“What makes a home a home?” Lucy and Sam ask in How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang. “Family first” the two pre-teen children have been taught by their prospector father and immigrant mother, but on the first page of the book these Chinese sisters are orphaned and left alone during the Gold Rush era in an uncaring American West.
The first section, reminiscent of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying follows them as they put their father’s corpse in a trunk, steal a horse, and look for the right place to bury him. The dry hills they pass through have golden grass, but it is the only gold left.
A flashback tells the mother’s typical story. Led by hope and promises of gold and land, she and two hundred other Chinese sail to California. When they arrive, they are given poor-paying, dirty, unsafe work in the coal mines. Father, born here but who “looks like them,” is assumed to speak their language and is hired as a liaison, teacher. Success and luck do not follow the couple and they, like so many of the non-winners in the story of the West, sink into poverty and despair. The image of the tiger, usually a Chinese symbol of good luck, appears throughout the book, but it has turned ominous, and it is bad luck that stalks them, or at best, the indifference of the wilderness.
The parents have passed on toughness and self-sufficiency to their children who survive, find different paths, and separate. One, identifying as male, chooses adventure. The other sister, looking for the warmth of home, chooses civilization. Eventually, the call of family, of belonging to someone, and being with others like themselves becomes strong. Their reunion tests the strength of those “family first” lessons.
Zhang gives voice to the Chinese prospectors, miners, and their families, groups of people generally missing from the romanticized stories of the American West.
I almost skipped The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn because it sounded too depressing. It is the sequel to The Salt Path, a memoir about a time in their lives when Ray Winn and her husband Moth lose their home to bankruptcy and learn that he has a fatal degenerative disease and is given two years to live.
Homeless in their 50’s, they choose to walk several hundred miles along the South West Coast Path in Cornwall, camping for months until they find a small place to live.
Wild Silence continues the story, telling how they manage afterwards. Immersion in nature during the months of the hike has slowed the progression of Moth’s disease and he enrolls in a sustainable agriculture degree program. Still traumatized by the loss of her home and business, Ray Winn hides in the house but is eventually motivated to write the story of their trip.
This lovely non-depressing book has much to offer. Most striking are the descriptions of the natural world. There are the plants and animals of Cornwall plus its land and weather. There is a short but difficult hike in Iceland in the shoulder season. Saturday it is summer, but Sunday, their last day, is winter. There are the glories and majesties of Icelandic mountains, the hardships of the trek, their relationships with much younger campers.
While in Cornwall, they are offered a neglected house and worn-out farm to restore and rewild. The concept of rewilding, or naturally bringing the farm back to sustainability, is very satisfying, and I enjoyed seeing with them the first buds on the apple trees, the new green of wildflowers and grasses, and the return of endangered curlews.
Winn paints inspiring pictures of nature, but it is the example of the couple’s emotional resilience that is most impressive. Suffering some of the hardest blows life can inflict, they find the agency to make creative personal choices that eventually lead them to active new paths. Moth Winn, nine years after his diagnosis, still manages the physical labor of the farm. Ray Winn, who never wrote before, has penned two best sellers.
The title of the first book, The Salt Path, which is so often referred to in this one, is reminiscent of Atlantic Ocean salt spray but also the original salt route through Germany. That route’s purpose, bringing a life necessity to many, echoes Winn’s feeling about the role of nature.
The title of The Wild Silence underlines humanity’s need for wild places and the author’s intense concern over their disappearance. “There was a silence in the air, no bird calls, or insects buzzing, not even the gentle rustle of the seed heads of grass moving in the wind. Just a hot, still, wild silence. The silence of an empty land where no wild thing lived.” Such is the description of the acreage they will bring back to life.
There is the feeling Winn has in Iceland, “…there was an overwhelming awareness of the earth gathering itself, preparing. Rising toward the moment when it would shake like a wet muddy dog and then go about its business. Rid for good of the annoyance of humanity.” (Oh dear, more Sixth Extinction.) But optimistic resilient people that the couple are, they go back to the farm to wait for the growth of spring. There was no problem reading Silence without having read Salt Path. The beautiful story is well told and stands alone.
“Nothing in the world is so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor,” writes Fredrik Backman in Anxious People. He follows his own advice in the construction of a novel that is funny, satirical, goofy and slapstick. Despite the light tone, serious subjects emerge in a well plotted story full of unexpected turns.
A would-be bank robber inadvertently takes hostage a small group of people viewing a prospective new apartment. While awaiting rescue they begin to confide in each other, and the problems of everyday life are shared. A widow is lonely as New Year’s Day approaches; a long-married couple doubt if their marriage will continue; a young couple, pregnant, worry about their ability to parent. And then there is the white rabbit who shows up. Through this runs the thread of long past suicide – one that happened and one that didn’t.
This sympathetic portrayal of the problems of living doesn’t shrink from reality, but, at least this time, they are resolved happily. A quote from The Merchant of Venice, that a character gets almost right, sums up its optimistic tone, “How far that little candle throws his beams. So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”
And a quote that especially appealed to me,“Even if he knew the world was going to hell tomorrow, he’d plant an apple tree today.”
Backmann’s stories are a bit odd,sad,funny,ironic, and hopefully. I enjoy them. Thanks for another thoughtful review.