Land of Milk and Honey

How does socioeconomic class impact interpersonal relationships between the working class, the wealthy, and the 1%?

How does the narrator feel about haute cuisine and street food? How does her attitude change throughout the novel?

How do sexism, racism, and classism intersect in the narrator’s life?

Compare Eun-Young, the narrator’s mother, and the narrator as a mother herself. How do they affect their daughters? What gets passed down through the novel’s generations of women? How do the daughters transform their mothers’ legacies?

Compare Aida’s father, Kandinsky, and the meteorologist, the novel’s main male characters. How do they use and respond to authority? How do they wield power?

Zhang frequently uses incomplete sentences, omits punctuation, and takes out spaces between words. What are the effects of these techniques?

Compare the way that pets are treated in the novel. How does the narrator’s relationship to her cat compare to Aida’s relationship to her dogs?

Examine culpability in the novel. How do characters place blame? How do they escape or accept responsibility for wrongdoing?