How Much Of These Hills Is Gold

“Silver and water could seal a spirit for a time, keep it from tarnish. But it was home that kept the spirit safe-settled. Home that kept it from wandering back, restless, returning time and again like some migrant bird.” 

Ma is explaining the meaning of her burial ritual. The emphasis on home has broader implications for Lucy’s own experience. Because she cannot find her own true home, Lucy wanders through life as incorporeal as a ghost.

“In Lucy’s fondest dream, the one she doesn’t want to wake from, she braves no dragons and tigers. Finds no gold. She sees wonders from a distance, her face unnoticed in the crowd. When she walks down the long street that leads her home, no one pays her any mind at all.”

Lucy expresses a paradoxical desire. In America her face makes her stand out in a crowd. She is painfully visible. However, if she were to travel to Asia, where she would be invisible, she would also feel alienated because China is not home.

“As she did on many nights, Lucy leaves Sam and Ba alone together. She doesn’t see what passes at last between father and daughter, father and false son.” 

Lucy’s depiction of Sam as a false son may not be completely accurate. Sam has invented an identity that seems to be in accord with his true nature. He knows who he is. In contrast, Lucy doesn’t know who she is. Perhaps she is a false daughter.

“Three months they’ve traveled in fear and in hiding, and Sam saw it as a game. Sam who’s at home wherever Sam goes, shining through hardship. The map Sam drew, the path Sam meant to take—it didn’t represent months or years, Lucy realizes. It was the start of a lifetime.”

Because Sam already knows who he is, he’s at home wherever he goes. Because Lucy is looking for an external point of safety, her inner insecurity remains. Even if she stops traveling, she will remain lost, which is precisely what happens when she later settles in Sweetwater.

“Lucy studies Sam from one side, from the other. Hard as she squints, she can’t see where Sam’s stories end, where Sam’s lies begin. If there is, to Sam, any difference.”

Like all the other characters in the story, Sam has many faces, many sides. While Lucy sees him as being overly imaginative, Sam lives in a world of his own making. This grounds and stabilizes him. Lucy has no such anchor.

“Girls have power too. Beauty is a weapon […] Not the kind of weapons your sister plays with.” 

Ma’s words echo in Lucy’s head many times throughout the novel. While Lucy learns to exploit her own beauty during her time as a prostitute, she doesn’t use it with the lethal accuracy of her mother. Ba’s narrative reveals how much Ma has traded on her beauty to get what she wants out of life.

“‘History,’ she says. The teacher smiles. ‘He who writes the past writes the future too. Do you know who said that?’ He bows. ‘I did. I’m a historian myself.’”

Teacher Leigh writes a history of the gold rush era from the perspective of a White man. He is consciously aware that in shaping his narrative, he will shape future perceptions of events. Controlling the direction of the narrative confers power.

“Lucy is reminded that what makes Ma most beautiful is the contradiction of her. Rough voice over smooth skin. Smile stretched over sadness—this queer ache that makes Ma’s eyes look miles and miles away.” 

When Lucy makes this statement, she isn’t yet aware of the greatest contradiction of all—that this woman who appears selfless and caring is capable of ruthless ambition. Ma easily plans murder to gain her freedom. She later steals from her own family to improve her chances of future wealth.

“Because this land they live in is a land of missing things. A land stripped of its gold, its rivers, its buffalo, its Indians, its tigers, its jackals, its birds and its green and its living. To move through this land and believe Ba’s tales is to see each hill as a burial mound with its own crown of bones.” 

Aside from the glorification of the mythic West found in history books, Ba fabricates his own tall tales. Rather than seeing lost worlds built from imagination, Lucy focuses on the ecological effects of mining in the landscape she knows. She picks apart the myths of both her father and America to find nothing but a crown of bones.

“Easier by far to read the history that Teacher Leigh teaches, those names and dates orderly as bricks, stacked to build a civilization.” 

This quote offers a counterpoint to the preceding one. Ba’s tales of a primordial past cause Lucy to think of all the missing creatures who no longer exist. Leigh’s history focuses on empire-building in which ecosystems are blithely sacrificed in the name of progress, with each loss bringing bigger gains.

“I could spend this gold tomorrow and it would belong to someone else. No—I want us rich in choices. That’s something no one can take.” 

Lucy is unaware of the irony of her mother’s statement. Ma decries the impermanence of gold that can be stolen. However, she is the thief who steals that very same piece of gold to finance her escape from her family.

“All your life you heard people say the story starts in ’48. And all your life when people told you this story, did you ever question why? They told it to shut you out. 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.” 

Ba claims he discovered gold years before the first prospectors arrived, yet this is not the story everyone knows. The quote hearkens back to Leigh’s comment about history. Whoever tells the story shapes the future. The quote also reinforces the right of the native-born to the riches of the land.

“Lucy girl, you always thought it was your old ba pushing the family, wanting more. But the push came first from your ma. Because that day of the ship, she saw me wrong. She mistook me for the gold man who ordered other men around.”

In Ba’s narrative the reader sees a very different side of Ma. From her initial contact with Ba, she is looking for a protector who can provide her with wealth and comfort. Both are projecting personas that will change over time. Ba is not an important man, and Ma is not a gullible girl.

“Too often truth ain’t in what’s right, Lucy girl—sometimes it’s in who speaks it. Or writes it.” 

Ba is making an observation about the power of the word. Whoever controls the narrative gets to shape the story. This is as true of recorded history as it is of a conversation among a small group of people. Truth becomes nothing more than a set of common beliefs.

“But I tell you, Lucy girl, that day in the ashes she lost her convictions. I saw the guilt and the wondering eat at her worse than flames.”

After the fire burns out, Ma doubts the rightness of her decisions for the first time. She eventually recovers. Ba, Ma, and Sam all have a certain conviction that their choices are right. Lucy has never possessed this quality. Her own lack of conviction is part of the reason for her own lack of a clear path in life.

“If I was a gambler, then she was a clerk. That hating part of her never stopped measuring what was fair. Never stopped counting up my sins, my rare successes.” 

Ba explains how his temperament is different from Ma’s. She is coldly calculating while he acts on impulse. It is her lack of impulsiveness that allows her to quietly plan her escape without anyone in her family suspecting her true intentions.

“A blank story to suit this town where she learned what civilization properly meant: no danger, no adventure, no uncertainty in a place so bled of wildness that a false tiger could be an event.” 

Lucy’s contempt for civilization is paradoxical. Throughout the story she longs for a place to ground herself. That stability is provided in Sweetwater, yet she finds herself dismissive of the monotony that security brings.

“What other future can there be? She’s become what she said: Orphan. No one. No fortune, no land, no horse, no family, no past, no home, no future.”

Lucy is swimming and drifting in the river as she makes this observation. It represents the ghostlike nature of her existence. She was drifting psychologically long before she ever arrived in Sweetwater. The real crux of the problem isn’t the lack of the things she enumerates but her lack of a self.

“Up this close, Lucy sees what she missed under Sam’s charm. Beneath is the same mix of violence and bitterness and hope that killed Ba. That old history that Lucy orphaned herself from.” 

Lucy deliberately cuts herself off from a destructive family trait. Her choice of words is telling. In the previous quote she complains about being an orphan. Here she makes it clear that she orphaned herself from certain aspects of her past.

“Anna wants Lucy docile beside her, the third seat in their train car, wearing their clothes, lapping their cocoa, sleeping near their bed and maybe even allowing the scratch of Charles’s fingers at night. Anna wants a domestic thing, a harmless thing.”

The characteristics described in this quote are those of a pet. The key to Lucy’s friendship with Anna is that she is passive enough to be treated like an inoffensive animal. What Lucy fails to realize is that she accommodated and perpetuated that dynamic through her own lack of conviction.

“Sam’s secret, like all their family’s secrets, is gold.” 

At some point in the story, each member of the family has concealed gold. Ba prospects in secret. Lucy carries a small piece of gold to show her teacher without telling her family. Ma conceals a chunk of gold inside her cheek and then runs off with it. Sam carries a hidden supply of stolen gold, for which he is later hunted down. They all possess gold furtively.

“Sam attentive to clothes despite a disdain for skirts, as if saying, with each tug of the needle, What people see shapes how they treat you.” 

Both Sam and Lucy have internalized one of their mother’s favorite aphorisms. Ma is a master at controlling other people’s perceptions of her. For that reason, she receives better treatment than her immigrant status would allow. Sam quickly develops some of the same ability, but Lucy doesn’t develop the skill until she becomes a prostitute.

“No one can hurt her now. Her body is immortal, or rather it’s died so many deaths in so many men’s stories that she fears no longer. She is a ghost, inhabiting this body. She wonders if she can ever die.” 

Lucy laments her detachment during her years as a prostitute. She attributes it to her brothel clients. However, her rootless nature suggests that she became a ghost long before this stage of her life. Nothing about her has truly changed.