Queer-Feminist Journeys as Critical Counter-Frame

Who owns the land?
What makes a home a home?
What makes a family a family?
What makes a man a man?
What makes a ghost a ghost?

These questions animate C. Pam Zhang’s novels How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020) and Land of Milk and Honey (2023), in which she offers a poetic and critical exploration of Chinese diasporic subjectivities. Following Hall (1996, 2021), diasporic identities can be understood as being in flux—a process of becoming, shaped by collective history, social norms, and power dynamics. Zhang’s fiction articulates a queer counternarrative that challenges dominant racist, classist, and heteronormative discourses surrounding constructions of ‘Chineseness’, ‘womanhood’, and ‘manhood’ in both nineteenth-century America and contemporary contexts across the United States and Western Europe. ‘Queer’ is applied here ‘to connote issues of gender and sexual nonconformity, and to suggest a change, a subversion, a twist of social and cultural norms’ (Bao 2025: 11).

Zhang’s narratives fundamentally disrupt the ‘white racial frame’, defined by Feagin (2013: xi) as a persistent structure of racial stereotypes, ideologies, and narratives that shapes how people make sense of, adapt to, and act within their everyday social worlds. Through the perspectives of gendered diasporic subjects (Hall 1996; Chou 2012), Zhang establishes new connections between the social worlds of the nineteenth-century American West and contemporary transatlantic dystopias, transcending space and time. Taking Zhang’s two works, this essay discusses self-representation versus interpellation (Althusser 1971), transgenerational trauma, aspirations, and the pursuit of sensual pleasures. It also depicts how Zhang connects questions about universal human rights in the context of human-made catastrophes with an analysis of individual responsibility within transnational capitalism.

In How Much of These Hills Is Gold, Zhang tells the story of a Chinese American family—father, mother, and two children—about a decade after the beginning of the gold rush. Following the stillbirth of her third child and a violent robbery by white settlers, the mother leaves for good, unable to stay in severe poverty and face constant structural discrimination. The father dies soon after, from the cumulative toll of mining labour, malnutrition, drinking, and despair, leaving Sam and Lucy, aged nine and 10, respectively, to bury him and survive alone. The father’s fate reflects the broader experience of Chinese male prospectors and labourers of the era. With few historical records of Chinese women and children, Zhang employs critical fabulation—a conceptual approach developed by Saidiya Hartman (2019) to address history’s omissions and misrepresentations, particularly those concerning racialised women—to endow these marginalised figures with agency, emotions, and intellectual reflections, resisting their reduction to labouring bodies or victims of systemic racism.

In Land of Milk and Honey, the main protagonist—an Asian American female chef in her twenties with work experience in Paris, who remains nameless throughout the story—seeks refuge in an Italian mountain enclave after the onset of catastrophic global air pollution. As American borders close to those with immigrant backgrounds and limited economic means, she secures employment preparing luxury European cuisine for a billionaire. Her billionaire boss and his scientist daughter operate a secret lab to grow food and breed animals solely for themselves and a selection of ‘useful’ people they plan to transport via spaceship to a new, unpolluted planet—echoing a techno-capitalist version of Noah’s ark. This work also exemplifies climate fiction, interrogating how food security and fundamental human rights might be preserved for marginalised populations amid ecological and political collapse.

Creating Diasporic Belonging

The discovery of gold in California in 1848 precipitated a dramatic demographic shift, with the Chinese population in the region increasing from approximately 50 individuals to more than 25,000 by 1852 (Pan 1998: 261). This wave of migration and the subsequent roles—prospectors, miners, and labourers—occupied by Chinese immigrants within the broader context of settler colonialism constitute a critical area of inquiry in diaspora studies (see, for instance, Chang 2019; Day 2016; Tiongson 2019; Le 2019; Ngai 2021; Huang and Weaver-Hightower 2019; Saranillio 2013). Analysing Zhang’s first novel, Hunziker (2023) and Reis (2021) discussed different aspects of settler-colonialism—Hunziker the relationship between Chinese prospectors and Native Americans, and Reis the theme of extractivism (Shih 2022). Chinese prospectors and labourers in the predominantly white settler communities of the nineteenth-century American West were physically and symbolically denied belonging. Institutional exclusion was legally created by the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the Foreign Miner’s Tax (1850), and the Californian Alien Land Law (1913). Against this backdrop, Zhang sets the reassurance of belonging inside the family: ‘You get lost again, you remember you belong to this place as much as anybody, Ba said. Don’t be afraid of it. Ting wo?’ (Zhang 2020: 24).

When Ba, the father, says the last sentence in Mandarin, he emphasises their shared cultural space, although he only learned basic words in this language from his immigrant wife and from working as a ‘middleman’ for a white employer managing newly arrived Chinese labourers. Born in the United States to Chinese parents—whose bodies were found beside him when he was a baby in the coastal region of California—the father grew up in a Native American community without Chinese cultural heritage. The mother claims the Pacific Ocean, a non-national entity, on which she travelled by ship from China to California, as her chosen source of belonging. Her transpacific (Wu Fu 2018) perspective rejects reliance on landownership, citizenship, or externally imposed identities for the creation of belonging:

Ting le? Ma asked, holding her hands over Lucy’s ears. Silence for that first moment. Then the throb and the whoosh of Lucy’s own blood. It’s inside you. Where you come from. The sound of the ocean. (Zhang 2020: 33)

Every time the family moves into a new improvised home such as a chicken coop, the mother draws the Chinese character for ‘tiger’ into the earthen floor, marking it as their home and cultural space. Both parents try to create a ‘home-culture frame’ as a counter-frame (Feagin 2013: 163) to their racist environment. The father, fully aware of the overwhelming atmosphere of exclusion outside their home, repeatedly reminds the children that their family comes first (Zhang 2020: 190).

Belonging is also forged beyond the family structure. With the departure of her parents and her sibling, Sam, and subsequently the loss of family space to anchor a sense of home, Lucy turns towards the ‘urban’ sphere of a small settler town as an alternative site of belonging. She works in a restaurant kitchen, trying to create a ‘distinction’ (Bourdieu 1984 between herself and the Native Americans working alongside her. Her attempt to become ‘white’ and therefore ‘equal’ fails, because she is not accepted as an equal member of the predominantly white community, even when dressing up in the dresses of a rich white prospector’s daughter her age. Since she has no socially respected identity, she strategically repeatedly labels herself as ‘blank’ in this regard: ‘Orphan. Don’t know who my parents are. No one but me’ (Zhang 2020: 195).

Zhang creates the situation of the siblings, who must eventually grow up without parental protection from hardships and without family ties, to place them in social networks, but at the same time with space to independently create their own version of belonging, to become ‘themselves’.

Here, the first novel overlaps with the second, in which the protagonist lives independently in Paris, with only a cat as a ‘family member’ to take care of after her mother dies. This situation allows her to experiment with temporary sexual relationships, work options, and living arrangements. She does not have to consider her mother’s diasporic trauma of leaving everything behind for the good of the next generation and expecting her daughter to get a university degree, buy real estate, and join the American upper-middle class—achievements of ‘belonging’ as defined in the ‘white frame’. But when the environmental catastrophe hits Europe, and the protagonist is threatened with deportation, systemic racism disrupts her feeling of belonging to Paris.

Negotiating Gender Inside and Outside the Diasporic Family

The question of how gender norms are negotiated inside the family and how these negotiations are related to each social environment’s white frame is central in both of Zhang’s novels. In How Much of These Hills Is Gold, Sam, although born as a second daughter, takes on for the father the role of the son he had always wanted and the successor of his patriarchal family lineage. Sam quickly figures out the privileges that come with ‘becoming male’, such as being paid more for working in the mines, getting more attention from his father, and being allowed to play freely outside. Lucy, the older sibling, describes Sam’s relationship with and resemblance to their father:

The gun hangs heavy at Sam’s hip, lending Sam’s gait a swagger not unlike Ba’s. Ever since Ma died, Sam’s quit bonnets and long hair, quit dresses. Bareheaded, Sam dried out in the sun till Sam seemed like a piece of cured wood: in danger of catching at the merest spark … Where’s my girl? Ba said, looking around the shack at the end of the day. Sam hid quietly as Ba searched, playing a game that was theirs alone. Finally, Ba roared, Where’s my boy? Sam leapt up. Here I am. Ba tickled Sam till tears sprang to Sam’s eyes. Apart from that Sam quit crying. (Zhang 2020: 22)

The fact that the father addresses Sam by Sam’s self-chosen gender is enough for the child to feel affirmed with a respected social position. With Lucy, the father uses the Mandarin word for ‘daughter’ (女儿). He speaks to her about his assessment of his life’s legacy only in a post-mortem stream of consciousness. Zhang addresses here the inability of the father to express his inner thoughts and feelings while he is alive. The values he teaches his daughter are neither ‘female’ in the sense of patriarchal Confucianism nor white-settler norms, but they are necessary for survival, which can be seen as a ‘diasporic’ approach:

Lucy girl. Baobei. Nu er. I looked for a fortune and thought it slipped between my fingers, but it occurs to me I did make something of this land after all—I made you and Sam. You turned out alright, didn’t you? I taught you to be strong. I taught you to be hard. I taught you to survive. To look at you now, taking care of some, trying to bury my body proper—I don’t regret that teaching. I got no need to apologize. I only wish I taught you more. You will have to make do with bits, as you have all your life. You are a smart girl. Just remember: your family comes first. Ting wo. (Zhang 2020: 190)

Post-mortem, the father acknowledges both daughters as his successors, defying the patriarchal norms of both China and the United States, which recognise only sons. Zhang portrays him as a diasporic figure excluded from both white and Chinese-speaking working-class communities, forming his own identity and norms in response (Hall 1996: 1–17). What might be seen as ‘diasporic normalcy’—social worlds comprising dense networks of people with diverse self-representations—in contemporary urban contexts, amounted to profound isolation for him. After his wife’s departure, he lacked any adult connection to affirm his subjectivity, which might have led to his self-destructive behaviour such as drinking.

The racially ambiguous father figure and billionaire in Zhang’s second novel goes through the same experience of being left behind by his East Asian wife. When Zhang has him say ‘la famiglia prima e ultima’ (‘family, first and last’) when he is emotional, drunk, and alone with the protagonist after dining with transnational elites, Zhang draws a parallel with the loneliness of the father figure in her first novel, showing that wealth without reaffirmation of one’s worth as an individual is not enough to break out of mental isolation (Zhang 2023: 104). The paternal figures in both novels, though positioning themselves as ‘the stronghold of the family’, remain marked by unresolved masculine fragility and dependence on their female counterparts, displacing their self-perceived failures of patriarchal authority into acts of violence against women.

Becoming Queer Diasporic Subjects

Historical records of queer Asian Americans date back to the late nineteenth century (Sueyoshi 2016; Sueyoshi et al. n.d.), but the documentation of their life is very limited. Zhang’s critical fabulation contributes to the representation of this specific social group in history and public discourse. The negotiation of female masculinity—a phenomenon that continues today in the Sinosphere (Tang and Tang 2021; Hu 2017)—finds literary expression in Zhang’s debut novel, in which Sam adopts a male identity despite being defined female at birth, performing masculinity through quotidian practices, including the improvisation of male ‘genitals’:

Lucy fans Sam’s hair out. Chopped short three and a half years back, it now reaches just under Sam’s ears … The ways Sam hid herself seemed innocent. Childish. Hair and dirt and war paint. Ba’s old clothes and Ba’s borrowed swagger. But even when Sam resisted Ma’s manners, insisted on working and riding out of town with Ba, Lucy figured those for the old games of dress-up. Never this far. Never this carrot, this trying to push and change something deep inside. It’s a clever job. Loose fabric in the underdrawers, sewn to form a hidden pocket. Well-done for a girl who refused girls’ chores. (Zhang 2020: 14)

When the children transport their late father’s corpse on horseback for days through the wilderness to find a burial ground for him, his genitals fall off, looking to Lucy like a salted plum (Zhang 2020: 30). He is literarily emasculated through his social circumstances. While the father’s ‘manhood’ is depicted as a dried plum, Sam, as the next generation, improvises his own ‘manhood’ with fresh vegetables and other objects he finds in nature. Given their social environment, Sam claims white male identities for himself, which he admires, even if they are not meant for him in the white settler community (Martel 2017): ‘When I’m a cowboy, Sam says. When I’m an adventurer. More recently: When I’m a famous outlaw’ (Zhang 2020: 7).

When becoming a young adult, Sam successfully performs and lives as a man. Performing masculinity serves partly as a means of protection against sexual harassment and related dangers in a heteronormative social environment. As parentless children, the two siblings’ safety is constantly under threat during their journey through the landscape, and Sam’s experience of being raped by a ‘mountain man’ who offered the children shelter persuades Sam that he could avoid being the target of sexual harassment as a male. Sam’s performance of masculinity also serves as a form of self-empowering queer expression, albeit limited by structural barriers. For example, Sam revels in briefly flirting with a rich, young white woman inside the privacy of a building, but due to racism and classism, which forbade a racialised, lower-status person like Sam having a relationship with a white woman, they could not lead a romantic relationship in public, even if it were heteronormative.

In How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020), Zhang explores the structurally limited survival strategies available to Chinese and Chinese American women during the gold rush: domestic labour, restaurant work, or marriage. Upon arriving in a harbour town, Lucy and Sam plan their overseas passage to China. However, when Sam is seized by men to repay his debts, Lucy chooses to stay behind and work them off as a hostess and sex worker. This role requires her to don a ‘Chinese princess’ costume, performing for male clientele, including Chinese immigrants. Here, Zhang also tells the collective story of the more than 10,000 Chinese women who were brought to the United States mostly under false promises to work in brothels in the later decades of the nineteenth century (Lee 1999: 88), of whom 900 stayed in San Francisco—the city that is probably Zhang’s ‘harbour town’. In 1870 the Page Act was issued, which prohibited Chinese, Japanese, and Mongolian women from entering the United States ‘to engage in immoral or licentious activities’ (Lee 1999: 89), and female immigrants from these countries were criminalised in general. Lucy resists objectification in the brothel through reading and intellectual activity—partly thanks to the white female brothel keeper, who provides Lucy with books and pays her in cash—allowing her to ultimately reclaim her subjectivity once her debt is repaid.

In Land of Milk and Honey (2023), trapped by global restrictions, the protagonist is coerced into impersonating the billionaire’s Korean ex-wife, racialised as a passive and mute spectacle to support his performance of hegemonic white masculinity—one that conceals his racialised Romani background. Subjected to surveillance, bodily discipline, and different forms of violence from her boss, the protagonist becomes a ghost version of herself. Her objectification begins to unravel through her relationship with Aida, the billionaire’s ‘half-Asian’ daughter. The sensuality in their encounters—especially taste and smell—restores her subjectivity. Compared with the figure of Sam in Zhang’s first novel, here the protagonist can literarily afford to be queer in her regular social space and in a romantic sexual relationship. Through the protagonist’s outbursts of food-related language for describing her sexual pleasure experienced with Aida, Zhang creates a humorous counter-frame, underlaid by a queer-feminist psychoanalytical approach (de Lauretis 1988), to challenge tropes of ‘the exoticised racialized woman’, who is ‘consumed’ by men like a tasty snack:

Yes to oysters swollen through butter. Yes to thighs cooled on glass, my hand a hot knife between. Yes to prosciutto, its salt slick; to avocados bursting, ripe. Our teeth clanged. I tasted blood and chocolate. Yes, to the fatthicksweet of it, to cream, to froth that rises, to the crunched lace of the ear and the tender behind the knee, to that joint at the legs where she softened, dimpled, begged me to bite. (Zhang 2023: 117)

While renewed desire for human connection and food helps the protagonist reclaim agency, she does not rely on Aida for self-definition; when Aida ultimately sides with her father’s project, the protagonist chooses autonomy over attachment. Though offered a seat on the spaceship as partial compensation, she gives it to another worker, affirming a survival strategy independent of the billionaire’s infrastructure. Later in the story, after the end of the environmental crisis, she accidentally becomes the single mother of a daughter, and the transgenerational circle continues, outside the patriarchal sphere of rigid social roles in their small family.

Overcoming Intersectional Ghostliness

A comparative reading of Zhang’s two novels through a queer-feminist lens reveals the multiple struggles of diasporic protagonists who are impacted by the white racial frame of their social contexts, as well as the trauma and expectations passed down from their parents. Most importantly, Zhang’s narratives highlight the broad possibilities of individuals exerting agency to resist externally ascribed social roles within racial and gender hierarchies, while grappling with settler-colonial histories, shifting definitions of family, constructions of masculinity, and the pursuit of authentic self-expression. Her protagonists evolve on their journeys, from being ‘ghosts’ haunted by external and internalised oppression to reclaiming their humanity. Zhang’s storytelling unfolds through a queer and poetic deconstruction of concepts such as race, nation, gender, and ownership, while simultaneously envisioning a more just transnational future.

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