How Much Of These Hills Is Gold By C Pam Zhang

In How Much of These Hills Is Gold, C Pam Zhang asserts the struggle of the Chinese-American protagonist Lucy and her connection to her femininity through nature, despite society’s ludicrous attempts to colonize and diminish her. Initially, it is clarified that there is a difference in “claiming the land, which Ba wanted to do, which Sam refused—and then there is being claimed by it”(320) which was what Lucy authorized it to do to her. Sam, Lucy’s younger sibling, made a unilateral decision to reject being claimed by the land displaying how he rejected his femininity from a young age as opposed to his sister. It is explained how someone could be claimed by nature and how “the trees would greet [them]”(320) if they fully accept the land and their connection to femininity.

Additionally, it is described if someone rejects nature and its claim that “[they] might hear on the wind…the sound of a voice [they]’ve always known calling [their] name”(320) which implies how nature and thus femininity might not always be seen but can still be recognized or felt instead. Likewise, when Lucy travels with her father to the hills where gold was discovered he is adamant that he “[can’t] see how [someone] can claim to own a place and treat it so poor”(143) this could be said for how society can claim to love women and still treat them unequally. The land Lucy lived in had slowly been destroyed by the implementation of trains and colonization and how “[t]he tracks grow, the hills are razed to hold them, [i]n the Western territory, the dry grass blows, torn up at its roots,”(316) which alludes to the detrimental effect of how women were and are still treated, being used by society much like how the land was being used to expand the impact of