How Much of These Hills Is Gold

C Pam Zhang’s debut novel begins in the American West, sometime in the second half of the 1800s during “the twilight of the American gold rush.” Lucy, 12, and Sam, 11, are orphaned after their father, a prospector, dies, and they want to bury him according to proper Chinese burial traditions. But — they don’t have two silver dollars to cover his eyes. Things go down, and Lucy and Sam flee into the hills with their father’s body. While the story starts with this tragedy — their Ba’s death — it does not stay focused on that alone. The story expands to their family’s history in America, and what it means to be an immigrant who is not allowed to make a home in the land of immigrants. Zhang writes Lucy and Sam with such tenderness that the siblings feel so vivid and real, and in doing so, she writes back into history the Chinese Americans who built the American West.

As Martha Southgate notes in The New York Times book review, How Much of These Hills Is Gold shares thematic similarities with William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying; as Zhang’s Lucy and Sam try to bury their father, as does the Bundren family try to bury their mother. Yet, Southgate continues, “Zhang’s voice and story are wholly her own. How Much of These Hills Is Gold is an arresting, beautiful novel that in no way directly mines another. But by invoking these tropes, she reimagines them for thousands of forgotten Americans of different races and gender orientations; her American West is no longer populated only by the all-white, predominantly male cast of characters who, we’ve been told, created it.” And that is the joy — and success — of Zhang’s debut: telling the history of the American West that has long been ignored.

Why did she write a western? “Eventually I realized that the people in these books that I loved were always white. I wanted to write a great American epic in which I saw myself reflected,” Zhang explained. She loves Western literature because it showed “that ordinary people can lead epic lives against this epic backdrop” — and immigrant stories are similar. Put both together? The epic and magnificent How Much of These Hills Is Gold.

Rating: ★★★★★