“A Land of Missing Things”: Extraction, Belonging, and Chinese Immigrant Labor in C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“A Land of Missing Things”Extraction, Belonging, and Chinese Immigrant Labor in C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold Ashley E. Reis (bio) In her debut novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020), C Pam Zhang centers the stories of those the western American settler mythos has cast to the margins, whose lives and labor this mythos has extracted—then stripped from the historical record—in service to a narrative of predestined and heroic colonial progress. The novel’s protagonist, Lucy, is a Chinese American teenage girl who comes of age in strained relation to her only sibling, Sam.1 The two navigate the familial, sociocultural, and environmental costs of post–gold rush era California in the decade between 1859–69, when a crew of laborers comprised largely of Chinese immigrants completed the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Lucy’s immigrant father, Ba (Mandarin for “Dad”), set out believing that the California landscape and opportunities to wrest what he could from it would position his family to accumulate wealth and stake their claim to a plot of land. Yet early in the novel the siblings find themselves destitute, alone, and adrift in “a land of missing things. A land stripped of its gold, its rivers, its buffalo, its Indians, its tigers, its jackals, its birds, its green and its living” (144). The ambitions of gold men, coal miners, and railroad barons alike have exhausted the land of resources, dispossessed it of Indigenous land stewards, and depleted it of wildlife, illuminating the losses inherent in the US settler state’s manifest destiny of westward expansion and, accordingly, unsettling the widely held notion of extraction as a productive practice. As the novel follows Lucy and Sam in their quest to find a sense of belonging and a place to call home—whether in the west of California or even the east of their parents’ China—How [End Page 253] Much of These Hills Is Gold delineates a relationship between the extraction of natural resources, the extraction of Chinese immigrant labor, and, ultimately, the extraction of the Chinese immigrant and Chinese American story from the history of the US West’s colonization and development. The project of manifest destiny underlying the novel depends as much on settler extraction and exploitation of Chinese immigrant labor, whether via prospecting, mining for coal, or laying the transcontinental railroad, as it does on the extraction and exhaustion of the raw materials that propel development. Accordingly, the novel unearths stories that have been relegated to the periphery by enacting the crucial work of rectifying the historical narrative of the US West to ensure the rightful inclusion of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans. As it testifies to the ecological, sociological, and cultural costs of extractive capitalism, which has engendered the catastrophic climate crisis we currently face, How Much of These Hills Is Gold complicates the United States’ dominant cultural reliance on extraction. Zhang’s contemporary literary intervention positions extraction as not only a destructive material process but a degrading and exploitative sociocultural one as well. Climate and Extractive Fictions This essay will draw from Matthew S. Henry’s theorizing of “extractive fictions,” after it first positions How Much of These Hills Is Gold within the broader context of the imaginative response to climate change that scholars call climate fiction. Climate fiction, broadly speaking, innovates alternative ways of representing and communicating the ecological, cultural, and sociopolitical dimensions of climate change. Antonia Mehnert delineates climate fiction according to its ability to highlight “the ethical and social ramifications of this unparalleled environmental crisis, [reflect] on current political conditions that impede action on climate change, [explore] how risk materializes and affects society, and finally [play] an active part in shaping our conception of climate change” (4). Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s empirical scholarship builds upon the work of scholars like Mehnert, illuminating various critical facets of climate fiction, primarily its effects on readers. Climate [End Page 254] fiction reconfigures readers’ temporal perception of environmental processes and acquaints readers with the slow violence of climate change (484), he explains.2 What’s more, Schneider-Mayerson articulates the ways climate fiction generates the imaginative circumstances within which readers perceive environmental...