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Chapter 14
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in How Much of These Hills Is Gold, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Truth, Lies, and History
Civilization vs. Wilderness
Home
Identity and Gender
Family
Grief
Summary
Analysis
One day, when Sam is ill with a fever, Ma sends Lucy to the gold field with Ba instead of to school. The plateau is lonely and desolate, but Ba shows Lucy the outline of an ancient lake. He weaves the story of this lake—how deep and full of life it once was—for Lucy. He explains that something, likely an earthquake, eventually cracked the lake’s bed, causing much of the lake’s treasure trove of gold to tumble downstream with the water. The remnants of that stream still wind through the settlement, although they’ve been drained and ruined by years of prospecting and coal mining. But some gold remained stuck in the ghost of the lake. There’s “always been gold in these hills,” Ba tells Lucy, just waiting to be found.
By this point in her life, Lucy has already begun to distrust stories, to categorize the things Ba says as lies. But there’s power in stories, and sometimes they convey deeper truths than a literal history can. Ba’s story of the lake engages Lucy in the sweep of deep time and encourages her to imagine herself in a very ancient version of the place she calls home. The American West is her home and Ba’s home not necessarily because they live there or even because they were born there—they have the right to call it home because they have the patience and love to see and respect it for what it is. In contrast, many of the White settlers who claim the land don’t actually appreciate it and value it only as a means to enrich themselves as quickly as possible, no matter what the consequences.
Active
Themes
Hearing Ba’s story, Lucy feels both thirsty and like she’s surrounded by water. So much of the land where she lives is filled with ghosts—the lakes and buffalo and Indigenous people who have long since disappeared. Hearing Ba’s story, Lucy can understand why he and Sam are so drawn to the past with its bright, living creatures. But to maintain that version requires asking what happened to destroy those creatures. Lucy prefers the tidy, clean history told in Teacher Leigh’s books to Ba’s fantastic tales, even though she can’t fully escape their power.
No sooner has Ba finished telling his story than Lucy explains to readers why people might prefer histories to stories. Stories remind her of things that have been lost. Histories are cold, hard facts. They’re also written, as the saying goes, by the victors. Because they are written by and for those in power, they sanitize the painful and difficult parts of the past to tell a story that’s comforting (if disingenuous) in its simplicity.
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Themes
Lucy doesn’t know what to look for. She finds a fossilized fish skeleton and many chunks of quartz. But when she throws one at a tree, it splits and reveals an egg-sized lump of gold at its heart. Ba makes Lucy eat a tiny flake of the gold, telling her that if she carries some of it inside of her, it will attract more.
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Themes
That night as Ba and Lucy walk home, Ba points out the beauty he sees in the harsh place where they live. He loves this wild and unclaimed land, land which belongs to adventurers like himself and his family as much—if not more—than to anyone else.
Active
Themes
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At home, Ma tells Ba that the mine boss came by and threatened the family with eviction, since Ba has abandoned the mine. Ma cajoled a month’s lenience, but their time there is limited. It doesn’t matter, Ba says, showing Ma the nugget Lucy found. A month is enough time to finish saving up for the 40 acres of land he’s been eyeing a little closer to the coast. Ma weighs the nugget in her hand then reveals the plan she’s been making since she learned that Ba has returned to prospecting. They’ll use the money to buy five tickets on a boat going to China. This nugget means they now have enough to go home.
Active
Themes
Gathering the family around her, Ma tells them about home, a place of misty mountains, cobbled streets, and exotic sweet fruits. Ba protests that they’d planned to stay on their own piece of land here. But Ma says it will never be their land. She wants their son to grow up among his own people. Lucy wants to know why they left, if that home was so great. She doesn’t like the way Ma’s description makes the home Lucy knows—the dry and dusty American West—seem awful. She insists she will not go and live among people who she’s heard the White miners disparage as “chinks.”
