The Gold Mountain

In China, those who dream of America as a promised land call it the Gold Mountain. For the rest of us, there is the family of our birth and there is some Gold Mountain, a more noble world to which we really belong, one whose citizens will recognize us for who we really are. The richness of this ideal world is often proportional to the poverty of the real, as personal grandiosity is proportional to shame.

Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World pp. 162-163