C Pam Zhang wrote this piece as a short story and put it aside. It was only later that she decided to expand it into a novel. So, I am counting it as a short story. To me, it is perfect.

The story is set in the American West at the end of the Gold Rush. But, unlike the rugged cowboy heroes of classic Westerns, Zhang’s protagonists are two girls of Chinese descent, 12-year-old Lucy and her 10-year-old sister Sam. The story opens with the two girls standing over the corpse of their Ba, a failed gold prospector and a brute of a man, made all the harder by poverty and drink. Their Ma is long dead. Penniless and destitute, their mission is to survive in this inhospitable land and to find somewhere to call home.

Zhang’s landscape is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s frontierland: harsh, arid and violent. “Noon sucks them dry. Street stretched shimmering and dusty as snakeskin. End of the dry season, rain a distant memory. They kept quiet, saving spit. The clapboard buildings loomed gray now that heat’s flaked the paint away. People lounge in shadow like dragon lizards. Like lizards, only their eyes move.” By centring of the experience of two Asian American girls, Zhang broadens the quintessentially male territory of the classic Western, allowing her to explore gender, gender identity and race, and their intersection with poverty.

The epigraph in the full novel is This land is not your land, a play on the title of the famous Woodie Guthrie song. The antipathy felt in that slightly changed lyric sums up the story of migration for so many people.

The writer Daisy Johnson describes Zhang’s talent as ‘dazzling’. I cannot think of a better word. Each word shimmers; each sentence sings. If I ever reach the stage where I can write as well as C Pam Zhang, my work in this world will be done.

First published as a short story in The Missouri Review, July 2017. Available online here. Later published as the first chapter of the novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold, Riverhead Press/Virago, 2020