55 pages • 1 hour read
Ruthanne Lum McCunnThousand Pieces of Gold
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Burden and Pain of Family Betrayal
Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and analyzes the source text’s treatment of sexual enslavement, enslavement, sexual assault, death by suicide, anti-Asian racism, gun violence, and lynching. This section also quotes the text’s use of outdated terminology to refer to Indigenous Americans.
Polly is extremely loyal to her family and struggles to view them in a negative light throughout the novel, though she carries the burden of her father’s betrayal her entire life. The weight of this betrayal is often in the subtext of the story instead of outwardly stated. Polly often follows thoughts about her love for her father with the reality of her worth in his eyes, as though these two concepts are enmeshed and unable to be separated.
In the novel, Polly relies on her family nickname, qianjin, and the promise of her family’s love to sustain her through some of her darkest moments. Before being forced to go to the United States, Polly frequently prioritizes her family’s well-being over her own. She unbinds her feet so she can work in the fields with her father, ensuring that her little brothers have food to eat. When the bandits come to their home, the only reason Chen finds her is because Polly snuck out of the manure pit in order to retrieve more food for her hungry siblings. However, her father doesn’t give her the same selfless loyalty, as is evident when he sells her to Chen:
Lalu stared at her father, willing him not to pick them up. He reached out, hesitated, then looked up at Lalu, his eyes pleading for understanding. She twisted her face away, a sob strangling in her throat. Behind her, she heard him snatch the bag and scoop up the spilled seed (34).
Nathoy requests a second bag of seed from Chen, claiming Polly is worth two bags instead of one. Polly doesn’t outwardly blame her father for selling her and often defends his decision, saying he had no choice. This could be related to her deep sense of filial loyalty, but this belief also protects her from the truth: that her father who always called her gold sold her for two bags of soybeans.
Making her parents proud sustains Polly for her journey to America: “Hugging herself inwardly, she had pictured her parents’ and brothers’ faces when she gave her father the gold that would make him the richest man in the village. The pride they would have in her, their qianjin” (61). She spends most of her early years in Warrens trying to save up money to free herself from Hong King and return to save her family. However, Jim’s harsh words before his death end her dream of saving her family: “When we were on the trail, I heard you call in your sleep for your father, and I’ve seen your face when you sneak out to hold Mrs. Saux’s baby. […] Your family means everything to you. But you’re dead to them” (88). As a result, when Jim dies, Polly mourns him and Lalu, implying that she is mourning the hope she had to be reunited with her family and her old life.
Notably, while Polly is extremely maternal, she never wants to have children. Her worries about harming children and Charlie’s inability to protect a hypothetical nuclear family reflects the way her parents harmed her. Despite her lack of biological children, Polly lives a rich life with her found and chosen family in Warrens and in Salmon Canyon, proving that she was ultimately able to persevere despite the pain her family caused her and find happiness.
Gender Expectations and the Quest for Agency
Throughout the novel, Polly flouts societal gender expectations to maintain—or claim—her independence and agency. When she believes her parents are going to sell her, she insists on having her feet unbound so she can work in the fields, even though this is not socially acceptable for women to do in her village. Her decision makes her an embarrassment to her family and the village: “Now you’re neither snake nor dragon. You are a woman, yet you work like a man, a laborer. Who will marry you” (22). However, she genuinely enjoys working in the fields, and it provides her with a skill that she can use even when she moves to the United States. When Charlie is too ill to finish building the trench the law requires for their mining claim at Polly’s Place, Polly digs it herself: “Each day I build a fire in the hole and warm the top of the ground. Then I dig. When I reach frozen earth again, I stop and build a new fire” (158). By building this trench, Polly and Charlie can file their mining claim, which will protect anyone from taking the ranch away from Polly due to her being Chinese. Additionally, when Charlie dies, Polly exerts her independence through farming to honor her beloved husband: “I plow. I dig the garden. I can bury my man” (184). While she completes a short stint living in Warrens following Charlie’s death, she ultimately returns to Polly’s Place so she can be at the place she feels closest to Charlie—and the most independent.
While Polly excels in farming, she is also extremely protective and maternal. While she thrives in these domestic and stereotypically female skills, she resists taking on the identity of wife or mother because she feels it will take away her agency. She resists marrying because she feels like it will entrap her: “Her mother had said a woman belongs to the father of her sons. If she married, wouldn’t she be exchanging one master for another” (95). Charlie initially respects this decision and finds ways to cultivate Polly’s independence, such as building a boarding house for her to run. However, Polly must eventually combat the fact that she is socially accepted to be a mother. When Charlie pushes her on the subject, she explains that she won’t have children, not because she cannot, like he assumes, but because she doesn’t want to. It appears that being responsible for her children’s happiness is too much for Polly:
The Gold Mountains teemed with men and women on the move, chasing dreams from coast to coast, city to city, mining camp to mining camp. Her dream, the end of the tightrope, was here. But she could not answer for the dreams of the children she and Charlie might have (147).
When Charlie finally convinces her to marry him, she only agrees when he accepts that they will not have children together, implying that for Polly, the role of wife allows for more independence than the role of mother.
Polly remains fiercely independent until the end of her life and is ultimately remembered as the “foremost pioneer on the rugged Salmon River” (206), proving that she is ultimately successful in transcending gender stereotypes and cementing her place in the male-dominated pioneering history.
The Shortcomings of the American Dream
For the majority of the novel, Polly struggles to find where she belongs. She describes herself as a “monkey walk[ing] carefully back and forth between the two sides. At each end, he stop a little bit, but he cannot stay, and so he walk again until he so tired, he fall” (119), and she feels constantly pulled between the white community and the Chinese immigrant community in Warrens. Much of Polly’s drive is intertwined with the optimistic American Dream. However, her reality reflects the racist and sexist US that connects her to other immigrants instead of the white population who boasts about America’s upward mobility.
Initially, Polly is told that America is full of gold and will be a place where she can succeed, as long as she lies and gets into the country. When she succeeds at fooling the customs officer, she is quickly shown that her reality will be very different than the one she was promised. However, even when she spends many years enslaved by Hong King, Polly never gives up hope on the promise of the American Dream. She is confused at first when Charlie tells her she cannot buy land because “you say America have land for everyone. That people from all over the world come for the land. Rich. Poor. All the same. Anyone can have land. You said” (109). Charlie explains that because Polly is Chinese, she is unable to buy land, proving that the American Dream is not accessible to everyone.
While the American Dream is inaccessible to Polly, she still strives to find a place where she belongs. Part of the reason she resists marrying Charlie is because she “know[s] what people call men with Indian wives. Squaw men. They do not live in town and not with the Indians. They belong nowhere. Their children too. Strangers to their father’s people and their mother’s” (137) and doesn’t want her husband to feel the same way she feels in the world. However, Polly ultimately does find a sense of belonging through real estate, first at her boarding house and then at Polly’s Creek in Salmon Canyon. When she finally decides to mourn Charlie and figure out her next steps, she has clarity on where she belongs: “All at once, a wave of homesickness engulfed Polly, sweeping away doubts and fears in a crest of longing. She knew where she belonged” (195), and she returns to Salmon Canyon.
Polly’s tense battle with the American Dream continues after her death. She dies in a community hospital and is buried in the hospital cemetery with other people the hospital couldn’t find homes for, despite vehemently declaring she wanted to be buried at home. It was only when later generations realized how much Polly overcame and survived that her body was able to be exhumed and relocated to Salmon Creek, where she always felt she belonged.
