In the heart of the Gold Rush, every glimmering nugget represented not just wealth, but the embodiment of the American Dream – the chance for any ordinary man to transform their life through hard work and determination. The journey to the West Coast symbolizes the belief that in America, anyone with enough grit was capable of carving out their destiny in the land of the free – which is a myth transmuted and reclaimed in the novel ‘How Much of These Hills is Gold’ by C Pam Zhang. By constructing characters such as Ba, whose history and life experience contradict known facts about the Gold Rush period in America's West, the novel reveals the false revisions in America’s myth-laden founding mythology by reimagining it through the eyes of underrepresented Chinese Americans.

The dismantlement of the myth surrounding the American West and an attempt to shed light onto the broken reality of the American dream is largely characterized by B. The novel opens with the death of Ba, and his children left on a ritualistic quest to bury him. The character is first introduced to the readers through Lucy's eyes as an abusive drunkard who posthumously haunts his children. The narrative is disjointed through the non-chronological intertwinement of both Ba’s memory and Lucy’s narration. In part one, Lucy’s and Sam’s mercurial memories of their parents’ past are combined into a shared folklore that is fictitious but true to Ma and Ba’s experiences. The stories involved tigers, skulls, and bones in California. Buffalo lingers around them like whispers and remnants, almost mystical. Lucy’s and Sam's mission to bury their father serves as a starting point to recount the tale of where Ba came from, his life experiences of being an ethnically Chinese man,  and how he built up this family. These stories forged essential origins of an American Dream anti-legend, marking initial moves toward deconstructing the commonly embraced and often romanticized idea narrative that the American West was conquered through individualism and ingenuity. Ba’s history as a miner elucidates a broader cultural indication that Chinese immigrant miners have always played a pivotal role in American history, but their contributions in chasing and materializing the American Dream were widely disregarded even though “equality” dominates one of the central ideas of the American Dream. For example, Ba asserts that he, not the miners at Sutter's Mill, was the original discoverer of gold in 1842. Ba says to Lucy: “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 us to say we came too late. Thieves, they called us. They said this land could never be our land.” The bitter speech, apart from contributing to the deconstruction of American mythos, also challenges the notion of history being objective. What adds complexity to the historical narrative is that Ba is a native-born American with the right to claim a share of the wealth, which contrasts with the conventional understanding of these events found in history books. Due to his appearance resembling a Chinese man, he does not conform to the image of the white prospector who bravely extracts wealth and adds embellishment to the American dream that is eulogized to future generations. While the Gold Rush era is romanticized as a time of opportunity and adventure that highlights successful stories of courageous miners who struck it rich, the narrative overlooks the harsh treatment of marginalized groups, whose lands were invaded and resources exploited by the newcomers. The California Gold Rush resulted in a rapid influx of settlers, leading to conflicts over land and resources (Clay, 2008). Native American tribes were often forcibly removed from their lands, and those who resisted faced violence and persecution. One example of this is the California genocide, where an estimated 80% of the Native American population in California perished due to violence, disease, and starvation. This dark chapter in American history is often omitted from the narrative of the Gold Rush (Stannard, 1992). Rather than presenting a story of the American dream where ample opportunity is promised for everyone, Ba’s story portrays the commonly accepted history as a selection of what people of privilege choose to highlight and what they choose to omit and leave out. 

Throughout Ba’s life, he was in a relentless pursuit of a wealthier life for himself and his family. He, along with many other Chinese men blinded by the deceptive American Dream, believed in the deceptive American dream. They viewed America as a land of opportunity and hope. However, Ba ends up as a failed prospector who depends on coal mining for a living. After he built up a family with Ma, his frustration with mining and his desire to chase gold are contrasted by Ma’s fear of his obsession and desire for her children to integrate into society through education. The two American myths, wealth and assimilation (Abramitzky & Boustan, 2022), frustrate the entire family while the other white characters oppress and hinder their aspirations. Before the parting of Ma, Ba was a man filled with ambition and hope, desiring wealth and freedom for his family. His initial fantasy reflects the masculine American dream. Ma's dreams of a tranquil life in her homeland across the ocean, on the other hand, do not conform to the bold, adventurous nature of the American Dream. The simple question that Ba asks Lucy “What makes a dog a dog?”, eventually looms over the core of the entire book as Lucy and Sam, caught between the parallel visions of fulfillment of their parents, transform the question into: “What makes home a home”. Ba’s failure as a prospector is also not resulted from his lack of education, but the law and denial of birthright. 

As the timeline moves to the point where Ba becomes a miner, the novel further devastates the alluring myth of the American dream by incorporating a depiction of ecological disaster. Pieces of land become wasted and lifeless after the miners. Nonetheless, Ba continues to chase his elusive dream of wealth fueled by imagination. He tells tales of massive creatures and a vibrant landscape that once thrived for Lucy and Sam. However, it was shown that even until his death, Ba was not lucky enough to live the life he desired. The reek of death only comes off stronger from the landscape as well as Ba’s corpse, to a point where Lucy feels extremely desolated and unhomely, completely in contrast to the Romanized and glorified Gold Rush period in American History. 

Finally, the myths of the frontier as well as Ba's myths are dismantled by his children. Lucy, in particular, can be seen to be skeptical about both the history fabricated by white Americans and Ba’s story. Lucy’s fear of believing Ba’s story also indirectly reveals the darker side of America is a land built upon genocide and colonization of Native Americans. She thinks “Because this land they live in is a land of missing things. A land stripped of its gold….. To move through this land and believe Ba’s tales is to see each hill as a burial mound with its crown of bones.” She unravels her father's and America's myths, only to discover a crown of bones. Nonetheless, despite these fantasies, through his experiences and struggles, Ba is also able to make observations on the power hierarchy in West America. He noticed that it’s the people in control of the narrative that have the power to mold the story. Truth, then, is merely a collection of shared beliefs. He marks “Too often truth ain’t in what’s right, Lucy girl—sometimes it’s in who speaks it.” At the end of the novel, the deconstruction of the myth surrounding the American Dream comes to a wrap as Lucy, now in San Francisco, listens to joyous cheers that echoed through the city on the day the final railroad tie was pounded into place, securing the track to the ground with a golden spike. She saw “A picture is drawn for the history books, a picture that shows none of the people who look like her, who built it.” The scene laid bare the corruptive myths making about the American West; Signifying that the Gold Rush period was called to an end as the empowered painted a splendid image of the American Dream by erasing the sacrifices of those oppressed. 

Thus, the first sentence that inaugurates the novel can be understood in two ways: first, as a reminder that America is not the dreamland built upon freedom and equality, but a stolen territory from slaughtered native Americans and exploited workers; and second, in the context of Ba and his family, as a warning that characters like him, who held a false belief in the American Dream, remained alienated in the country – "This land is not your land."