Land of Milk and Honey

Zhang explores how differences in socioeconomic backgrounds affect interaction. The main characters fall into different social strata: Aida was raised with generational wealth, her father is nouveau riche (a self-made millionaire), and the narrator grew up in a poor, working-class family (though she becomes rich in the final chapter of the novel, long after she leaves the mountain). This means that during her time on the mountain, the narrator has less power and privilege than the other characters, and this impacts almost every aspect of her life.

The narrator’s employer recruits residents for his mountain community based on their wealth and their willingness to donate to his project. He offers them a lifestyle that hearkens back to the privilege and excess that they were used to before the smog, including growing and serving foods not available anywhere else. In the storerooms under the kitchen, the narrator “witnesse[s] the true wealth of that country” (18): His labs grow plants and animals that have gone extinct. To become wealthy, the narrator’s employer killed, exploited, abused, and manipulated a wide variety of people. He lacks social skills and grace, but people from higher socioeconomic classes tolerate him to access his food reserves and his Mars colonization project. Possibly because he senses their distaste, he overcompensates for the deprivation of his childhood by hiding his skin color and Romani ethnicity and by never letting go of his resentment of the discrimination he experienced in early life. More importantly, the employer assaults—and nearly kills—the narrator; he and Aida are able to commit assault and murder without repercussions because they are wealthy.

Unlike her father and the narrator, Aida has only ever been part of the upper class. At first, Aida seems to have far more freedom than the narrator: “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” (58). The narrator has had to soften or suppress her anger to perform the submissiveness that is required of female chefs. In contrast, Aida can remain angry because she doesn’t need to work to live. The narrator repeatedly stresses that Aida isn’t cruel: “There was kindness planted beneath Aida’s scorn, soft loam under thorny cover of privilege” (68). However, Aida is unkind toward the narrator when the narrator is faced with class-based oppression: Aida doesn’t intervene when her father, who has the most privilege of the three of them, assaults the narrator; Aida likewise neglects the narrator when her father demands that she work long hours in the labs. The narrator tries to convince Aida to run away with her, but Aida—eager to cling to privilege—chooses to stay with her father.

While Aida and her father remain trapped in the socioeconomic roles and attitudes they have cultivated from birth, the narrator gets the chance to cross class boundaries. She is born poor, becomes middle class in the service profession that nevertheless expects her to compromise herself for authority figures, lives among people of various socioeconomic classes after leaving the mountain, and then ends her life as a very rich woman. Part of the psychological transformation that enables her to transcend blinkered class-based thinking is realizing that pleasure can come from both cheap and expensive foods—an idea she’d had to reject to become a professional chef. Not only that, but often, cheaper ingredients make for better final results: For instance, when she tries to recreate a dish from La Ciccia, a “red-sauce joint that served eight-dollar specials” (178), on the mountain with expensive ingredients, she realizes that it needs cheap corn syrup to taste like she remembers. When the narrator becomes wealthy, she tries to be a better person than her former employer, starting a foundation for women in the food industry.

The narrator experienced sexism in the food industry before working on the mountain and tries to combat it after leaving the mountain. Moreover, in her case, sexism intersects with racism because the narrator is an Asian woman. Sexism impacts women of different classes in the novel, but the narrator—being from a lower socioeconomic class than Aida—also experiences misogynist violence.

Throughout the narrator’s career, she has faced discrimination based on gender, where her continued employment is contingent on her “proving [her] worth in kitchens where [she’s] chopped faster and worked longer than men who s[i]ng out honey, sweetheart, bitch” (18). She got visible tattoos on her arms, in part, to appear more intimidating to sexist male cooks. When she first gets to the mountain restaurant, her employer’s demands are clearly the result of her being a woman: He hides her away in the kitchen and then has her impersonate his first wife, Eun-Young—a disguise that is only possible because of the racism and sexism of the diners she serves. The narrator thinks, “It has always been easy to disappear as an Asian woman” (95), pointing out that to her employer and the guests he manipulates, women are interchangeable at best.

As Eun-Young, the narrator experiences sexist violence not just in the kitchen but also in the dining room. In the role of her employer’s wife, she performs “[l]ust or satisfaction or pleasure. Gratitude, as required, knowing that, naked beneath a man’s disappointment, there lay this possibility of violence” (98). The fear of male anger leads the novel’s women to constantly try to predict the moods of men and create conditions in which men will not harm them. Aida has to cater to Kandinsky’s desire for submissiveness by flirting with him and acting demure. However, when he becomes enraged about a hair in the food, even the narrator’s kneeling groveling is not enough: Kandinsky demands that she be beaten by her employer. Aida is complicit in her father’s sexist violence in that she “[doesn’t] stop[] the second blow, or the third” (145)—one way that internalized sexism works is to co-opt women into betraying one another to escape becoming targets themselves. However, it is Aida’s father’s male ego—represented in the phallic image of the rocket into outer space—that gets Aida killed.

After leaving the mountain, and after the rocket to Mars explodes, the narrator changes socioeconomic class and tries to use her newly obtained privilege to help women in the food industry avoid the same kind of abuse that she suffered. She believes that “[t]here is time on this greener earth for girls to ripen into themselves […] They can choose” (229). She hopes that her foundation will give women more choices than she and Aida had.