How Much of These Hills is Gold: C Pam Zhang’s novel is a Chinese take on the American western

Longlisted for the Booker Prize, American-Chinese author C Pam Zhang’s novel takes a timely look at racism in the US through the eyes of two Chinese orphans

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C Pam Zhang, whose debut novel, How Much of These Hills is Gold, was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Photo: Gioia Zloczower

James Kidd

Published: 4:15pm, 16 Nov 2020Updated: 4:15pm, 16 Nov 2020

This has been quite a year for C Pam Zhang. In April she released her debut novel, How Much of These Hills is Gold. Set towards the end of the American gold rush, the story follows two young Chinese siblings, Lucy and Sam, as they navigate hostile terrain and even more hostile white Americans on a quest to bury their recently dead father. Having earned glowing reviews, Zhang was longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.

“[It was] a huge honour, a validation and, as all prizes are, a stroke of luck,” Zhang tells me from her home in San Francisco. “Every year great books are honoured, and other great books are left out. I’m trying to ignore prize season as much as possible and get back to the writing itself.”

It has been an extraordinary year to publish a novel that dissects and exposes America’s relationship to its racial (and racist) past. What has it been like to be Chinese-American and hear your president constantly scapegoat your birthplace for causing the coronavirus pandemic?

“Infuriating and terrifying and, yet, predictable,” Zhang says. “The anti-Chinese racism in the wake of Covid-19 is more naked than any I’ve seen in my lifetime, but it’s only the newest face of a very ancient prejudice. You can draw a clear line between the ‘compliments’ Asian-Americans receive about their English and the acid thrown on a 39-year-old Asian woman in Brooklyn in the same week my book was released. The current president is saying, over and over, that Asian-presenting people will never belong.”

How Much of These Hills is Gold, by C Pam Zhang. Photo: Handout

At the same time, Zhang says she was heartened by the widespread condemnation of these xenophobic tactics, and the defiance of the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the US during the summer. “In some sense the nakedness of the current racist rhetoric is interesting, in that it invites equal forthrightness and passion in those who push back. That may make a deeper examination of these issues possible. I’ll wait and see.”