Thousand Pieces of Gold

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.

Polly is the novel’s protagonist and is originally from Northern China. The only daughter of her parents, she is known in her home village as being strong-willed and hardworking, even when it goes against social norms. Following her father’s failed winter harvest, she realizes her parents are considering selling her, and she insists on having her feet unbound so she can work in the fields to help her father. As a result, she walks with a limp for the rest of her life and is treated as a pariah with no marriage prospects in her village. She is ultimately sold by her father, an event that begins Polly’s experiences with The Burden and Pain of Family Betrayal. She becomes an enslaved person in America, working in Hong King’s saloon in Warrens, Idaho. She never forgets her family, and her father’s nickname for her, qianjin, sustains her in her darkest moments in America. When she gets to Warrens, she is renamed Polly.

Polly craves independence more than anything, primarily because, for so much of her early adulthood, she was stripped of any agency and identity.