Department of English

This paper examines the role of the landscape of the American West, both literal and literary, in relocating a mythical Chinese American past in two recent novels, How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang and The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin. Though the two novels differ from each other radically in many ways, their uses and subversions of the conventions and expectations of the Western genre create an expansive literary space of discovery and invention. In rejecting colonial narratives of places and their histories, these historical fictions forge new pathways for Asian American identity formation and posit a theory of embodied geographical belonging that resists the dehumanization of normative modes of identity definition. Through a comparative analysis of Zhang’s and Lin’s works within the frameworks of Asian American and Western genre literary criticism, this project uncovers the interdependency of language, history, and identity, and their embodiment within the unnarratable relation between landscape and its inhabitants.