Thousand Pieces of Gold is a 1981 historical novel by Ruthanne Lum McCunn and based on the life of Polly Bemis, a 19th-century Chinese immigrant woman in the American Old West.

But I immediately knew that I wanted to find out more about her and write an entire book about her because she brought out so many things about American history that we don't actually know about, generally, in this country.

But to survive with your capacity for compassion for other people intact and not to turn hard and bitter yourself is, to me, extraordinary.

And that was what drew me to her and to want to find out more about her.McCunn has said that Polly Bemis reminded her of her own great-grandmother who was also born in northern China and sold into slavery.

After Thousand Pieces of Gold was published, she learned that her father, who had died when she was a girl, had met Bemis when he was a teenager working summer jobs as a fire watcher in Idaho.