Booker Prize nod a surreal experience for Zhang
S.F. author watches reaction to her debut novel while sheltering at home
“How Much of These Hills Is Gold,” the debut novel from C Pam Zhang, received rave reviews, was named the first selection in Goop’s book club and landed the author an appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” And now the book has been named one of 13 contenders for the Booker Prize, the prestigious British award that only began allowing Americans to compete in 2014. But in some ways, the reality of the book’s release hadn’t quite hit Zhang yet. “It came out while the area was sheltered in place, and we’re still sheltering,” says Zhang, who spoke by phone from her home in San Francisco in June prior to the Booker announcement. “I haven’t even seen my own book in a bookstore window yet. I haven’t even had that experience.” But reactions from readers have made strong impressions on the novelist. “It’s the readers’ reactions that really touch me, in particular, hearing Asian American women respond to it and say that they feel the book is depicting an emotional territory that they’ve felt, but never seen represented. That’s really important for me,” she says. “I wrote it for Asian American children growing up here who are conflicted about their relationship to America.” “How Much of These Hills Is Gold” (Riverhead Books, 288 pages) is the story of siblings Lucy and Sam, who face tragedy as children. They come of age while fending for themselves at the time of the California Gold Rush, their experiences compounded by issues of gender identity and the anti-Chinese racism of the Old West. “To me, Northern California has always been associated with literature and with this mythologized, almost fantastical, landscape,” says Zhang. When she was 8, Zhang traveled by car with her family when they moved from Kentucky to California, first settling in Salinas. “Expanding beyond Northern California, the general mythology of the American West has always been really huge in my mind,” she says. “I’ve always been really drawn to any accounts that depict the grand sweep and epic scale of this landscape, how it is both awe-inspiring and beautiful and, also, terrifying.” One formative read: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” series. It sparked Zhang’s imagination when she was a child, but as an adult, she acknowledges there is something troubling about that. “When I look back, I realize that I was inhabiting the lives and the imagined minds of characters who are predominantly white,” she says. Zhang recalls imagining that she was hanging out with Laura Ingalls in the Dakota Territory. “Even at a young age, I would have to be like, ‘How would Laura and her family perceive me as a Chinese person? I don’t think her mother would like me,’ ” says Zhang. “There would be this barrier to get over. It just never quite worked, my desire to slip into the stories of America or the stories of the West that I so loved.” Race, language and gender play a significant role in the story of Lucy and Sam. They speak Mandarin intertwined with English in their home, and readers see how this shapes their familial relationships. “We today talk about code-switching, but I think that switching between languages goes even deeper than that,” says Zhang. “For the character of Ma, because none of her family really shares her original language, there’s literally a whole world and a whole part of herself that she can’t access ever, not even with her immediate family.” They are profoundly impacted by both the racism that permeates the towns they inhabit as well as the gender roles of the time. Lucy yearns to fit in and embraces femininity. “Lucy, I think, in many ways, is a stand-in for the assimilation that so many Asian Americans feel in this country; she wants to be adjacent to whiteness,” says Zhang. In contrast, Sam is rarely referenced by pronouns, and when that happens it’s as the result of other characters’ observations. “I just wanted Sam to be allowed to be wild and free and, because of this, Sam really had a huge effect on shaping the language and the syntax and the rhythm of the book,” says Zhang, noting that there are no gendered pronouns referencing Sam in the first handful of pages of the book, a choice designed to have readers see the full character before assigning any labels. Says Zhang, “It was really important for Sam to be free in this way.” Zhang wrote the novel while living in Thailand, and the time away from California proved to be integral to the story’s manifestation. “Because I was interested in writing a mythology and a reimagining, it gave me a lot of power to write it in a different place, where I didn’t feel so tethered to all the details and all the facts,” she says. “I wrote this book to, in a way, be a corrective, or be a response to American history. Living in America, I felt more weighed down by the history that I was trying to stand in opposition to. That was just an easier project to embark on from another country.” But growing up in California also helped her reflect upon the era in which the story is set. “Because I went through the public school system in California for a good chunk of my life, I had this foundational knowledge about the Gold Rush, about the presence of Chinese railroad workers,” she says. Ultimately, “How Much of These Hills Is Gold” isn’t a history book. It’s the story of two young people whose lives are shaped by the very complicated physical and social landscape of the American West. “For me, there has to be a pattern in the writing and editing process, where sometimes you pay close attention to the historical facts and sometimes you do need to go away because it is a work of fiction,” says Zhang. “You need to let the book grow unconstrained by the facts. I do think that facts, at certain periods, can feel suffocating to a fictional work.”