Land of Milk and Honey

by C Pam Zhang

I’d once possessed that strain of fury, as had my fellow cooks, my friends, my produce guy, a virulent rage against our tainted inheritance of this stupid, smog-choked planet. But it couldn’t last. We’d been inoculated from rage by other, more immediate concerns. For example: how to pay rent, how to stay alive.

The bad news, the debts, the visa applications, the flesh of your arm humping white between a nurse’s fingers as she stuck you with a paltry twelve months’ protection against whatever new strain of disease, as if bankruptcy or homelessness or a weariness at aping the motions of life weren’t more likely to kill you first.

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

The life we’d been promised was a scam, the world a scam, the whole goddamn play a scam and there seemed nothing to do but burn it down as rioters did in Paris, New York, Nairobi—and then creep back through the embers because what other choice did we have? What other planet? Of course I’d ended up in the middle of another scam.

You believe in a country that does not exist as you imagine it, in a code of morality as fanciful as any creation myth. What do you call that if not blind faith?