I first got a taste of Land of Milk and Honey (Riverhead Books, 2023) when C Pam Zhang came to read at Brooklyn College in the fall of 2022. She read an early scene in the novel, where the protagonist, a chef, is struggling in a kitchen, trying to pass a cooking test for a job. It was slightly disorienting—in the future world of the novel, what people eat becomes different, the political climate more chaotic. But much remains the same on the granular level of the human, the emotional: the meticulous process of cooking, the exhaustion of a traveler, the anxiety one feels during a professional test, and the profound joy from a single rapturous bite. A few times during the reading, she made small editing notes for herself, a writer who commands precision with her words.
In Land of Milk and Honey, Zhang never loses sight of that human and emotional connection she builds between the characters and the reader, as the narrative excavates history and meaning beneath the surface and navigates an increasingly threatening reality. The scope of the novel is monumental: global geopolitics and extraterrestrial expeditions, the vision of the future dark with extreme wealth gaps and natural catastrophes. In brilliant and moving juxtaposition to the setting are the intimacy of the voice, the characters’ deep longing and desire, the hope and faith that they are still able to harbor, and the joy and pleasure that ultimately sustain life. By writing the future, Zhang illuminates our present with sharpness and clarity.
I was delighted to speak to C Pam Zhang over Zoom about the ever-shifting definition of speculative fiction, her relationship to food and place, utopia and dystopia, and how we can define resistance and future for ourselves.
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The Rumpus: Your first novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, is a work of historical fiction, and Land of Milk and Honey can be categorized as speculative fiction. While both novels are set in a faraway time, they gesture urgently toward our present reality. Why did you choose to write from such a temporal distance?
C Pam Zhang: That temporal distance allows the reader to step back and see the world we live in in a slightly different way, in which certain aspects may become clearer. In the case of How Much of These Hills is Gold, creating this mythology with tigers roaming around in the American West allowed me to puncture the genre of Western with its cowboys and white male protagonists and ask the question of how real that story is to begin with.
In the case of Land of Milk and Honey, taking a half step forward into the future, in which food is disappearing and becomes this status symbol in addition to an essential human need, allowed me to ask—as resources become scarcer, what do we value? What does abundance look like? What does abundance mean to different people, and how do we define it for ourselves?
I would also say that, I think, the definition of speculative fiction is changing every day, as our reality becomes increasingly unreal. In the world of Land of Milk and Honey, food is replaced with this monk soybean protein. In the real world, we have a meal replacement called Soylent, based off a product in an old science-fiction movie. In the book I wrote about smog, and this summer there was a cloud of wildfire smog covering New York.
I also think of speculative fiction as a survival tool. It gives us the ability to look at the real world and ask, “What if?” We live in a climate of information overload. Speculative fiction allows our imaginations to stay limber and step out of the suffocating doom scroll of a news cycle, where the future can feel preordained that it will only become worse.
Rumpus: Exactly, much of what is considered speculative is already happening. The world in your novel is completely recognizable, tethered to our world through its familiar characters (the uber-rich employer reminds me of people like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk), its systems (borders, visa, and immigration systems) and many other details. What was the process of constructing such a world? How did you decide what of our world you would change and what you’d preserve?
Zhang: I didn’t have a particular tech founder in mind. But having worked for many years in the Bay Area during the so-called “golden bubble of the tech boom,” I was certainly familiar with those names you mentioned. I constructed this world partly because I was writing the book during the pandemic and thinking about fantasies of escape.
These narratives of tech founders creating their own individual escape hatches—buying islands in New Zealand or constructing bunkers or thinking about building ships to create colonies on Mars, extremity that is enabled by money and privilege and access. Then, there were more quotidian fantasies of escape that, I think, many of us average people felt—wanting to get out of our houses, missing the feeling of being able to travel, eating a meal out, having a drink in a bar. These two sorts of fantasies collided in life and in my book. The protagonist’s escape fantasies can only go so far as taking a job somewhere else, and these uber-rich colonists’ escape fantasies are much larger.
Rumpus: Having read both of your novels, I noticed some common threads you continue to be interested in and expand upon. Two rather obvious ones are place and the status of immigrants, refugees, and stateless people. The titles of both of your novels contain a noun for a place—hills and land—which refer to the place that is central to the narrative. The protagonists of both novels are immigrants and children of immigrants. What is your relationship to place? What is an immigrant’s relationship to place?
Zhang: To an immigrant, a place can be a form of magical thinking. Immigration often happens because immigrants have this kind of fantasy of a better place, right? That can both be a productive idea and an idea that eats away at you. If you’re always wondering about there being a better place, how do you situate yourself within your community? How do you make the world immediately around you better for yourself and for other people? In Land of Milk and Honey, this is a question that the chef increasingly grapples with. It’s in the front of her mind because she is an immigrant’s daughter and has lived this parallel life. I also think immigrants, or anybody who is an outsider, have a kind of clairvoyance in how they are able to perceive the unspoken or invisible rules of a community.
Rumpus: Why does the chef still want to return to the United States, a country that has closed its borders, plagued with political and climate disasters, and where she no longer has any family? What does she want to return to?
Zhang: Part of it may be that she wants to close out a chapter in her life, but I don’t fully know. I don’t think she is able to articulate it to herself. I like leaving that up to interpretation.
Rumpus: Perhaps the relationship to a place that you still consider home, no matter what it has become, is complicated and inarticulable.
Zhang: Yes, the answer can also change every single day. I like that about it.
Rumpus: Let’s talk about food. Food occupies such an important and complex space in our life as well as your novel—sustenance, necessity, object of desire, “source of pleasure” (a phrase repeated in this novel). It also represents a history and a culture. These days it’s more and more a signifier of status, wealth, and privilege. It’s such a feat that you have woven all of these layers in the book. What is your relationship to food? What was the process of navigating such complexities?
Zhang: I was a really picky eater as a child, both because I was just a squeamish kid and because my family was very poor and we couldn’t afford to eat out, so I wasn’t trying many foods beyond the Chinese food I ate at home and the plastic American food in school cafeterias. To me, Western fine dining always existed on this fantastical pedestal. I knew it had cultural status, value. I also knew it was inaccessible to me.
So when I ate in a Western fine dining restaurant for the first time as an adult, I was acutely conscious, not only of the food but also of my discomfort in that dining room. I was so aware that I wasn’t supposed to be there. I didn’t know the vocabulary nor the etiquette. I didn’t know which forks to use, how to speak to a waiter, or when you order the drinks and when you order the appetizer and the entrée. I couldn’t taste the food at all because I was so deeply aware of everything that it represented. And later in life, through my tech job, I was able to eat extraordinarily lavish meals in San Francisco and feel like I was supposed to be there. I think moving through these many phases with food has allowed me to look at it from different angles and see where there are places of hypocrisy and exclusion in the culinary culture.
Rumpus: An important character in the novel asks toward the end of the book—and I’m curious too— “why French food?”
Zhang: Why French food, indeed! In some ways this question boils down to why we generally find ourselves completely happy to pay sixty dollars for a chicken dish in a French restaurant but would pause at paying the same price for a chicken dish in a Chinese restaurant or an Indian restaurant. The situation is changing in certain metropolises but, nonetheless, there is this fundamental global idea that French and Western cuisine remain supreme, which also means that the culture, the language, the people behind that food are ascendant.
The question of “why French food” comes to the narrator in Land of Milk and Honey quite late, and she realizes that it’s a question that she has never consciously considered because it was just the water she swam in. A phenomenon is happening now where, when you watch and read about food, there is a realization that we need to question the assumptions of cultural hierarchy that underlies our culinary landscape. What allows someone to get to that question is stepping aside from the external value system of food, menu pricing, and asking yourself as an individual, “What am I tasting? What do I feel about it? What do I prefer when no one else is in the room?”
Rumpus: The public value system and our private value system might often be at odds with each other. Ultimately an individual has to make a choice for themselves.
Zhang: Absolutely. And for individuals from marginalized communities, it’s much harder to hear your own internal voice.
Rumpus: That’s perhaps why the protagonist cannot get to this question until late in the book, as she has to go through all of what comes before that moment. Speaking of what she goes through in the novel, I want to ask you about worldbuilding. How did you build such an immersive, palpable future world?
Zhang: I think worldbuilding has to be character-driven. In my first drafts, there’s relatively little worldbuilding. I just let the character tumble through their life choices, and the world builds itself around that. When you draft in that way, you achieve a kind of authority in the world that would be hard to get to if you were building it from the outside in. The world becomes personal and felt before its official rules are laid out. At the end of the day, anyone can construct a world on another planet or under the sea that is as crazy and absurd as they want. Whether things are realistic or believable doesn’t come down to the details. It comes down to that sense of authority that comes through in characters and voice. When you’re writing speculative fiction, if you stop at every detail to ask, “Does this make sense? Is this believable?” [then] you’ll never get anywhere.
Rumpus: Did you have lessons you learned from writing your first novel that you were able to apply to writing Land of Milk and Honey?
Zhang: My biggest lesson as a writer is how to fail faster and joyfully. Writing my first novel made me a lot less precious about the process. I am never more alive than when I’m throwing away dozens of pages and discarding an entire chapter or draft. The first novel gave me the confidence that I did it once so I can do it again. Failure is an inevitable part of the process. The faster you get through your failure, the faster you’ll get to the end.
Rumpus: I’m curious about the lines of incomprehensible language in the novel. First you used them sparingly, later on more liberally, and in doing so the form accrued so much meaning and humor. I laughed out loud at one point—such a brilliant way to use negative space to challenge the efficacy of language and to interrogate the abuse of language within capitalism. It also adds authenticity to the narrator’s experience as a foreigner in an environment where she is totally otherized. How did you arrive at this bold stylistic choice?
Zhang: The real answer is I don’t know. But if I dig back in my subconsciousness, two things come to mind—Ling Ma has this story called “Los Angeles” in which some of the characters speak in dollar signs instead of dialogue. There are some other symbols as well, I believe. I found that really fascinating. And Animal Crossing. The characters speak this gibberish that I find fascinating. Both in Ling Ma’s story and Animal Crossing, the gibberish rendering of language helps the reader/viewer understand the emotional core of what is being communicated—it’s raw and stark, it becomes a language that is transactional. As you pointed out, there’s a lot in the book about language as transaction, about identity as transaction.
Rumpus: The narrator is selling out her identity. She has to become another person in order to stay in the mountain.
Zhang: I had a lot of fun with that. Going back to speculative fiction’s ability to ask what if—this kind of selling out in a smaller and less dramatic way is something almost all of us, who are Asian women, or who belong to any marginalized group, do every single day, right? We do this conscious or subconscious calculation of what we need to offer, what we need to give, how we need to work or change ourselves in order to become more desirable on the job market or in the sexual marketplace.
Rumpus: I read somewhere that this novel is described as dystopian. Though the future you’ve imagined has very dark elements—plausible, to be sure—I’ve found many utopian hopes, ideals, and most importantly, faith, in the chef, in Aida, in Aida’s father, the employer, and in the ending, which was so, so moving. I want to ask this question in a way that doesn’t put dystopia and utopia into a simplified binary—how does Land of Milk and Honey hold opposites ideas to be true? What are your thoughts on utopia and dystopia?
Zhang: Utopia and dystopia are extremely personal definitions. The chef goes to a beautiful, luxurious mountaintop community that most people in the world would probably call a utopia, but part of her—developing her own sense of taste throughout the book—realizes that their utopia is not her utopia and may in fact be her dystopia. The book’s vacillation between those two possible labels reflects that broader idea of external versus internal definitions for the situations in which one is living.
It’s interesting because dystopia is not my label, though I have no problem with it. But I think that the way people read this novel is quite telling of how they see themselves in the world and perhaps their stance on the future.
Rumpus: In a way, the employer is also very idealistic and even that can be moving, too. It takes a lot of faith to believe whatever utopia one believes in.
Zhang: I’m so glad you pointed that out. I was interested in presenting a spectrum of characters. There are characters who have no power and no privilege. There are characters with a great deal of power who think they’re acting selflessly and those who only want to act selfishly. I’m interested in how there isn’t actually very clean lines between these different types of motivations, how it all gets muddled in the wash.
Rumpus: Even with a first-person perspective, you did such a great job with that. I didn’t feel much moral or value judgements from the narrator or the author. So much of our fiction today, in my opinion, requires us to be morally correct in some way. But reality is more muddled, right?
Zhang: I think about that all the time. Every one of us makes “bad” or “immoral” decisions. It’s impossible to live completely morally in a capitalistic society. It’s a question of “Do you have power and platform where your bad decisions have gigantic and catastrophic effects on others?” I don’t think it’s a matter of if you’re better or worse than someone but what are the consequences of these decisions. It’s interesting to see how power intersects with that.
Rumpus: The most moving part of the novel for me is the love story, to fall in love when one’s survival is threatened, death is near, and the world is ending. I found Land of Milk and Honey so deadly romantic and existential. For me, it posits love and pleasure as forms of resistance. What do you hope your readers take away from this novel?
Zhang: Exactly like you put it. Thank you. Writing this novel during the pandemic reinforced me with this belief that pleasure is a necessity if we are to survive. During the pandemic, there was so much dialogue about what are often called the essentials of life—our health, food, water, shelter, and I think a lot of us realized that, yes, those are absolutely essentials that everybody needs to survive.
But when you look at the balance of a human life across decades, those essentials are not enough. We need pleasure. We need joy. We need companionship. The question is, “What is the point of surviving?” It’s not merely rhetorical. For anyone who battles with depression or bleakness and emptiness, that’s not a rhetorical question. I do think it is as you said. It’s important to find love and abundance and pleasure and to define them for ourselves.
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Author photograph by Clayton Cubitt
