Land of Milk and Honey

by C Pam Zhang

My life was wait, wait, wait.

We’d been inoculated from rage by other, more immediate concerns. For example: how to pay rent, how to stay alive. Aida, rich as she was, hadn’t been forced to choose between anger and dinner. For the first time in years, I tasted, through her, that feeling.

without pausing to do her math, assuming it would balance out one day, the years of sacrifice against the coming joys.

she did not know what she thought until she wrote it;

Fundamentally, ours was a disagreement about time. How much remained. What was most precious to preserve within its limits.

However straight the path may seem, however fixed the destination, there are ways and ways and ways.

success. Across the years it is hard to make out this version of myself so blinkered by ambition that she sprinted through thirty years without asking why.

I had only this new-old hunger, this ache in the gut,

Blood money, I said again. My money is more useful than your guilt, though you are welcome to offer it.

life is finite and not all nourishment can be measured.

There was no sound, no speed, no blow, and all these years later I still find it hard to name this as violence,

She was easy to mishear if you listened to words alone, to the clang of armor forged by need. But she had, too, this other language dispensed through food, encoded in observations of what fed me. I might have misunderstood had I not grown up versed in that vocabulary: my mother buying full-price Pop-Tarts for my first day of school, my mother leaving a bowl of cut fruit out after a fight.

Bitterly, and then gladly, I acceded to the new generation.

We obey our natures, in the end. There were times I forgot, and fought mine.

Honesty left my listeners bored, or queasy.

My daughter grew into her own tastes. From toddlerhood she’d push aside apples and fill her mouth with Whys.

I’d named my daughter after no one; she was meant to be unburdened.

me in my old woman’s skin that rendered me increasingly invisible: she looked at me. At me.

She knew how to ask, without apology, for what she was not offered.

Old trees, dying, may burst after fruitless years into sudden blossom, a final exuberance of flower and sugar. Toward sun.