Land Of Milk And Honey ‹ Literary Hub

The following is from “Land of Milk and Honey” by C Pam Zhang. Zhang is the author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold, winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Prize and the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature; nominated for the Booker Prize; and finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her writing appears in Best American Short Stories, The Cut, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She is a 5 Under 35 honoree.

The day the letter from California arrived for me was the day the chef announced he was removing pesto from the menu for good. No more nuts and seeds in the pantry and no basil, even in powdered form. I barely heard it. I put my envelope in the walk-in freezer as if ice could cool the craving.

With my back against chilled steel, I pulled out not an American re-entry permit but a bill. The letter told me that my dead mother’s apartment in Los Angeles had burned down. “Unfortunate accident,” the lawyer wrote of the commotion that caused him, and then legal liability. The fees for garbage disposal, firefighting and municipal emissions fines were detailed, but the color of the apartment walls, which I no longer remembered, was not mentioned anywhere in the bill. No avocados, no strawberries, no almonds. California had become a food desert and I imagined the wind howling through broken windows, abrasive, dry and unclean.

While I was doing the math, the door opened. The boss says the break is over, a chef told me. He wants you to make a sub for the pesto.

With what?

On the way out, the cook threw a bag of flour with his feet. Anything you want, princess, as long as you use that shit.

The flour puffed up into a fine gray cloud. No parsley, no sage, no products of any kind. It was spring. March. But a false spring in which the harvest would fail for the third year in a row. Blame it on the acidity of the smog, as some did, or anhydrites, or a lack of sun and morals – the result was gray skies and gray kitchens. You could taste it: gray. No olives, no quails, no grapes of the sour green variety for Champagne. I took stock of the restaurant’s dwindling supplies: dusty cans, ice-cold slices of century-old fish. Mostly it was bag after bag of mung protein soy seaweed flour distributed by the government.

We were lucky to have it! Said. The flour was a miracle of nutritional science, made from plants that tolerated darkness. Luckily it had taken the smog a year and a half to reach Europe, luckily we had escaped the famine that was ravaging the Americas and Southeast Asia, and luckily mung protein flour was cheaper, calorie for calorie, than the patchwork diets of earlier times. But the flour was grainy and gray, and the baked bread could not be made to rise. I speak of an occlusion in my twenty-ninth year, a darkening of my vision in front of me; I’m not just talking about the air.

“Boss” had lost its meaning, like “luck,” “fresh,” “soon.” No saffron, no buffalo, no polished short grain rice. Dishes disappeared from menus like extinct stars as conservative, nativist attitudes took hold of the few restaurants that remained open thanks to government subsidies. Just as they closed borders to refugees, countries are closing their palates to all but the cuisines they deem essential. In England, dwindling supplies of frozen fish were reserved for herring or gray versions of cod and chips – and, of course, some outrageously expensive French concoctions that, along with sour wine, might buy a guest the illusion that he was still there lived in luxury. Back to cumbersome security. Back to national dishes that have remained unchanged for centuries. The loss of pesto shouldn’t have been a surprise in a world without favas, without milkfish, without Curry Lane in London or Thai Town in LA, without fusion, without daily specials, and without truffles that have stood out like embarrassed lovers on blankets of turf. We were lucky, said the people around me. We survived.

But in the darkness of that cold room, I could no longer imagine a future for the pesto-free halibut dish, unable to fathom the amount of debt I owed or the color of the cloudless sky. I couldn’t see what I survived for. The British, with their stiff upper lips, were alien to me; If I had a friend in this damp port city, it was the drunk who stalked the half-empty market and proclaimed the end of everything.

That day I knew it. A world had disappeared. Goodbye to all of that, to the person I had been, to her who had left a half-eaten plate of carnitas under the heat of the California sun. It wasn’t the fat that I missed, but the revelation of the lime. While I waited for sadness, I met hunger. For radish, radicchio, the bitter green of endive.

And so I quit that job to recklessly, immorally, and desperately pursue the only job that gave me any hope of success. The position was private chef for a supposed elite research community on a small mountain on the Italian-French border. A quick search revealed this controversy. The community’s goal was to develop genetically modified food crops that could withstand smog. All discoveries should be shared with the Italian government. However, since the funding came from private investors, Parliament had ceded one of the rare high mountain zones that is still blessed with occasional sunlight to complete the agreement. And so the mountain was populated by investors and their accompanying scientists, collaborators, physicians, field workers, etc., who had carte blanche in determining how to achieve their lofty research goals. Apart from quarterly checks by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, there were no observers, no police presence, no external or internal communication: the mountain governed itself with diplomatic immunity. The outcry on the internet was murderous. A fat animal can buy his own land!! I read one of the auto-translated comments that confused me until I looked up an alternative translation: Rich Monster.

All that mattered to me was the job’s promise of fresh produce, but – here was the catch – no guarantee of a long-term visa. It was a ten week rental agreement. Employment at will, at the request of my employer. Colleagues at the seafood restaurant asked about my mental health

I resigned. They reminded me of the thousands begging for my work visa.

I was not unaware of the risk. For this reason I added lies to my application. The job required a formally trained, French-trained chef capable of working with unusual ingredients and creating exquisite haute cuisine, and this is how I gained my experience. Trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, sous chef at a Michelin star restaurant that closed when its owner was found hanging from a string from her own saucissons – no one to refute my claim. When I hesitated because of my lies or because of the extreme isolation the community demanded (non-disclosure agreement, no phone, no internet, no contact, no family, no leaving restaurant premises without permission) – when I hesitated in the face of my younger self’s explanation to everyone would try my food, that cooking was an art that was neither frivolous nor selfish – well. I was no longer the one who left California with scruples and ambition; Not knowing exactly who I was, I adapted to the form of the application.

It was only at the end of the form that I admitted to being honest. I am your perfect candidate, I wrote in the free text box, because I don’t know anywhere in the world where I could return. I will faithfully complete each task within reason and with dignity.

Maybe that was crazy. It’s true that before I left England my only confidant was the supermarket drunk. You understand, I whispered, I have to do this. As he kissed my palm, his breath had the antiseptic coolness of mung protein flour. The buyers gave us a wide berth. They lied to themselves, like scientists lied, like politicians lied, just like my employer, with its opacity and dubious wealth, must have lied. All I cared about was that he provided a head of shriveled lettuce; even iceberg would do. That was my wish. That was my fantasy.

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