This 'ultra-wealthy' Seattle suburb inspired dystopian novel’s take on pleasure and privilege

Reading C Pam Zhang's "Land of Milk and Honey" is like walking up to the finest buffet while a strict personal trainer eyeballs every morsel you put on your plate.

You want it, but you feel guilty for that wanting.

The novel is set in a world on the edge of dystopia. A terrible smog has ravaged the planet and food is scarce. That is unless you're one of the lucky few who have escaped to an elite enclave at the top of a mountain that rises above the pollution choking the rest of the world — the world that cannot afford an escape.

That's where we meet Zhang's main character, an unnamed chef who is hired to feed these elites with a seemingly endless supply of fine ingredients — and other pleasures.

Zhang will be at Town Hall Seattle on May 8 to talk about the book. And it's a rather fitting setting to do so, because Zhang found herself in a place not so different from that mountaintop she imagined while she wrote the book in 2020.

"I was living in Medina, Washington, which, as you probably know, is home to Bill Gates," Zhang told KUOW. "I wasn't living in one of those kinds of compounds. It was this funny little pandemic-year situation where we were living on this small house in the back of a landlord's property because he couldn't find the workers to flip the house, essentially."

So, there she was, "living in this strange but beautiful place with spiders in the basement and a gorgeous view of the lake."

And Zhang found herself among people, wealthy people, who had constructed a community that also isolated them from each other behind enormous hedges and long driveways.

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"I would walk my dog through the streets of Medina, where I think only once or twice saw another soul," Zhang recalled. "It was this truly eerie experience of simultaneously living embedded among the ultra-wealthy and yet aware that I was distinctly not a part of that... that there was no community among them."

It was striking at a time when so many people all over the world were starving for connection, yet locked away, hoping to survive a pandemic. She was left wondering how one finds pleasure and "a lifeline back to understanding the world" in the midst of catastrophe.

In "Land of Milk and Honey," part of the answer for the chef comes in the form of a relationship with her powerful employer's daughter. They indulge their desires for each other and for food no longer on most tables — if it was ever on a modern table at all (no spoilers, don't worry).

"In many ways, I'm upset that the word 'pleasure' has been taken over by these capitalistic images of money," Zhang said. "Whereas, I think for many people — and certainly for myself and for the protagonist of the novel — it turns out that pleasure is very singular and small. ... Pleasure can be a radical and a revolutionary act."

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The chef's own revolutionary act doesn't come until later — after a very unusual twist — when she realizes "luxury ingredients alone do not make pleasure," even for someone whose career revolves around beautiful food and the feelings it evokes. After all, Zhang said, rich foods can make you sick.

Add that to her longing for gatherings with friends around food cooked with love, and Zhang found herself reflecting on a deep mourning for herself, for humanity, and for the planet.

"To me, this was a way of grappling with the grief that many of us feel about the loss of biodiversity, whether that's expressed in food crops or animal life or habitat to live in," she said. "There has to be a way of acknowledging and mourning what we no longer have access to, and at the same time, turning our creative energies to figuring out what we can do with what we have."

Not every writer has a window into an elite's idea of paradise like Zhang did, but through her, readers get a glimpse of that strange existence. She invites readers to consider what it means to survive and to thrive. More importantly, she invites readers to think about the privilege it is to accomplish the latter.

Hear more from Zhang on KUOW's Meet Me Here.