There is claiming the land, which Ba wanted to do, which Sam refused — and then there is being claimed by it. The quiet way. A kind of gift in never knowing how much of these hills might be gold. Because maybe if you only went far enough, waited long enough, held enough sadness pooled in your veins, soon you might come upon a path you knew, the shapes of rocks would look like familiar faces, the trees would greet you, buds and birdsong lilting up, and because this land had gouged in you an animal’s kind of claiming, senseless to words and law — dry grass drawing blood, a tiger’s mark in a ruined leg, ticks and torn blisters, wind-coarsened hair, sun burned in patterns to leave skin striped or spotted — then, if you ran, you might hear on the wind, or welling up in your own parched mouth, something like and unlike an echo, coming from before or behind, the sound of a voice you’ve always known calling your name —
How Much of These Hills Is Gold started so intriguingly — a pair of young Chinese-American orphans, fleeing a tapped-out coal-mining camp, need to bury their newly-deceased father according to vaguely understood cultural customs before figuring out the rest of their lives — and with debut author C Pam Zhang’s lyrical and entrancing prose, I thought I was in for a beautifully written account of a unique struggle. And while this book does give us some of that, somewhere between the novel’s time-jumping structure (that pretty much skips over the struggle) and Zhang’s conspicuously precise writing (I loved her sentences, but was always aware that they were impressing me), I was left with the sense that this was more about style than substance. There is certainly skill here and I would read Zhang again.
The family chased the next mine, and the next. Their savings swelled and shrank in seasons as reliable as dry and wet, hot and cold. What’s home mean when they moved so often into shacks and tents that stank of other people’s sweat? How can Lucy find a home to bury a man she couldn’t solve?
Lucy (“who after years lived in towns like this has no more tender parts to tear”) and Sam (“young enough to think desire alone shapes the world”), at twelve and eleven, flee into the California desert with their father’s body tied to the back of a stolen horse, knowing that according to their dead Ma’s “burial recipe”, their Ba would need to be laid to rest with silver (to weigh down his spirit), running water (to purify his spirit), and the body must be placed in a “home” (so the spirit will rest and not repeatedly return “like a migrant bird”). Although the older sibling, Lucy (who takes after Ma) must take direction in this quest from Sam (who is the squint-eyed image of Ba), and Lucy despairs of finding an appropriate resting spot for the failed and violent man who had taken to drink after the death of their Ma. And as I wrote above: I found this opening section to be intriguing and affecting. But then the narrative jumps back three years (to 1862), and I thought, “Okay, this is how the family lived when Ma and Ba were still around.” And then it jumped to the newly dead father’s perspective as he tries to whisper to Lucy the story of how he met her Ma in 1842 (weird, but okay). And then we are in 1867, catching up with Lucy and Sam again as they make their way in the West as absolute outsiders. And again: I think that Zhang writes really fine sentences, but the plot doesn’t stand up to the unconventional structure, and the whole doesn’t add up to something deeper.
I grew up in these hills and they raised me: the streams and rock shelves, the valleys where scrub oaks bunched so thick they seemed one mass but allowed me, skinny and swift, to slip between trunks and pierce the hollow center where branches knit a green ceiling. If I had a people, then I saw those people in the reflecting pools, where water was so clear it showed a world the exact double of this one: another set of hills and sky, another boy looking back with my same eyes. I grew up knowing I belonged to this land, Lucy girl. You and Sam do too, never mind how you look. Don't you let any man with a history book tell you different.
At its core, this is a story about otherness; about the history of Chinese-Americans and how their contributions to the building of America have been overlooked and erased. We learn that not only Lucy and Sam, but also their Ba had been born in California, but even so, they are all treated as no more American than the Native Peoples who were repeatedly driven further and further off the lands that the newly arrived white men from the East claimed as their own. But while these facts colour everything that happens in the plot, Zhang doesn’t really probe the facts deeply enough to make this a satisfying piece of social or historical commentary. Things just kind of happen, and although they are prettily described, I was left wanting much more.
