How a Chinese-American novelist wrote herself into the Wild West
The day in 2015 that C Pam Zhang was laid off from her first job out of college, she celebrated with friends at the park, then promptly made plans to move to Bangkok. She had been working at a tech startup in San Francisco for several years, she said, “kind of stress-testing this question of whether I could be happy doing something that was not writing.” But the layoff felt liberating, so she decided to live off savings for a while and give writing a real shot.
“I was like, I’m giving myself a year,” Zhang said in an interview last month. “I’ve been complaining all this time about not having the time to write. Will I actually write when I have the time, or am I just a big fake?”
Over seven months in Thailand, she wrote more than a dozen short stories, in the process landing on the sort of work she wanted to do: speculative fiction that dealt with themes of death, migration and loneliness.
That year, she also drafted a novel. Set during the Gold Rush with elements of magical realism, it focuses on two orphaned siblings who are fending for themselves in an American West where tigers roam. The book, “How Much of These Hills Is Gold,” is due out from Riverhead on Tuesday.
It is inspired by the emotional currents of Zhang’s upbringing, particularly the loneliness and insecurity of a childhood spent moving around. It also reckons with grief, something she experienced after losing her father when she was 22.
“The death of a parent has this really strange gravity, no matter how many years you get away from it,” Zhang, now 30, said. “It warps everything else around it.”
In “How Much of These Hills Is Gold,” the siblings, Lucy and Sam, go into survival mode after their father dies and they are left penniless in a hostile town. “One thing I wanted to reflect on in the book was how when you mourn in a way that is repressed, it will haunt you,” Zhang said. “You can’t get away from it.”
Born in Beijing (the C in her name is short for Chenji), Zhang moved to the United States, where her parents were already living, when she was 4. She had 10 different addresses by the time she was 18, as her parents sought out better job opportunities or school systems for her and her younger sister. But one move stands out. When Zhang was 8, the family packed up their car and drove from Lexington, Ky., to Salinas, Calif.
“I was so struck by the landscape of America,” she said, recalling areas where they were pounded by torrential rain or in the plains of Oklahoma, where she could see weather patterns from miles away. “It’s really beautiful but also, in many parts of the country, extremely bleak and kind of scary.”
Those lasting impressions informed her reading habits. A fan of Laura
Ingalls Wilder and John Steinbeck, she said, “Eventually I realized that the people in these books that I loved were always white. I wanted to write a great American epic in which I saw myself reflected.”
Sarah McGrath, who edited the book, said that reading it reminded her of Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” or Mohsin Hamid’s “Exit West,” which “help me understand our culture and our history in a new way, not by telling it directly but by showing it through emotion and relationships and its art.”
“How Much of These Hills Is Gold” is one of several new or forthcoming books by Asian-American writers set in 1800s America. There is “The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu” by Tom Lin, forthcoming from Little, Brown, which is set 150 years ago and follows a Chinese-American assassin seeking revenge after his wife is abducted. “Prairie Lotus,” published last month, is a book for young readers that its author, Korean-American writer Linda Sue Park, describes as a “painful reconciliation” of her youthful love of Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” books with the sometimes racist views they espoused.
“I would lie in bed and imagine that I was Laura’s best friend and make up adventures that we would have together,” Park said. But she realized that, not only were people who looked like her not visible in the story, “but that even if I had been, Laura’s mother, in particular, would probably have never even let her get close to me.”
The Gold Rush and its aftermath, and Chinese Americans’ role in it, is ripe for reexamination. Until recently, the roughly 15,000 Chinese-American laborers who worked on the first Transcontinental Railroad, built in the 1860s, were all but erased from the historical record and later barred from obtaining citizenship by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
A well-known photograph from the inauguration of the Transcontinental Railroad inspired a moment in
Zhang’s book. Lucy, one of the main characters, “hears the cheer that goes through the city the day the last railroad tile is hammered. A golden spike holds track to earth,” Zhang writes. “A picture is drawn for the history books, a picture that shows none of the people who look like her, who built it.”
“How Much of These Hills Is Gold” is not meant to encapsulate the Chinese-American experience of that time, but rather to portray “the loneliness of being an immigrant and not being allowed to stake a claim to the place that you live in,” Zhang said. In light of the discrimination Asian Americans are facing as the coronavirus has disrupted life, however, she thinks her book is more relevant than ever.
When she began writing it, “I actually worried that the book’s depictions of naked racism and violence would seem too extreme, too maudlin,” she said. “Now I’m reminded that these ugly attitudes toward Asian-presenting people have always lain just under the veneer of the country and that they are erupting now.”
After growing up moving from place to place, Zhang has settled in San Francisco, where she lives with her partner and their cat and dog. She works part time as a creative director for a skin-care startup, and though she sometimes struggles with the stillness of domesticity, she values financial security, having grown up in a family in which money was sometimes tenuous.
“We don’t talk enough about how, especially for people who come from immigrant backgrounds, from poor backgrounds, from impoverished families, that money is a source of emotional comfort,” she said. “It’s not just money.”
Thinking about the literature of the West that she has long been drawn to, and the way it showed “that ordinary people can lead epic lives against this epic backdrop,” Zhang said, she feels similarly about immigrants’ stories. “How they’ve crossed entirely new lands and traded one life for another — those stories are epic in nature,” she said. “They deserve to be told in that way.”