Title: Write Back to the Myth of “the White Man’s West”: Passing into the West in How Much of These Hills Is Gold

Abstract: How Much of These Hills Is Gold, the debut novel by Chinese American female author C. Pam Zhang, is characterized by its haunting new-century vision of the American West. It brings new faces from a Chinese American family to the myth of the American West, a native gold miner, a Chinese fisherwoman and their orphaned girls, focusing on the family’s multiple and intersected types of passing, and featuring an ambivalence to settler colonialism and indigeneity in native or migrant diasporas of the west. This enables the novel to break the limitation of the discourse of visible history and literary pseudoscience, and to rediscover the history of the people not through the filter of literary paradigm for “making the white man’s West,” but through the experiences of those who lived the history. This paper is going to elaborate these main characters’ performance of passing into the West and to unlock the specific content of the novel to write back to the myth of “the white man’s West.”

Keywords:: C. Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, new-century western American literature, passing, pseudoscience

Author: Wenting Liang, Ph.D. Candidate, Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2024.03.007