of Zhang’s lyrical and land-centric novel: John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying are great places to start.