Land of Milk and Honey

by C Pam Zhang

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

Each morning of that first week I rose, smoked a contraband cigarette or four to quell my nerves, opened windows to air out the smell, and then, adrenalized by nicotine and fear, I worked to validate my continued existence.

In preparing for that dinner I cooked for Aida, for my employer, for imagined guests, for my pride, for the numbers ticking up in my bank account and down in the ledger of my debt, for the right to breathe clean air, feel the lick of sun, live in that country. But at twenty-nine I could no longer stomach my food: I didn’t cook for myself. Once I had. Once upon a time I’d left Los Angeles and been swallowed down the throat of a life in which my sole loyalty was to my tongue. My belly. Myself. My mother called me selfish and so selfish I became.

Like every cook, I blamed the smog. In truth, it was more than that. A universe within me had already been flickering out. By the time I set foot on that mountain I felt myself to be a void, a null space, a set of hands for hire. But I could still give a damn good dinner party.

All around me, as if the scales had fallen from my eyes, I saw color flushing the slopes, a color I’d never again hoped to see: that green that is the herald of flavor and pleasure, that says: look, says: wait, says: taste: the gates of the underworld unlatched for mints and sorrels and pine-dark needles in shade and the pale sun-swell of the honeysuckle that bells out the triumphant return, after long winter, of a daughter. It was a green made possible by a man who held in his sway horticulturalists and biologists and chicken geneticists and meteorologists who could control the weather itself, and I forgot those wan, distant orbs in the sky as I opened my mouth, I bayed. And then, at last, it was spring.

The fury in Aida’s voice was familiar. Nostalgic. 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. 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.

I settled into a lull of sky and sun, of existence almost without language, without the attendant agony of thought. No alerts, no news, no front-page eulogies to hummingbirds or swifts, no extinctions of nothing and no one I cared for.

I saw the moment the diners’ revulsion changed as raw meat does upon hitting the pan, as raw fish did once adopted by the famous and wealthy and white; I carry with me this image of how disgust becomes desire.

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.

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. I drank. The zeroes hit cool and plush at the back of my throat.

Under a man’s hands—crush of his body—exigent breath—I remembered how to perform. Yes when I meant no. Lust or satisfaction or pleasure. Gratitude, as required, knowing that, naked beneath a man’s disappointment, there lay this possibility of violence, as pungent and close-fitting as skin. One pound of flesh, paid freely, was preferable to a bloodier extraction. My past roles of sex kitten and hard bitch, blushing penitent, coy exotic, tease: I’d learned, long before this day, that I could play anything to avoid the role of victim. My employer nodded across the table when he saw that I grasped his meaning. The woman I was to become was not a whole person at all. She was a hollow, a receptacle, a mirror held at a flattering angle. We understood each other: he, too, was not quite whole.

I started drinking. What else to do with my pointless mouth.

Naturally, my employer identified the price a person might pay to never again suffer loss. Even as they ate their eighth or eleventh courses, diners were reminded to safeguard their next meal. Their next. My employer understood, instinctively, the art of pairing oppositional flavors.

I had the job I’d once wanted, but she who stalked the halls had no taste for such ambitions. I was another ghost evoked through fragrance and steam, but more than family country lands home lovers career I mourned the loss of myself: me.

Were they good? That’s beside the point. Once, I heard a journalist say she did not know what she thought until she wrote it; I didn’t know my own mind until I tasted. More than Italian than French than German that summer I learned a vocabulary of beaver fat and dulse, of dormice and powdered duck bone, of a tongue cupped to the tones of vanilla, acacia, green peppercorn. The cat yowled unless permitted to investigate each bowl. I’m not so crazy as to say I cooked for a cat—but in the wake of particularly disastrous failure, it was often his gaze, appraising, that spurred me back to the stove: the idea that I might, this time, finally stir his appetite.

The nights got colder. The wind died down. The smog returned, thicker than before, puddling at the base of the mountain like bean soup. She was right. My resolve fractured. When Aida knocked again, my body reached toward the simple heat in hers.

After Eun-Young, I learned that it is best not to dwell. Take only what is essential from the old life and move forward into the new. That is survival. I asked if this worked. I am wealthy. My daughter has grown into her potential. The island continues in a form, and I have built around me my own tribe, stronger than any other, with the qualities necessary to prevail under any conditions. I have you. I was oddly flattered until he said, Still, I wonder. Why is it that you are, on paper, perfectly adequate—yet I find you not nearly as appealing as my first wife?

Into my nape, gentle as a lamb, she said, To want to kill is to want to live.

Through lunch meat and cold rice, Oreos snuck out of school in a napkin, past pickles flaccid beside jars of jelly and peanut butter. All my puny harvest. I don’t know what I want until I taste it. Hours later I wake to the sound of my mother coming home from work. Her low voice. Her tired tread. Her face is dim, the kitchen too, but day breaks in our single window as she eats the breakfast I have made from what she made me, and her face: it dawns: a horizon I have never seen: I see: my mother knows pleasure. Hard-won, deep-buried, scraped from the dark of need, hers is a pleasure I find by seeking my own. I was raised to eat bitterness.

I give the easy answers: that it was a requirement for this job, for every job I’d wanted, that French cooking, not Chinese, spelled 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. But Aida, exacting, infuriating, points out the forty-five thousand Chinese restaurants in pre-smog America, and for the first time I pause in the space between my past and my future.

French food seemed like the only way. For the first time, I admit, I didn’t, exactly, choose.

Fear was the whetstone that sharpened the instincts of those who first dared to hunt mammoth, or sail across seas. There are times I fear the scope of my daughter’s vision—but it is better to hold the gun.

He claimed to have evolved past fear. He lied. Behind the mask was a damp, scared boy. Fear of toxins, fear of carcinogens, fear of flood and smog and protest and entropy and all that could not be optimized, controlled, bought and held behind glass. Fear fueled a country so intent on perfection that they would give up the world.

I’d been so proud of negotiating a few thousand more for my bonus, so sure of my intelligence, my command. I’d forgotten that a scam relies on the desire of the scammed to believe what she wants to believe. The game had always been my employer’s to win.

How deep the grooves, how quiet the anger worn into this man who would forever measure himself against the expectations of those who found him lacking.

We all die. We have only the choice, if we are privileged, of whether death comes with a whimper or a bang; of what worlds we taste before we go. I thought she chose the bang. 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 was asleep before I could share the secret I once learned of a pomegranate orchard’s prodigious growth: Old trees, dying, may burst after fruitless years into sudden blossom, a final exuberance of flower and sugar. Toward sun. At the last, even trees ache in their sap for pleasure.