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Summary Of How Much Of These Hills Is Gold By C. Pam Zhang

2529 Words11 Pages

How Much of These Hills is Gold, by C. Pam Zhang, is an adventurous novel that dates back to the period of the California gold rush, the backdrop of the lives of two siblings, Lucy and Sam. The two come from Chinese-American descent, often seen and portrayed throughout the book. After the death of their father, they journey off west in hopes of finding a burial place for their father and a place they can call home. Zhang highlights the use of gender through a constant theme of masculinity and femininity and uses these to empower characters and highlight real-world society, which helps us understand and relate to the characters by being able to compare their experiences to our real-world scenarios in a sense of identity. In a sense, this highlights the common advantages and disadvantages of both …show more content…

This pictures that when Sam took on the masculine traits and personality and hid her feminine side, other men started to treat her with more respect, and it allowed her to get the opportunity to travel North with this group of men. But when they found out who she was, she lost the chunk of respect she received when she adopted those masculine traits, and she started to get treated differently and they did despicable things to her. “Sam tried her best to look calm, but was truly internally distraught by what happened to her. There is the faintest of shivers through Sam, hidden by the motion of Sam leaping up to clear the breakfast things” (282). The situation presented gives us, this picture of the differences between how Sam got interlaced between the two identities, and it exemplifies how when adopting masculinity, you can be given things like respect, opportunities, and much more compared to femininity where all this respect and opportunity was taken away just like

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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.

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