Land of Milk and Honey

by C Pam Zhang

So much of what my generation had been promised disintegrated at our touch.

She’d slaved and sweated and kowtowed and overlooked and overworked and made it to Paris without pausing to do her math, assuming it would balance out one day, the years of sacrifice against the coming joys. I was no longer she. I had learned the rude calculus of loss.

more than family country lands home lovers career I mourned the loss of myself: me.