C Pam Zhang, 34, was born in Beijing and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She was longlisted for the 2020 Booker prize with her debut, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, an otherworldly western centred on Chinese-American siblings in an alternative 19th century. Her second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, now out in paperback, follows a private chef who gets a job in a billionaire’s Alpine hideaway during a global famine caused by smog. The author Sarah Moss has praised it as “a rich novel of ideas, insisting on moral complexity in the end times”.
What led you to write this book?
Part of me felt itchy having been put in the mould of a writer of historical fiction. Land of Milk and Honey has been labelled dystopian, but when I was writing it in lockdown in 2021, reality felt so dystopian that I’d joke that it felt like our world plus five years. Where I was living at the time was a sort of enclave of tech billionaires in Washington state. I’d be walking around in my isolated life staring at these hedged-off estates, wondering what it was like inside their compounds with their private chefs and pools and basketball courts. I think the novel explores how we define and pursue pleasure in a world crumbling around us. To write about food was fun on a sheer visceral level, which I’d been missing a bit writing my first novel; those characters were simply not allowed to experience much pleasure.
Why did you choose Italy as the setting?
Simple escapism during the pandemic, partly. Certainly, I was aware of the drift towards fascism in Europe and elsewhere, but what was more important to me was that the setting is actually at the border of three countries. I’m interested in the arbitrary nature of borders. The chef [the novel’s Chinese-Korean protagonist] is herself an exile from America, where she was born and raised, because of a law that prevents citizens whose parents were born in another country from getting back in during this mass famine. Through my whole life I’ve seen people I love go through struggles with passports and visas and come up against this faceless and quite irrational idea of the nation and who is allowed inside it. But the European location was also important for getting into a conversation about culinary hierarchies: whose food is deemed worthy of a $100-a-plate charge and whose food is automatically considered second – or third – class? Often these conversations stand in for conversations about cultures at large.
The novel’s acknowledgments take the form of an alphabetised list putting authors you’ve read side by side with memorable eating experiences, including a chip butty from a fast-food van...
Is there anything more complete than the carb-on-carb pleasure of a chip butty? The expected form of a literary acknowledgment page is quite stiff. I wanted to feel free to say that, as much as reading The Lover by Marguerite Duras was important to writing this book, so was eating – and not just fine dining, but really simple, greasy food.
When did you first feel the impulse to write?
I was writing terrible stapled together books when I was four, five, six years old; my first language was Mandarin and there are apocryphal family stories of me reciting ancient Chinese poets. But from the moment I graduated from college until maybe six months after How Much of These Hills Is Gold came out, I worked in tech in San Francisco. I was repressing the instinct [to write]; coming up through an impoverished background, I had a hard time letting go of the stability of a job. How Much of These Hills Is Gold started out as a short story I wrote during a period I’d taken off work to live on my savings in Bangkok, but I tried to put it away and resist the novel-writing impulse: it was scary to embark on this long project with no hope of reward. I’ve had a lot of difficulty giving myself permission. I’ve been trying to embrace the idea, in my writing and in other aspects of my life, that uncertainty can be fruitful and not just scary.
What did you read as a child?
My family couldn’t afford books and we also moved a great deal [in the US, after leaving China, when Zhang was four]. If your local library is small, you quickly run out of titles you might have chosen and just read everything. I’m trying to read like that again, because I love that sense of truly being a naive reader, where anything can come to you from the shelf and every book is a portal. I was drawn to books that offered some vision of enchantment, whether that was science fiction in the form of Animorphs [by KA Applegate] – I loved that series – or CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy, about a philologist who is kidnapped and wakes up on a spaceship. Or really pulpy horroresque series by Christopher Pike and VC Andrews [author of Flowers in the Attic]; to a preteen, the weird sex stuff was like toxic candy.
Tell us what you’ve been reading lately.
During the pandemic, I was having a harder time reading fiction. I found solace in slowly reading more biographies of women writers and artists, seeing proof that women artists could live through periods of incredible turbulence and still make art. The Invention of Angela Carter [by Edmund Gordon] was great – it was very much about her canniness in constructing her persona. Now I’m reading a biography of Jean Rhys. I’ve only read one of her novels, but I’m pleasantly surprised to see that she went through periods of her life where not only did she not write, but she also did not read. There’s this anxiety to professionalise as a writer – write every day, treat it like a job – and it’s fascinating to see that there’s no linear relationship between input and output when it comes to creativity. For me, it feels like there’s a vein you tap into sometimes if you’re lucky – but if the well’s dry, there’s really nothing you can do about it. It’s something I’ve believed in my own life and it’s kind of good to see it on the page.
• Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang is published by Penguin (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
