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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In the new novel, Land of Milk and Honey, a dense smog has blanketed the world, blocking out the sun and wiping out nearly all food growth and production. There's global chaos and most people only have access to a gross kind of mung bean powder to stave off hunger unless you're really really rich, which means it's a bad time to be a chef, like the protagonist of the novel. That is until she learns of a job opening at an elite separatist mountain community in Italy, run by a strange billionaire and his brilliant daughter.

Thanks to his stockpile, lab experiments, and bribes, they have fresh produce livestock and even wine. Our protagonist lies to get the gig, which on the surface looks like cooking for rich guests and potential investors. As she becomes more enmeshed with her employer and his daughter, our protagonist starts to wonder what she's giving up in order to be sheltered away from the smog, starvation, and social unrest. The novel is titled Land of Milk and Honey by our guests C Pam Zhang. Her first novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, was a finalist for the Booker Prize. You can catch her tonight at Greenlight bookstore in Fort Greene or this Saturday at Brooklyn Museum, but I'm thrilled to welcome her to the studio. Pam, thanks for being with us.

C Pam Zhang: Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: The scenario you present is scary in its own right. It's also doubly scary because it's imaginable. Of course, any of us who were in New York over the summer and saw the orange sky for days and days. How were you feeling when you were writing this novel?

C Pam Zhang: The novel was a pandemic project in many ways. I was writing it in early 2021 when we were all locked down, and I was feeling bleak and disconnected from my body,but really the novel was my escape hatch out. It was a reminder of the necessity of pleasure in dwelling in the body and dwelling in intimate human relationships to get us out of that mind space.

Alison Stewart: Your last novel was historical fiction set in the western mining town during the end of the gold rush. This one is speculative, we assume it's in the future, slightly different version of our world. What is an adjustment that you had to make as an author in dealing with speculative fiction versus historical fiction?

C Pam Zhang: Even my first novel I think had an element of the speculative, too. I like writing in a world that is half a step removed from the one we're living in, because I think that distance gives me the power as a writer and gives the reader the ability to see the inequalities and problems of our world a little bit clearer because you get that space to think about the extremes.

Alison Stewart: Do you think of it as being in the future, or it could be could be now?

C Pam Zhang: I joke it's like it's now plus or minus one year.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to ask you to read from the beginning of the book, if you could set this up for our listeners.

C Pam Zhang: Yes. This is the very first page. "One day after my life is already over, a girl comes up to me at the back of the auditorium and says, "Are you the famous chef from the Elle?" The question does not surprise me so much as the asker. She is 18 or 19, at most, with a face that has not quite grown into its bones, has not decided what it means to be, ferocious or mild, pretty or something more. She is young to be concerned with a period of time that her generation prefers to forget, that my generation would forget if not for the ruptures that open up in our sleep, that knowing.

"I know you." She says and I look at her again. She is nothing like the other except that I was wrong about her youth, not her age, her youth. Beneath that soft skin is an attitude older implacable as rock so that she commands the space of the now empty auditorium. Other conversations leak from the corridor. Last week's class, which salad spot for lunch? Dull? Ordinary, a world apart. "Did you know what would happen before you left the country?" She says, her questions come faster with my pulse. "You must have known about the parts didn't you? Escape because know they'll would die."

I find the words that last. They are they're alive. How to explain it all. How to begin at the beginning. I say I was just some mediocre cook. And then my breath fails me, I wheeze, those words a hook in my chest and I am slipping my old women's skin as if it is costume. I am sloughing this room, the soil, this year. I am back to that place very high and very far where I can't speak for the thinness of crisp mountain air, back to the country that no longer exists. A country that was mine for a year in the sun."

Alison Stewart: That was C Pam Zhang reading her book Land of Milk and Honey. She's looking back in life, "I wasn't mediocre cook." What is actually being a cook or a chef mean to the protagonist, the young version of herself?

C Pam Zhang: As you laid out, this is a world in which food crops have disappeared, and so most people don't have access to ingredients. To this protagonist, cooking is an art and as an art, it's a life form. It's what she lives for. It's how she has expressed herself. The question at the beginning of this novel is, when you have lost the thing that seemed the most important to you, all of your life, where do you go? Where do you turn again for inspiration?

Alison Stewart: Why don't we have a name for her?

C Pam Zhang: I wasn't even aware that I had not named her for many, many drafts, probably maybe 10 or 15 drafts and that question was first asked of me. I think it has to do with this idea in this book of identity, being infinitely malleable. This is a character who in order to survive, as you said, lies to get in her job, molds herself and warps herself to accommodate what she thinks she needs to be and loses herself. The book is also about her process of slowly coming to realize where she has made those compromises and where perhaps she doesn't want to compromise anymore.

Alison Stewart: We've got her character of the chef, we've got a basic idea of who she is before she gets to this community. The chef lies to get the job, something the employer knows, yet he hires her anyway. Which made me wonder, so what is important and valuable to this man?

C Pam Zhang: To this man, he's a man of surfaces. He's incredibly wealthy. He's a billionaire, but he's gotten there in his own way by shortchanging what matters to him. He's always felt like an outsider. He's always felt isolated, and so he thinks that he can buy his way into creating what is to him a utopia and what the rest of the world might look like a dystopia. The chef being an Asian American woman, I'm trying not to spoil things too much, has the superficial qualities that are beneficial to him.

Alison Stewart: What does he see as the purpose of this community.

C Pam Zhang: He is creating a new world, and one in which he can not only survive, but thrive in the ways that he wants to. I think it was interesting to work with this character of the billionaire employer, because certainly, in the real world, I don't approve of billionaires and certainly billionaires that exploit the resources of the world, but they exist, right? In writing this character, I had to find my way into not forgiving but perhaps sympathizing with how people get there and what horribly, sad, honestly, pitiable and lonely things about their lives get them into that headspace.

Alison Stewart: Did you read profiles of billionaires?

C Pam Zhang: What I actually did was I wondered about them. I used to work in tech, you see, and so I felt like I had had enough brushes with sociopaths in high positions of power that I then expanded into that imaginatively.

Alison Stewart: Billionaire adjacent. What is, even if it didn't make it into the book, a behavior that you witnessed or around during your time in tech that influenced this character or influenced the world that you've created that this character wants to create.

C Pam Zhang: I did not grow up wealthy. My first experiences eating a fine French food, fine Western dining of the sort that is cooked by the protagonist in this book was through my tech jobs, being taken to Michelin starred restaurants as team dinners, which sounds amazing. My mind was blown. I felt so fortunate to be there. I would sometimes look around and see these sort of [unintelligible 00:08:45] dining there and leaving food at the table, not listening to the server when they're explaining the art and the craft of the meal. The meal was all about the artifice and the symbolism of it. It wasn't about the food.

Alison Stewart: That offended you?

C Pam Zhang: It made me really curious, "What are you eating then? What has food become?"

Alison Stewart: Why are you here?

C Pam Zhang: Yes. What has food become? If not nourishment, if not delight, what has it become?

Alison Stewart: It's the status, that's what it is.

C Pam Zhang: It is the status,very, very much the status, and certainly in my novel, there's a way in which food functions as a pure status symbol for the very elite. I think food is really interesting in that regard, because I consider it the most accessible art form. We all have it to some degree, and yet it can be warped in this fantastic way.

Alison Stewart: That's so interesting, because in the past-- I always say creative people have their antenna up to what's going on in the world, and obviously, the past few years, we've seen The Menu, the film. We've seen Happiness On The Boat and the horrible dining scene.

C Pam Zhang: Oh my God, the vomiting in that movie.

Alison Stewart: And all the food, the fine dining which looks so revolting when you see it in that area. That's so interesting, the idea of what food could and should be-- Triangle Sadness that was that movie. Our other character I want to make sure we touch on is the employer's daughter, Aida. She's beautiful, she's brilliant, she says whatever she wants to say, what's on her mind. We find out she is running the experiments and growing new food and all of that. There is an attraction between the chef and Aida. What is the basis of the attraction? It gets a bit sexual?

C Pam Zhang: Yes. I would say because the chef, she's a woman of color and who has worked in the service industry all her life, again, she has to warp herself to be who she needs to be to survive. Aida, at least for the beginning of the book, looks like the opposite, looks like a woman who has the power to be exactly who she wants to be and shape the world around her. I think that is part of the initial attraction, but what becomes interesting and complicated about that relationship is the way in which, past these surfaces of status and beauty and wealth, Aida is still constrained. I think we heard a little bit of that in the opening of the book that I just read. There's something I'm interested in the novel in which the ways that female power and female beauty can be commodified, and can be used as this crutch to say that there is no substance beneath.

Alison Stewart: My guest is C Pam Zhang. The name of the book is Land of Milk and Honey. The chef has to make these elaborate meals for these important invited guests. We also learned that some of them are potential investors. This is not just about whining and dining, that he's got a mission. The employer has a mission here, but there's this element of scarcity, which is really important in this story, and some things are more precious and you're getting this last little bit of wine, or you're getting this last morsel of something that was only on the planet for this moment in time. How does the employer use scarcity to his advantage?

C Pam Zhang: He uses scarcity and the fear of losing things as this powerful wedge to cause his investors to want to gather all resources from themselves. I think this fear of losing things is so dominant in many of our lives and what causes so many political schisms, this desire to make sure you have enough because you don't think there's enough for everyone. In writing this book, I started to interrogate a lot of my own opinions about what scarcity and abundance look like in the world.

Alison Stewart: And how people react to it.

C Pam Zhang: And how people react. Right. I think in writing this book, it made me want to move towards a mindset of abundance. This idea that maybe we do have enough, and maybe what we have enough of is not necessarily tangible resources, or that's not all of it, but emotional resources, a capacity for generosity. A capacity to say, "If these are our limited things on the table, how can we share them in a way that still feels like we're part of a community?"

Alison Stewart: The way you write about food is really interesting in the book. I'm going to give an example. "In hidden orchards, the stone fruit ripened so fast that what we didn't eat was given to the animals, so like chimps, like finches, like gilas, we glutted on plums, so ripe, they split if looked at, cherries and blackberries staining our sheets. We distilled summer meads heady with anise and yogurt and watered fields with barrels dregs. The tidal boom of an underground aquarium, I cut a sturgeon nose to slit and ransacked its body for that other fruit, pure caviar." There is-- I don't know, what's the word for the way you write about food? It's visceral, a touch aggressive.

C Pam Zhang: There's silence in cooking.

Alison Stewart: Yes. What effect were you going for when you write about food in that way?

C Pam Zhang: I wanted the reader to feel at times like they were pressed up into the muck of it. I think that as someone who is Chinese American and grew up in a non-Western culinary household, I'm really interested in the way in which-- In American Western society, we're often afraid of knowing where the food comes from. We're afraid of facing the violence that necessitates what we're eating on the plate. I think that kind of fear of looking at it straight on can lead to accidental decadence and accidental disconnect with the realities of what the planet is capable of giving to us. If you don't know the feeling and the difficulty of killing an animal, then you just eat your chicken tenders and your nuggets thoughtlessly. You don't give any power to the idea that maybe these things should be eaten with their origins in mind.

Alison Stewart: Also, being grateful.

C Pam Zhang: Yes. I will say that I'm a super happy carnivore. I love meat, but I think it is really important to know where all of this comes from.

Alison Stewart: Meat, this is my segue to this-- I'm not going to give too much away, but there's a scene that involves wooly mammoth on the menu and it goes somewhere. When you were thinking about a moment where food is not delicious, it's not something you necessarily want to eat, it's not appetizing, it's maybe even a little bit horrific, why did you want to touch on that idea?

C Pam Zhang: That's a good question. I think I wanted the reader to encounter the revolting nature of excess.

Alison Stewart: Sure. One of the things that chef does, and we won't give it away, but she is required to lie in this job. Perhaps we learned maybe why the employer wanted her, because she would be willing to lie about things. Why is she willing to lie?

C Pam Zhang: She's willing to lie because at first, she thinks that is the only way to survive. Again, the world of the novel is more extreme than the world in which we live in, but just as an Asian woman in the workforce, I have encountered places where I lie in small ways, in big ways about how willing I am to do things, how happy I am with a microaggression or a certain kind of joke being made in the room.

Again, with that question of why speculative fiction, why something that is a little bit more extreme than what we're living today, I think seeing that extreme helped me, and hopefully, readers realize how powerful and how crippling those kinds of lies can be in our everyday lives. At some point, you have to decide to stand on your ground and say, "This is who I am and I will not sacrifice myself any further."

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the novel Land of Milk and Honey with C Pam Zhang. She's speaking tonight at Greenlight and on Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum. This community, where this elite community that has food where he's inviting people to come up, the employer is, investors to come up, people who are powerful to come up, it's in Italy. It's in a mountain. How did you decide the mountain in Italy?

C Pam Zhang: Well, I will caveat by saying I don't quite consider Italy. It's a mountain on the border of Italy and France and part of the crux of--

Alison Stewart: It's Austria.

C Pam Zhang: Yes. They're trying to make their own micro-nation. It definitely had to be in Europe because the novel is also about this culinary, and therefore, cultural hierarchy that still exists today where European food and French food are seen as ascendant. That had to be a place where these European investors were drawn to.

Alison Stewart: We talked about the protagonist lying. We talked about what's important to her. Does she ever deceive herself? Do you think your protagonist deceives herself?

C Pam Zhang: Oh, certainly, certainly. Yes, I think that we all deceive ourselves when we're making these kinds of survival decisions, and it's only when there is a great break made when we come to that moment we're like, "We cannot cross this line any further," that we realize all the self-deceptions that we've been making all along.

Alison Stewart: What about the employer?

C Pam Zhang: I don't think he ever comes to terms with his self-deceptions. I think that's what leads to his, without giving too many things away, a tragic arc to his character.

Alison Stewart: What about the daughter, which is interesting because she's somewhat of a woman of science?

C Pam Zhang: She likes to think that she isn't deceiving herself because she is so embedded in the scientific community, but in her relationship with her father and her desire to have and to hold a family, I think that's where some self-deception comes in

Alison Stewart: To find out what happens, you'll have to read Land of Milk and Honey. C Pam Zhang is speaking tonight at Greenlight and Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum. Thank you so much for joining us.

C Pam Zhang: Thank you. It's a delight.

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