BookBrowse Reviews Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

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A surprisingly optimistic vision of an apocalyptic future that centers on the unpredictable nature of pleasure.

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In Land of Milk and Honey, C Pam Zhang's second novel, Earth is covered by a vast gray smog. Many of the planet's plants and animals, and therefore foodstuffs, are disappearing: "No more nuts and seeds in the pantry, and no basil, not even the powdered kind." The unnamed narrator, a 29-year-old American professional chef who finds herself stuck in England after the United States' borders are abruptly closed, attempts to cope with these losses by taking a job for a wealthy employer who provides her with an extremely well-stocked pantry and the chance to experience sunlight again from the altitude of an isolated Italian mountain. Her role, murky at first, is at least partly to create lavish dishes to woo potential investors for research that seems broadly concerned with preserving and maintaining natural resources, including flora and fauna believed to be extinct elsewhere.

Despite her place in this elite community — or colony, as it might better be described — the main character is literally unable to enjoy the fruits of her labor; soon after her arrival she attempts to eat but vomits up the first fresh strawberries she has tasted in years. She eventually overcomes her aversion to the many rare foods to which she now has access, at first vicariously through her employer's 20-year-old daughter Aida, whom the narrator finds herself increasingly drawn to and who has an appetite seemingly boundless enough for them both. As the two become allies in a place of staggering privilege that Aida believes has value and that the narrator is gradually seduced by, the narrator begins to uncover Aida's father's true intentions in hiring her. This comes along with the odd revelation that it is not exactly a coincidence that the young women, who have been thrown together on a remote mountaintop in Italy seemingly at random, have two Korean parents between them — Aida's mother, Eun-Young, who left her Italian father, and the narrator's Korean American father, a "wife-beating shithead" who left her Chinese mother. Additionally, the narrator comes to understand that her employer's plans for the research community are further-reaching than they first appeared, and that she may have a significant part to play in them.

Land of Milk and Honey bears similarities to another strange and beautiful novel about an apocalyptic scenario: Ling Ma's Severance, which follows office worker Candace Chen from a contemporary New York of everyday drudgery into a world overrun by a virus that effectively turns people into zombies. Each book features a relatively young Asian American female protagonist with no remaining parental figures who reacts to drastic change through adherence to an increasingly irrelevant professional life, and each unrolls in a leisurely tone, seamlessly integrating richly rendered flashbacks into a sinister, suspenseful present in a way that somehow makes you forget that this present poses any urgency, though it obviously does. Both books use the particular positioning of Asian women in groups of people not like them — for example, their potential vulnerability to perceptions that they will be compliant — to explore larger truths about the roles of race and gender in our current atmosphere of global capitalism that is ill-equipped to prevent famine and pandemics from running amok.

Land of Milk and Honey is much more direct in its social commentary, though, and despite a tragic storyline, it is fiercely optimistic in what it has to say about the nature and future of humanity. Like Zhang's debut How Much of These Hills Is Gold, which focuses on two children of Chinese heritage in the historic American West, this novel takes a wide swing past culturally entrenched assumptions to connect with a less visible target.

In its preoccupation with food and other joys of life, Land of Milk and Honey suggests that pleasure is just as likely to be a transformative guide as a numbing tool of coercion, and that it is definitely not a comprehensible currency that abides by simple rules of supply and demand. Many popular depictions of apocalyptic or dystopian futures have little to say about women's pleasure specifically — if anything, they tend to focus on the threat of sexual assault for women, presumed to be heightened in times of scarcity. These narratives are not necessarily unrealistic (and Zhang's novel certainly acknowledges the presence of male power that reinforces itself through violence) but they are often unexamined, and feed a larger narrative that arguably serves as a threat in itself: the idea that the vulnerable have more to fear from radical change than the status quo that supposedly protects them, that the physical autonomy of people of marginalized genders is a luxury dependent on peaceful times of plenty and a higher authority.

"What," asks Zhang's narrator, "is fairness in a world that fears there is never enough, in which one need always scrapes against another? I'm not smart enough to give that answer. I only believe that the tongue, dumb beast, is not selfish in its instinctive cant toward pleasure." At one point, she gives in to her romantic attraction to another character, which is reciprocated in a way that somehow feels both organic and unexpected. At another, she finds more inspiration and excitement in a vendor's artful resurrection of the Chinese street food jian bing (see Beyond the Book) than in any of the elaborate French dishes she is instructed to create by her employer: "Here I am, a hungry ghost in Milan, stomach churning with bing yet not quite full; here I am with a new hunger spiking like vinegar through the old." These sharply-written, revelatory moments, appearing as they do between scenes of excess and waste, serve as a reminder that the treasures of the world are unquantifiable and unpredictable, that none of us really know what will bring us joy, what will save us — or humanity. And that, sometimes, what lies on the other side of this lack of knowledge is very, very good.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in October 2023, and has been updated for the October 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.