Land of Milk and Honey
Written by C Pam Zhang
September 26, 2023
191 pages
ISBN 9780593538241
Land of Milk and Honey is the second novel written by C Pam Zhang. She was born in Beijing and came to the United States when she was four years old. She attended Brown University and studied at Cambridge University. Her many accolades include the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature. The prelude of this book introduces the main character, now an old chef reminiscing of that year in the land of milk and honey, an unsettling place with strict rules.
The story opens with the then 29-year-old chef in an apocalyptic world where climate change has destroyed biodiversity and enveloped the skies in smog. Life is bleak and the future even bleaker and has left her empty, wanting, waiting, hungry. No strawberries, no sweet mangoes, not even one leaf of crisp lettuce to taste. And worse, not even pesto to cook with. Her choice of profession was dismissed as worthless unskilled labor by her Chinese-born mother, which made the chef feel that she was never good enough. In the aftermath of her mother’s death and the subsequent loss of her mother’s house from a fire, the chef’s only inheritance was debt and her dead mother’s cat. She decides to leave the life she knew by quitting her seafood restaurant job and applies for a private chef position far up in the mountains between the French and Italian borders. And so begins her year as a private chef up in the mountains, leaving the smog below and into a place where the juiciest richest ingredients abound in the land of milk and honey.
Here in the mountains, the chef meets her employer and his daughter Aida, whose mission is to save a few species of fruits, vegetables, animals, and certain chosen essential people from extinction and leave the smog-filled pit called earth to start a new life in utopia. In an uneasy, disquieting way, the chef knows that she must trust her instincts and stay true to herself.
Land of Milk and Honey is a beautifully written story destined to become a classic; it knits cultures, social status, rich vs. poor, abundance, and scarcity into a narrative that evokes the senses. There is a sensuality to Zhang’s prose where her words paint and elicit images, memories, tastes, smells, pleasures, love, and the “will to live.” This novel took me to the land of milk and honey where the narrator discovers who she is and grows into the woman she became.
The author’s age (Zhang is in her early thirties) surprised me because she has a depth of perception and life experience far beyond her years. This is a story steeped in cultures and time, reminding us of the different lives we live – and yet, we are after all, similar in many ways.
Review by Sunghae Ress, editing assistance by Molly Higgins and Amanda Cheung.
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