Land of Milk and Honey
This is another strong book by Ms Zhang. I picked up the book not quite knowing what to expect and was most pleasantly surprised. Two books by Ms Zhang so far, and the one common thread I can see is that “you just cannot expect anything normal that she writes”.
In this book, a burnt out chef (I think they’re all burnt out), finds employment by a very rich employer who hires her not really for her culinary abilities, but for her other aspects. As the book goes on, you figure out that this is really a book of “asian exploitation”, but in a very different and completely unexpectedly way that “Yellowface” explored.
The setting is a dystopian future, where for some odd reason, plants and animals are slowly going extinct. Food is scarce, everywhere is locked down to the extreme for fear of spreading the disease/contaminant, and everyone is eating some weird sordid paste. This makes the jobs of chefs pretty bad, and the protagonist, on a lark, applies to some weird dream job location where they promise you’d be cooking some very exclusive food for some exclusive people.
She surprisingly gets accepted and finds out that she is cooking with real ingredients, now extremely rare and expensive, in a country within a country, aptly named “the land of milk and honey”.
She doesn’t meet the employer until midway through the book, and when she does, she is given a new task, one that changes the texture of the book. I won’t spoil the rest of it, but while it is exploitation, it is completely different from what you’d assume based on what I’ve written.
The rest of the book goes off in a direction that is hard to predict, and I loved every single chapter of it. The authoresses prose is as captivating as ever, both angry and quiet and beautiful in a single chapter.
Highly recommended. the book reads like a thriller because it is one and the pacing is perfect. A great second hit.