KollabSF Interviews C Pam Zhang, Author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold

There was something I didn’t trust about immigrant stories. They were either forced stories to teach gratefulness by pitying the kids that didn’t look white, or an excuse for my dad to berate me for being a privileged American. The protagonist was more about America, as it told me to keep my head down and survive until I assimilate into the “promised land.” Nowhere did these stories truly convey the immigrant survival mindset by using your creativity and skills to carry on only to the next day. A fellow writer Nay Saysourinho put it best, “As a child in an immigrant family, we don’t have feelings. We make plans.” However, can this type of American immigrant story still exist when there’s no safe place in the world to migrate to?

I first stumbled upon C Pam Zhang's work when I read "Of How Much of These Hills is Gold," when it was still a short story in the Missouri Review in 2018. Reading the opening line for the first time, "Ba Dies in the night, prompting them to seek two dollars," the sentence resonated with me as it was relentlessly truthful. It had that sense of urgency for a plan of action, as feelings are a mere luxury when your world is always cracking at the seams. In February of this year, I got the chance to interview Zhang in San Francisco to talk about her new novel How Much Of These Hills Is Gold. The story puts two recently orphaned siblings in the middle of the American Gold Rush, vying for a home in the unknown. The novel has been named one of the most anticipated books of 2020 by The Millions, The Week, Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, receiving stellar reviews from The New York Times and USA Today. 

Zhang happily agreed to the interview, resonating with Kollaboration's mission of using Artistry as one of the most effective and inspiring forms of activism. “I think that the great role of art and fiction is to allow us to see ourselves in a complex and nuanced way. And what I mean by that is that Asians are shoehorned into the model minority myth, which is very flattening. It's important to have representation that allows us to be seen as angry, as valiant, as heroes, as fucked up, as sexual beings.”

I had the pleasure to read an advance copy of How Much of These Hills is Gold, as the book reinvents the Western story. When you glance at the Table of contents, you’ll notice something peculiar about it as it’s broken up into 4 sections, using out of sequence time frames between “XX42” and “XX67.” There’s something ominous with the way the chapters are laid out poetically in the table of contents, labeled with titles like “Meat,” “Plum,” and “Blood.” The reading experience had the same feel as if listening to improv jazz, with Zhang spontaneously creating small out-of-rhythm drum beats of different perspectives over the continuous theme of finding home. As you walk with the two siblings Lucy and Sam, sometimes the wind would speak, Cantonese words are carefully placed to show affection, or a tiger would appear in the form of eight lines. These details don’t distract you away from the themes of trauma, class, assimilation, and peril that constantly haunt Lucy and Sam. Her protagonists face not only greedy opportunists, scoundrels and elitists, but also elements of nature and family baggage that creates even more tension through their adventure. With Zhang’s deep level of attention, she also doesn’t forget to add small victories for the siblings: eating salted plums, tightening their hair into a braid, or having a kind gaze touch their eyes. 

Curious to why she chose the a western setting, she opens up about her childhood, “One reason I landed upon this genre is that I grew up really loving American epics that happen in this landscape. Books like Little House on a Prairie or East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. These books had ordinary characters, small families against this epic backdrop. It made their lives seem epic, which I think we all yearn for. Later in life I realized that as much as I love these books, they only feature white people. I wanted for the Asian Diaspora to see ourselves represented in that tradition.”

This western tradition always omits the roughly 15,000 Chinese workers who built the intercontinental railroad From 1863 and 1869. What we are left with is the Western trope of the gun toting, righteous self-determination lone cowboy taking the good fight against the savages. We saw this variation of a trope in the Oscar nominated film that lost to “Parasite” in the Best Picture category titled “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” The film had Brad Pitt star as a John Wayne-like stuntman for a former Western TV star, who beats up an arrogant and cocky depiction of Bruce Lee. Criticism grew towards the movie as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote a letter in the Hollywood Reporter denouncing this depiction, as he knew Bruce Lee was against physical showdowns of any kind. “I was in public with Bruce several times when some random jerk would loudly challenge Bruce to a fight. He always politely declined and moved on. First rule of Bruce’s fight club was don’t fight — unless there is no other option.”

It’s important to protect these legacies, given Asian Americans have so little to rely on in terms of Hollywood representation (let’s not forget pioneers like Miyoshi Umeki, who’s the only Asian woman to win an Oscar for acting and Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American actress to gain international recognition-- Not Bruce Lee). So when I asked Zhang what theme she was most excited to explore while writing  How Much of These Hills Is Gold, she took a slight pause. After her small silence into her thoughts, Zhang comes back to me, “The theme of written history, and how it is extremely white and written for white men. This book is about building mythology in America.” 

During our interview, as I kept pointing out the historical significance of Chinese in the Western era, she politely reminded me that this novel is still a speculative fiction. The way she uses speculative fiction, as opposed to writing historical fiction, is what makes her craft so stellar. In an interview Zhang did for The Offing about her lyrical short story “Are They Vampires, or Are They Just Chinese?”, she gives one of her trade secrets: “What’s creepy is my being haunted for years by the pressure to write a Sad Immigrant Story. Having lived part of that story, I can tell you that oppression and bigotry get pretty fucking boring if you face them in their daily, unrelenting, deadening, systemic forms…. Speculative fiction is such a gift to minority writers. It’s capable of performing a kind of magician’s trick. A shiny new world, an oddity, a monster—these are all classic acts of misdirection.”

What I always find that makes Zhang’s work stand out is her use of misdirection in writing about death and grief in a supernatural way. Fine examples include short stories like “Dad.Me” where apartments rented have ghosts of dads stuck in an infinite loop, and “Pollution People,” where a daughter has her dad’s ashes ride shotgun as she ventures into Kentucky on a mission. Rather than using death as a tired trope of ending a character’s existence to make an “emotional major event” (Even worse how stories kill or “fridge” a woman character to develop the male characters forward), Zhang’s characters still move forward in death and move the narrative forward in their unique fictional way. 

Showing my adoration, (and possibly fanboying a bit too much) I asked her what’s her connection writing about grief. She breaks it down for me, “Often the way we are taught the way to think about grief is that It's a horrible event that destroys the weeks or months or a year around it, and then people go back to life. I felt that grief was this black hole, where everything is warped around it forever more. I wanted to convey the afterlife in a way I don’t think it's often conveyed.”

Textbook definition of grief is pretty straightforward, as “intense sorrow caused by someone’s death.” In Huamei Kang’s research paper, “The Exploration of Migratory Grief, Social Factors and Resolutions,” Kang explores the idea of grief response as not being related to death but to the losses associated with migration. These kinds of losses include job security, status, and social environment. Kang wonders in her research paper: “What is the likelihood for immigrants to give themselves the permission, space, and compassion to grief without being able to recognize our own losses?” In How Much of These Hills is Gold, Zhang gives permission to one of her characters to recognize their losses, in the voice of Ba.

What I feel like is a major highlight of the book, is the chapter “Wind Wind Wind Wind Wind” where it feels like an essential interlude. Ba tells his whole story to Lucy in an ambiguous form, with reflective, omniscient insight. He tells his story with sincerity that he might not have had before, “Lucy Girl, there were plenty of times I wanted to give you a soft, easy life. But if I did, the world would gnaw you down like these buffalo bones.” Zhang’s narration echoes my initial feelings when I read “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew Open Letter” by James Baldwin as he’s been where Ba has: “You gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort.” Both share their wretched heartbreak, suppressed anger, laid out in their own words in hopes that their next akin has a better story. This is where Zhang gives life to her characters that I felt were missing in Asian Immigrant stories I read growing up. The stories I was fed from history books always depicted immigrants as “uncivilized” in the beginning, and erasing their savagery through assimilation into America. Being represented in these stories gives us a glimpse to be seen who we truly are, because these stories are to be ours. “They told it to shut you out,”as Ba Says to Lucy, “They told it to claim it, to make it theirs and not yours. They told it to say we came too late. Thieves, they called us. They said this land could never be our land.”

By the time you have read this, I myself have begun this profile five times and torn it up five times-- I question if I should remind you of the current reality we are in as you read this. I debate in my head mentioning something of what’s “novel” now, can quickly diminish this piece as into “what happened back then.” However, does this reflect more about my Americanness, my quick reflex to immediately omit the past that has grief? I look in the news and see Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers use the analogy of “the wild west” to compare to what he feels the “Chaos” the Wisconsin Supreme Court created by overturning his stay-at-home order. I read Lili Loofbourow’s article in Slate on how she found a woman’s letter about her experience nursing soldiers in the 1918 flu. She writes “I knew nothing about the 1918 flu, “My ignorance was, according to the National Archives, symptomatic of a larger case of American amnesia: ‘It is an oddity of history that the influenza epidemic of 1918 has been overlooked in the teaching of American history.’” My decision was made once I read a tweet from writer and Founding editor Hyphen Magazine Melissa Hung, as she writes out her thoughts of from whence we came from, “As I enter my 3rd month of sheltering in place, I remind myself that this is nothing compared to how long my immigrant parents were separated from their families.” How Much of These Hills is Gold is an essential read to remind us of the power of speculative fiction, as Zhang said in an The Keynan Review Interview,  “there are times when the language of science fails to capture the full texture of experience.”