How Much Of These Hills Is Gold

Sam is Lucy’s younger sibling and presents a striking contrast to Lucy. Sam is confident, stubborn, and sure of himself from an early age. He possesses a charisma that Lucy lacks but admires. While Lucy doesn’t know who she is, Sam carves out an identity based purely on self-determination. Upon realizing that more opportunities are available to boys, Sam commits to living as one, cutting his hair and dressing as a male.

Unlike Lucy, Sam maintains a close relationship with his father. In part, his decision to identify as male is a way to compensate Ba for his stillborn son. Sam also inherits Ba’s obsession with gold and eventually becomes a prospector. As is true of his father, gold is Sam’s undoing. Although prospecting ultimately leaves him penniless and tailed by gold men, Sam still has a defined identity and articulated goals, exhibiting more agency than Lucy manages to achieve by the novel’s conclusion.

Ba is Lucy and Sam’s father. The reader’s perception of him changes radically based on Lucy’s observations and his own narrative. Although Sam is a good example of how appearances can be deceiving, Ba may be an even more profound illustration of the principle. He is a walking contradiction. He looks Chinese but was born in America. He never learned to speak his native language and has no attachment to it, yet everyone judges him to be a foreigner. It is a grim irony that the law barring the foreign-born from staking gold claims doesn’t apply to Ba. He would be legally entitled to stake a claim of his own, yet no one would believe he has that right.

Initially, the reader sees him through Lucy’s eyes as an abusive drunkard. As her narrative travels backward in time, we see him as a loving father who grieves the loss of his dead wife and son. Later still, we learn that his wife abandoned him and that his harshness toward Lucy is only because he wants her to be tough enough to survive in a cruel world.