And so I crossed into the land of milk and honey knowing nothing, not even the country's true name. It was the officer at the Italian border who first said, Terra di latte e miele?

It was three in the morning. I'd flown through the night and could not quite see where I'd landed, nor my interrogator's face. The hatred in his voice was so intimate that I wondered if I knew him.

No thanks, I don't want coffee, I said, latching to the one word I thought I understood. I understood nothing, my god.

I hadn't encountered that odd, archaic phrase before my arrival; I wasn't meant to. They hid the country's true name as they hid its true nature. After Italian immigration, it was the mountain's private security that held me for hours, taking my passport, my retina scans, the measurements of my face and waist and earlobes, my blood, my phone, my photo. This last made the guard pause for so long that I grew nervous. The picture I'd sent in my application was slightly blurred, taken from a distance, my features indistinct. As if, should I be discovered, I might plausibly deny being myself.

The guard touched her throat. --- -- ------ -, she said, and let me pass.

It was in the small hours of morning that I drove up the mountain in a discreet black car. The wind nipped, hard, and though the air up high was smogless, it was cheerless, too. Rocks scrawled gloomy warnings in the dark. Occasionally a compound would loom, then vanish, in a flash of high, cold wall that seemed intent on excluding me—an impression that proved correct, because never would I be invited into the homes and private lives of those investors. The piece of mountain I claim is heat and toil, soft flesh and the hard taste of salt.

What fields I passed were sere and dead. No sign of spring, for all my employer's grandiose goals. I'd pared my expectations down to dried herbs by the time I reached the mountain's peak.

* * *

The restaurant at the top appeared as a hulking box the same dark hue as the sky it rose against. No windows broke the monotony of those walls. A cliff behind dropped into abyss and the front lawn, while vast, was muddy. I found the lights off, no answer at the locked door. I stood shivering and perplexed as the sky lightened.

The door clicked open at last. I stepped through just as sun rose over the mountain.

Much later it would occur to me that he had timed this moment, my employer with his flair for the dramatic, a man who named his country with a prophet's arrogance. The light was stunning, transcendent, a white-hot bullet between the eyes. From behind my fingers I saw dark walls blush lavender, orange, pink. The restaurant was built of two-way glass, opaque from without and transparent from within, so that on my first morning I had the impression of no walls, no windows, no doors, just the suspension of my body in sky, sky, sky, sky, sky. I had traveled, it seemed, through those low, smoggy years to emerge in this vessel of light.

I would come to know the restaurant in its many moods. Blue by day, apricot at sunset, bruised by the advent of night or storm. The view never ceased to awe. All the rest of my time I'd experience headaches, mild vertigo, a kind of drunkenness on the light that gilded the dining rooms, and pooled in the bed in the suite labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY, and made a blaze of the chef's coats I found in the closet, along with a white silk dress, floor-length, some housekeeper's mistake.

The kitchen was the room most loved by light. Sun streamed down and made the white appliances one continuous pour of milk. I wanted to lick it; I settled for touch. I strummed the marble counters and turned dials on the twelve-range stove, and when I ran a hand over the backsplash I discovered under my fingers ivory suede, an insane material, impossible to keep clean, but so plush it held my imprint. As I stood at the window counting the Tiffany fish knives, I felt a euphoria such as the first European colonizers must have upon sighting new land. Mine, I thought, and it wasn't for a while that I realized the kitchen was empty of food.

Excerpted from Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang. Copyright © 2023 by C Pam Zhang. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.