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C Pam Zhang Books

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“We shouldn’t be forced to choose at all. The fury in Aida’s voice was familiar. Nostalgic. I’d once possessed that strain of fury, as had my fellow cooks, my friends, my produce guy, a virulent rage against our tainted inheritance of this stupid, smog-choked planet. But it couldn’t last. We’d been inoculated from rage by other, more immediate concerns. For example: how to pay rent, how to stay alive. 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.”

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Book:Land of Milk and Honey
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“How can I describe my life in the years leading up to this moment except in shades of gray? All the scrape and grind of it, all the empty shelves and lost ambition, all the soot grown hard on windows, season after season the only black harvest. The bad news, the debts, the visa applications, the flesh of your arm humping white between a nurse's fingers as she stuck you with a paltry twelve months' protection against whatever new strain of disease, as if bankruptcy or homelessness or a weariness at aping at the motions of life weren't more likely to kill you first.”

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“And so the milk ran dry. But first we had the luck of those creams, those spilled-down sauces, that summer of appetite that began with a soufflé cheesecake. There are very few ingredients to the recipe. Butter doesn't make the cake, nor cream. Its secret is ephemerality. Pull it from the oven and it is perfect; the next moment it is cooling, flattening, collapsing beneath the gravity of time. This is a flavor untasted by diners and critics, no record of its existence but for a private memory that lingers on one or two tongues.”

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“It wasn't tuna ventresca that drew diners to this community over others, nor was it heritage beef. It was the final bottle of a 1985 Cannonau, salt-crusted from its time on the Sardinian coast. Each diner had barely a swallow. My employer bid us not to swallow, not yet, but hold the wine at the back of the throat till it stung and warmed to the temperature of blood and spit, till we wrung from it the terroir of fields cracked by quake and shadowed by smog; only then, swallowing, choking, grateful, did we appreciate the fullness of its flavor. His face was ferocious and sublime in this moment, cracked open; I saw it briefly behind the mask. He was a man who knew the gradations of pleasure because he knew, like me, the calculus of its loss. To me that wine was fig and plum; volcanic soil; wheat fields shading to salt stone; sun; leather, well-baked; and finally, most lingering, strawberry. Psychosomatic, I'm sure, but what flavor isn't? I raised my glass to the memory of my drunk in the British market. I imagined him sat across the table, calmed at last, sane among the sane. He would have tasted in that wine the starch of a laundered sheet, perhaps, or the clean smooth shot of his dignity. My employer decanted these deepest longings, mysterious to each diner until it flooded the palate: a lost child's yeasty scalp, the morning breath of a lover, huckleberries, onion soup, the spice of a redwood forest gone up in smoke. It is easy, all these years later, to dismiss that country's purpose as decadent, gluttonous. Selfish. It was those things. But it was, also, this connoisseurship of loss.”

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“Under a man's hands--crush of his body--exigent breath--I remembered how to perform. Yes when I meant no. Lust or satisfaction or pleasure. Gratitude, as required, knowing that, naked beneath a man's disappointment, there lay this possibility of violence, as pungent and close-fitting as skin. One pound of flesh, paid freely, was preferable to a bloodier extraction. My past roles of sex kitten and hard bitch, blushing penitent, coy exotic, tease: I'd learned, long before this day, that I could play anything to avoid the role of victim.”

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“I can see now that I was hungry for love that summer. For something to love: a bite, a dream, a person, a meal, a field, a piece of a world worth believing in. Not for me the solace of boeuf bourguignon; not for me red wine and browned butter, that unctuousness proximate to rot or burning that stickied a diner's tongue. I had lived too long in the low country. I had tasted bitter gray. Only ashes and lost empires in the crust of a kouign amann that would never shatter the same way again.”

Hungry For Love
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“I want more, I said, putting a hand to my stomach, which rides higher than most know. Closer to the heart. I want the jiang bing that vendor will make when she runs out of nut butter. I don't think she's arrogant. I think she's right. I want to sample jian bing from every cart in Beijing, and I want to taste what those kids are eating at home, what they don't teach in cookbooks at Le Cordon Bleu. There's so much out there--- Helplessly, I said, I haven't even told you how much I love foods wrapped in other foods. Then tell me. I tried. I tried. Banh xeo in Hanoi, I said, and duck folded in the translucent bing of northern China. I spoke of tacos in Mexico City: suadero, al pastor, gringas. South Indian dosas as long as my arm, thinner than a rib of a feather. Oh, Aida, I said when I fumbled the names of the chutneys. How can I know all I've ever want? Something will get left out. I was wrong about cilantro. Tlayudas, she said stubbornly, as if she hadn't heard. Blini. Crêpes. They're basically French jian bing, I said with a strangled laugh. Pita sandwiches. Pickle roll-ups. Calzone. Bossam! I yelled, and the dogs barked and the children cheered and the streets of old Milan rang with the imported memory of pork kissed by brine, earthy with Korean bean paste, safe in its bed of red leaf lettuce.”

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“Autumn was a harvest of big-box stores and their back-to-school sales: fruit leather, instant mac 'n' cheese, and bread that we unhusked, crinkling, from its plastic sleeve. My mouth watered for the sweetness of processed wheat sown thick through gas stations from California to New York. Honey Buns and Wonder Breads, in perfect squares and machined circles, and the ripe weight of a Danish, mass-produced, that attempts no fidelity to the country after which it is named--- no country but this one ambered by waves of industrial grain.”

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“In hidden orchards the stone fruit ripened so fast that what we didn't eat was given to the animals, and 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 the barrels' dregs. To the tidal boom of an underground aquarium, I cut a sturgeon nose to slit and ransacked its body for that other fruit, pure caviar. I looked to Aida for the salt. Sweaty, unshowered, her pubis its own rough ocean. Saline, the meat of her as she bucked against my tongue, split open, gleaming.”

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“Yes to oysters swollen through butter. Yes to thighs cooled on glass, my hand a hot knife between. Yes to prosciutto, it's salt slick; to avocados bursting, ripe. Our teeth clanged. I tasted blood and chocolate. Yes to the fatthicksweet of it, to cream, to froth that rises, to the crunched lace of the ear and the tender behind the knee, to that join at the legs where she softened, dimpled, begged me to bite.”

Food And Sex
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“Once upon a time I'd left Los Angeles and been swallowed down the throat of a life in which my sole loyalty was to my tongue. My belly. Myself. My mother called me selfish and so selfish I became. From nineteen to twenty-five I was a mouth, sating. For myself I made three-day braises and chose the most marbled meats, I played loose with butter and cream. My arteries were young, my life pooling before me, and I lapped, luxurious, from it. I drank, smoked, flew cheap red-eyes around Europe, I lived in thrilling shitholes, I found pills that made nights pass in a blink or expanded time to a soap bubble, floating, luminous, warm. Time seemed infinite, then. I begged famous chefs for the chance to learn from them. I entered competitions and placed in a few. I volunteered to work brunch, turn artichokes, clean the grease trap. I flung my body at all of it: the smoke and singe of the grill station, a duck's breast split open like a geode, two hundred oysters shucked in the walk-in, sex in the walk-in, drunken rides around Paris on a rickety motorcycle and no helmet, a white truffle I stole and shaved in secret over a bowl of Kraft mac n' cheese for me, just me, as my body strummed the high taut selfish song of youth. On my twenty-fifth birthday I served black-market fugu to my guests, the neurotoxin stinging sweetly on my lips as I waited to see if I would, by eating, die. At that age I believed I knew what death was: a thrill, like brushing by a friend who might become a lover.”

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“Aida swung by with cookbooks, dietary stipulations, menus. To nouvelle and classique French fare we added Neolithic recipes free of dairy, medieval Italian recipes heavy on squash and almonds, early agrarian recipes so crammed with husky, fibrous grains that they would, in Aida's words, Make you shit till you see god. Modern additions included a vegan diet beloved of the world's best cricket player, astronaut supplements for bone density, foods charcoal-infused and nitrate-free.”

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“At the bottom of the passage, behind thick steel doors, I witnessed the true wealth of that country. Others have estimated the value in those rooms of grains, of nuts, of beans; of the millions in canned foie and white asparagus; of the greenhouses under their orange lights, and the vast spice grottos. I can't quote numbers. I can only say what happened when I pressed my face to a wheel of ten-year Parmigiano, how in a burst of grass and ripe pineapple I stood in some green meadow that existed only in the resonance, like a bell's fading peal, of that aroma. I can tell you how it was to cradle wines and vinegars older than myself, their labels crying out the names of lost traditions. And I can tell you of the ferocious crack in my heart when I walked into the deep freezer to see chickens, pigs, rabbits, cows, pheasants, tunas, sturgeon, boars hung two by two. No more boars roamed the world above, no Öland geese, no sharks; the day I climbed the mountain, there vanished wild larks. I knew, then, why the storerooms were guarded as if they held gold, or nuclear armaments. They hid something rarer still: a passage back through time. The animal carcasses were left unskinned. In the circulating air, the extinct revolved on their hooks to greet me.”

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“I meant to run down every road and up to every house if necessary. Movement conjured appetite, specific and sharp. For carne asada fries sweating in Styrofoam. For Australian fairy bread doused in sprinkles so plastic they'd outlast the coral reefs. For jian bing and soy milk and man tou strung each morning down Beijing's hutongs, where vendors were rumored to whiten their dough with lead paint, not fatal in such quantities, but sweet, addictive, you could cultivate a dangerous passion. Every artist needs a muse, the pastry chef had said, and it occurred to me that the muse might be myself.”

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“So much of what my generation had been promised disintegrated at our touch. Consider the friend, a painter of seascapes, who dreamed of affording waterfront property. On the day the levees broke, the Gulf flooded her studio and painted her walls with costly oils. Consider the friend who worked for six years at a company he hated on the promise of a sabbatical, only to be let go. The friend who complained about family reunions and lost every relative over the age of fifty to a virus. The friend who saved up to invest in a fund and saw her money dissolve like sugar on the tongues of bankers who barely got a scolding from the SEC. The life we'd been promised was a scam, the world a scam, the whole goddamn play a scam and there seemed nothing to do but burn it down as rioters did in Paris, New York, Nairobi—and then creep back through the embers because what other choice did we have?”

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“It shouldn't be here. This sedge grass is decorative bullshit he imported from Northern Asia. The lab spent two years modifying it to slot into our ecosystem, all so that the mountain would literally smell of honey. Terra di latte e miele, she said, mockingly. Thank god my father went into business, not poetry. He's far too much of a romantic. I laughed, incredulous at this portrait of my stiff employer, and Aida reddened. It is romantic, if you think about it. He planted the grass for my mother. She's one of those Catholic Koreans, painfully devout. You know. The promised land, Canaan, found after forty years of wandering the desert. The land of milk and honey.”

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“Strawberries sat abandoned in the fields by season's end, so ripe as to be barely solid, warm as heart's blood. Ambrosia, they call that variety, the food of gods. But the hubris of excess has mortal consequences. You can go blind, mad, drown in red. The second nature of strawberries is a sugar that turns to rot. They reappeared one by one as I vomited, shapeless and no longer sweet, those little, used, red hearts.”

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