Hello!
How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang, from the Booker Prize Longlist 2020, is my book choice this week. It is a story of two orphaned native-born Chinese sisters, Lucy (12) and Sam (11), set in the wake of the California gold rush and their journey to bury their deceased father and search for home.
The narrative is written in the present tense immersing the reader into the action and creating a sense that we are living it along with Lucy and Sam. Using simple prose, it is divided into four parts. Parts One and Two are written in the third person and opens when ‘Ba dies in the night, prompting them to seek two silver dollars.’ And a few pages later we learn they are alone as ‘And long gone, Ma.’ The death of Ba sets the sisters on a journey to bury him.
The backdrop of the wild west in the 1800’s subverts expectations of white cowboy protagonists. The writing feels YA initially: with both parents removed from the narrative through death in the first few pages of the story, the sisters are propelled on their adventure. However, knitted in the simple prose and initial YA feel, is the image of the two children trailing the corpse of their dead father in a crate through the desert. This morbid image contrasts a sense of black humour, where bits of the corpse fall off as it decays in the heat of arid plains, described by Lucy who realises that ‘the hand has not one but two missing fingers.’ This is furthered when she decides to preserve the body in salt, like a piece of meat, to rid it of maggots and flies: ‘Sprinkled over Ba’s body, the salt looks like ash.’
With a thematic feel of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men’s the American Dream, where George describes ‘a little house and a couple of acres’ and Lennie’s desire to ‘live off the fatta the lan’, Lucy and Sam are fully aware of Ba’s dream: ‘I’ve got my eye on a piece of land eight miles toward the ocean. Between two hills, forty acres.’
Layered within the narrative, Chinese tradition appears throughout, where the sisters search for two silver dollars to place over their father’s eyes ‘sending the soul to its final good sleep’. A sense of family and responsibility drives the sisters on their journey as Ba says, ‘Family comes first.’ Animal and insect imagery add texture to the layers with reference to: snakes, buffalos, horses, tigers, flies and maggots. The buffalo descriptions are particularly striking: ‘the skeleton rises from the earth. Like a great white island…they’ve seen buffalo bone in pieces along the wagon trail, but never whole.’
The narrative also explores a search for identity and home. Sam, androgynous, becomes the boy Ba never had and is ‘prized by a father who wanted a son’. As Lucy searches for ‘What makes a home a home?’ she also seeks an understanding of identity through appearance, location and language with realisations such as: ‘For the first time Lucy understands that the language Ma shared with them in bits and pieces, was only a child’s game’.
The narrative cleverly shifts to the first person in Part Three where Ba’s perspective reveals an adult version of past events and then switches back to the third person in Part Four, fast forwarding five years. The relationship between gold, salt, earth and the elements interplay and are linked with plums, blood and skull imagery. The Parts are identified with dates (XX62, XX59, XX42/XX62, XX67) indicating the actual year (1862, 1869, 1842/1862, 1867) but also potentially representing any year creating a sense of timelessness to the narrative.
This coming of age story of Lucy and Sam takes the reader on a meandering journey through savage events, vast sorrow and parched deserts but it also through personal sacrifice, belonging, family and hope. How Much of These Hills is Gold sets out a new vision of the immigrant experience in forming the history of the American West.
Themes: coming of age, American Dream, heritage, tradition, death, loneliness, family, parent-child relationships, sibling relationships, gender, identity, sacrifice, loss, hope
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The Gold Shoe Writer 