How Much of These Hills Is Gold

C Pam Zhang was born in Beijing. She immigrated to the United States when she was just four years old to join her parents, who were already living there. She and her younger sister had a nomadic childhood, living in no fewer than 18 places before Zhang went to college at Brown University. After graduating, Zhang started working for a tech start-up in San Francisco. But when she was laid off, she took advantage of her changing circumstances to move to Bangkok and try her hand at writing fiction, something she had long wanted to do. How Much of These Hills Is Gold, her first novel, was published in 2020 to widespread acclaim. It won or was nominated for a dozen awards, including the California Book Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Her follow-up novel, Land of Milk and Honey, was listed among the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books for 2023. Zhang lives in San Francisco with her partner, two dogs, and two cats, where she works as a writer and as a part-time creative director for a skincare company.

On January 12, 1848, James Marshall Mill found gold in a creek at Sutter’s Mill in present-day Coloma, California. California territory had only recently been annexed by the United States following the conclusion of the Mexican-American War; indeed, the discovery of the gold preceded the official announcement of the annexation by a week. The ensuing race for gold and riches brought approximately 300,000 people to California from the United States and abroad over the next eight years. The Gold Rush swelled the population of California, allowing it to quickly achieve statehood in 1850, and paving the way for the first successful effort to connect east and west coasts by rail, the Transcontinental Railroad. Construction of this railroad began in earnest in 1863, and the final spike was driven in at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869. Although Chinese people had been coming to America since the early 19th century, the Gold Rush and the Transcontinental Railroad supercharged Chinese immigration. Although many of these immigrant workers were key to the success of the Transcontinental Railroad and the growing agricultural sector in the West, they faced serious racism and exclusion. In 1850, just after California became a state, it passed the Foreign Miners’ Tax Act which levied a tax of $20 annually (a little over $800 in today’s dollars) on all gold prospectors who were not citizens of the United States, with Chinese prospectors being a specific target of the tax. Later, in 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which forbade immigration by any Chinese person for 10 years, due in part to growing anti-Chinese sentiment and violence, particularly on the west coast, where Chinese immigrants settled in large numbers.

As a Western antiepic, which emphasizes the difficult and painful aspects of life in the West rather than simply glorifying them, How Much of These Hills Is Gold joins in the tradition of works like Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, both of which were published in 1985. Its focus on the stories of pioneers further attests to author C Pam Zhang’s childhood obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autofiction Little House series, although Zhang is on record discussing how books like these sanitize violence against Indigenous people and exclude the more diverse voices of the real American West. In its speculative and somewhat magical reimagining of an era of American history which has been greatly mythologized by White writers and is now being enriched by broader perspectives, How Much of These Hills Is Gold joins works like Colson Whitehead’s 2016 Underground Railroad. Nor is it the only example of a novel portraying an American West peopled not just by White pioneers and cowboys but a much more (historically accurate) diverse cast of characters, including Tom Lin’s 2021 The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, a Western epic that follows the adventures of a Chinese-American trained assassin out to get revenge on the people who separated him from his White wife.