Land of Milk and Honey

“I fled to that country because I would have gone anywhere, done anything, for one last taste of green sharp enough to pierce the caul of my life.”

The narrator’s main motivation to work on the mountain is her sense of taste; here, the color green represents the flourishing crops that no longer grow in the smog. To taste these foods, she ends up in the extreme situation of impersonating her employer’s wife, whom he killed.

“For years I’d fed, survived, swallowed my portions of gray—but had I hungered for pleasure?”

Here, the narrator distinguishes between gray, a symbol of grim but efficient survival, and the enjoyment that gray food doesn’t provide. Before coming to the mountain, she had been in survival mode after the gray smog blotted out the sun, living without access to many pleasurable things because of her socioeconomic class.

“As if he’d stabbed randomly at a French cookbook written for American housewives: Impress your friends and make yourself the envy of your enemies!”

This is an allusion to renowned TV chef Julia Child’s famous cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It, combined with her television show, The French Chef, aimed to teach Americans how to create French cuisine without the gatekeeping and pomposity of traditional mid-20th-century culinary education.

“The ingredients were all Vegas, the presentation of the bird in its smooth gray sac austere, even foreboding, a dish I imagined serving to prima ballerinas if ballerinas could eat.”

Here, the narrator describes a chicken served inside a pig’s bladder, a dish that straddles the line between Eating for Pleasure or Survival. She uses the term “Vegas” to indicate that the dish is extravagant and over-the-top, like that city; the excesses of this dish purport to make it transcendent, much like the image the narrator has of serving this rarified food to ballerinas, whose outward appearance is usually the idealized female form. The narrator thinks about ballerinas because Aida used to be an ostensibly ascetic dancer but now, as a scientist, can indulge her hearty appetite.

“Anyone who has fed the rich knows that, past a certain price, it is not a matter of taste, nor hunger.”

The narrator believes that the rich diners enjoy eating woolly mammoth because it is immeasurably expensive, not because it looks appetizing or tastes good. She has to serve people who care about rarity, not her skill with flavors. This develops the theme of The Divide Between the Rich and the Poor.

“The mechanisms of survival are pitiless. There are times to eat when you have no hunger and drink when you have no thirst. Life, as they say, must go on, and go on, and go on, even when you cannot see the sense in it.”

When the narrator agrees to impersonate her employer’s wife, she calls her performance “pitiless”—she must act the role regardless of how she feels inside. Zhang repeats the phrase “and go on” to emphasize how life keeps moving in the face of confusion and doubt. Time, an important symbol in the novel, is here shown to be relentless, unforgiving, and inappropriate.

“The woman I was to become was not a whole person at all. She was hollow, a receptacle, a mirror held at a flattering angle. We understood each other; he, too, was not quite whole.”

The narrator pretends to be Eun-Young—a cipher who flatters the narrator’s employer. Unbeknownst to her, the impersonation is meant to prove to the residents of the mountain that he did not murder his wife. The narrator believes that there is nothing behind the narrator’s mask of authority: He is not a “whole person” but another cipher, one who does not have an identity to hide.

“I tasted blood and chocolate. Yes to the fatthicksweet of it, to cream, to froth that rises, to the crunched lace of the ear and tender behind the knee, to that join at the legs where she softened, dimpled, begged me to bite. Three years, can you imagine, gray days and gray nights, no lovers no family no feasts no flights no fruit no meat and suddenly this largesse of freckles down her torso, this churning, spilling free.”

Here, the narrator compares the pleasures of food with the pleasures of sex. Zhang takes out spaces between words to visually combine flavors and textures, as if to illustrate tasting something that is “fat, sweet, and thick” all at once. Zhang also takes out commas between items in the list of what the narrator had been missing to show how her deprivation stacked up relentlessly.

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself, said Aida, plunging hands into the birth canal.”

This is an allusion to Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Like Clarissa Dalloway, Aida is an upper-class woman who is taking control of a situation usually handled by servants or lower-ranking people. However, here, Aida isn’t organizing part of a party but assisting in a tiger’s birth. The image of a woman taking power in the workplace, as Aida does here, references the feminism of Woolf’s writing.

“Imagine a story whose moral is mute desire.”

After eating the pomegranates offered by Aida, the narrator rereads the myth of Persephone—a goddess from Greek mythology who is kidnapped by Hades and forced to live in the underworld for six months each year when she is tempted into eating six pomegranate seeds. The narrator believes that the mythic figure, like her, is guided by desire and regards it as moral.

“While their constituents ate gray bread, members of parliament continued to accept fat bribes and fatter deliveries of Parmigiano, lamb’s ears, truffles, as they deliberated policy that would determine the country’s future. The secrecy Aida shared with her father was necessary—and, to them, pleasurable.”

In this passage, the color gray symbolizes the lives of lower-class people who don’t have access to good food. Only the rich and powerful politicians are given expensive and rare dishes by Aida and her father, and hiding their surfeit of food brings them pleasure. By emphasizing The Divide Between the Rich and the Poor in this way, the novel shows that the powerful are hypocrites.

“________ ______ ___ _______ ________ ________. My mother will fast for the next three days to cleanse herself.”

Throughout the novel, Zhang uses blanks to indicate a language that the narrator doesn’t understand, including Italian and Korean. Here, the narrator repeats a few Korean words that she heard while watching K-dramas, as well as gibberish; Aida translates these words into an apology, hoping to smooth things over with Kandinsky after he finds a hair in his food.

“For the first time we were aware that what had knit us in the summer could, with the introduction of other allegiances, fray. Break. We never spoke of it.”

When Aida’s father assaults the narrator to please Kandinsky, Aida sides with him, not the narrator. Zhang uses the metaphor of knitting to describe their changing relationship. She compares the rift in their relationship (Aida not interfering in violence against the narrator) to the fraying of knitted material.

“In the fire I saw the face of my mother shrunken to a dead black mask. I lifted my hand to hers.”

During an autumn harvest festival, Aida and her father release chimps to be hunted by Aida and the major donors and then roast them over a fire. The narrator, not knowing what they were hunting and seeing the human-like forms of the prey, mistakes a burnt chimp face for that of her mother, who died in an apartment fire. The narrator draws a moral line at eating chimps and doesn’t partake, seeing how genetically close they are to humans.

“I wept; I would have preferred an affair to a snack.”

When Aida becomes busy with preparations to colonize Mars, she eats something other than the narrator’s cooking. The narrator, finding food wrappers in Aida’s coat, is jealous of this. To the narrator, food is love, and Aida is rejecting her love by rejecting her food.

“Smoothness lodged in my throat, thick as memory.”

Here, the narrator is transported in time by eating hazelnut butter. The texture causes her to recall how her mother ate peanut butter with her bing and realize that her mother did enjoy some simple pleasures and didn’t simply live to work.

“I refused to be stuck. In Pasaje, California. In the smallness of my mother’s life. In a fixed notion of my cooking, my abilities, my worth as ascribed to my Chineseness my Asianness my smallness my womanness my perpetual foreignness—myself. French cuisine is respected everywhere.”

The narrator’s choice to study French cooking was a way to earn respect and access that her mother didn’t have. By separating the places that feel like traps to the narrator with periods, Zhang uses punctuation to demonstrate the feeling of being stuck. In contrast, Zhang removes all punctuation between the intersections of oppression that the narrator faces: Prejudices based on her ethnicity, size, and gender all run together.

“I had lied when I said I could not see her vision. How could I not see it, alive in the eyes of her. Green above a filthy world she’d plant pomegranates and date palms, macadamias and arabicas lush and dark with seed. Olives would shimmer gray to the horizon.”

Here, the symbolisms of the colors green and gray are combined—both are part of an ideal garden. In other words, this is a dream of biodiversity. Aida’s eyes reveal this dream to the narrator, showing Aida’s depth of character in contrast to the fish-eyed blankness of her father.

“I only believe that the tongue, dumb beast, is not selfish in its instinctive cant towards pleasure. The question that follows me through the seasons of my life is what comes after hunger is sated; whether that pleasure is guarded, or shared.”

The narrator struggles with prioritizing pleasure because her mother argued that it was selfish. Over time, she decides that hoarding pleasure—not sharing it—is also selfish. Her goal with cooking is to not only please her own tongue but also please other people’s tongues—to create tasty dishes that everyone enjoys.

“We all die. Whether it comes after thirty years of hard labor or sixty at a desk, whether we calculate or plan, in the end we have only the choice of what touches the lips before we go: a lobster if you like it or cold pizza if you don’t, a sip of smoke, a drink, a job, a reckless passion, raw fish, the beguilement of mushrooms, cheese luscious beneath its crown of mold. What sustains in the end are doomed romances, and nicotine, and crappy peanut butter, damn the additives and cholesterol because life is finite and not all nourishment can be measured.”

Here, the narrator lists a variety of physical pleasures, including food, sex, drugs, and even work. She argues that we should choose to consume what we love—whether it be expensive foods like lobster or cheap foods like pizza. Our desire for pleasure deserves to be nourished, even by things that are not nutritious.

“I’m contractually obligated to keep my secret. If you expose me, I’ll be fired through no fault of my own. You get the spot. I get severance.”

The narrator convinces the meteorologist to reveal her secret identity by discussing the material conditions of her being fired versus quitting. Her need to get off the mountain, but not be financially ruined in the process, develops the theme of The Divide Between the Rich and the Poor. Here, she must trust the meteorologist not to simply tell her employer what she has asked him to do in a bid to curry favor; the employer’s insistence on scarcity and exclusivity is in part designed to pit his underlings against one another.

“More rarely did I allow myself to remember her love of torrone and terrine, her face screwed up in the ugly joy of dance, and thought—I saw her face everywhere, Aida but not like her, plastered up again and again till it because smooth and strange, a cipher without any meaning.”

After the spaceship explosion, the narrator hopes that Aida didn’t board the ship and looks for her everywhere. Aida, like her mother, becomes a cipher once she disappears. It is most likely that she died, becoming an idealized image of pleasure in the narrator’s memory.

“I was alive to see the story change, from one of humility and dazed gratitude to one of pride at the triumph of human good—a pride made impossible by its contrast to human evil.”

The narrator’s relationship with time changes as she ages. She becomes a witness to a major societal transformation as the rich stop aiming to colonize Mars and escape Earth and instead contribute to combatting the smog. This shift gives the novel an optimistic ending; humans overcome the atmospheric disaster, and the narrator rises in wealth and status until she can have a significant influence on the women who come after her.