Land of Milk and Honey

Aida is the narrator’s love interest and foil. Aida’s father was born poor on an Italian island and is implied to have Romani ethnicity, and her mother, Eun-Young, was born in Korea. While the narrator and Aida are similar in that they each have one Korean parent, they were raised in dramatically different socioeconomic classes. While the narrator and her mother were poor, Aida’s father raised Aida in a “bubble of privilege” (71), although he himself “did not grow up with [his] daughter’s privileges” but became wealthy in his adult life (158). Aida originally wanted to be a dancer, and Eun-Young supported this dream. However, her father convinced Aida to become a scientist instead. Before going to live on the mountain, Aida was working on her postdoctoral degree in evolutionary biology at the University of Milan. She meets the narrator when she is 20 years old.

At first, Aida seems to have no restrictions: The narrator thinks that Aida “flout[s] so many rules that [she]’d believed her free, by right of wealth and singular ferocity, from the stereotypes that trap[] [the narrator]” (141). Aida drives fast convertibles, trains dogs, and has authority in the secret labs. She is insatiable when it comes to food, often testing the narrator’s recipes and eating for pleasure rather than health, as her “palate [i]s at root a child’s, craving the rich and the sweet” (123). Aida’s position as the daughter of the narrator’s employer complicates her romantic relationship with the narrator, as does the fact that the narrator has to pretend to be Aida’s mother during Sunday dinners. Nevertheless, their sexual connection is at first very strong.

A rift develops between the women after Aida doesn’t intervene when her father assaults the narrator at Kandinsky’s request. She prioritizes her father’s wishes, especially his plans for Mars colonization, over the narrator’s physical safety. The romance completely deteriorates after Aida hits a child with a car in Milan but is not punished after her father uses his influence to circumvent the police. When the child dies, the narrator’s employer promises to pay the family, but it is the narrator who ends up giving the child’s family the money decades later.

Despite the car accident, the narrator asks Aida to run away with her as she leaves the mountain. Aida refuses, and she presumably dies when the spaceship ascending from the mountain explodes. However, the narrator hopes that Aida did not board the ship and looks for Aida in the places that they said they wanted to visit together, Seoul and Beijing, for as long as she lives.

Aida’s father, the narrator’s employer, is also never named. He makes millions as “a prophet of doom” (25), profiting from natural disasters and exploiting the vulnerable. When the narrator meets him, he is in his fifties and has darker skin than most of the people on the mountain, “though his hue verge[s] to artificial orange and he w[ears] so much makeup it [i]s hard to tell” (96). He hides that he comes from an Italian island with a large “Romani population” (158), as well as other details of his past. Aida’s father is socially awkward and has a grating voice, and his “authority [i]s built on fear” (76). He is also a reformed smoker with a poor sense of taste, so he leaves most choices about the menu to Aida. However, he insists on serving extreme and almost fantastically rare foods, like woolly mammoth and golden chimp, to impress his donors.

To the narrator, her employer seems inhumane: His “cold black eye” reminds her of predatory animals (72). This turns out to be the case, as he often becomes violent, assaulting the narrator at Kandinsky’s request and attempting to suffocate her when she leaves the mountain. When the narrator reveals her true identity to the meteorologist, she learns that her employer killed his first wife, Eun-Young, the woman he wants the narrator to impersonate during guest meals. He planted the grass that smells like honey, which she loved, out of guilt: “Every blade was the mark of a guilty man” (202).

Aida’s father is thus the main antagonist of the novel. He is also a relatively flat character, undergoing no psychological or emotional change throughout the novel. Instead, “there [i]s no body behind the mask. He [i]s the demeanor of a person forced to grow up servile, until the mask became he” (158). Her employer’s performance is his only personality; there is no depth to him.

The world’s richest man is also the only character who has a first and last name—a choice that Zhang makes to show his class difference from even the wealthy elite that populate the mountain: “Even to the wealthy he was so wealthy to be a different species” (136). Kandinsky “affect[s] the swagger of the West Coast tech elite” (137), which positions him as a man whose extreme privilege exempts him from standard behavioral expectations. Aida and her father spend much of their time trying to get Kandinsky to donate to their space project, as well as be a part of it. Kandinsky’s wealth also enables him to demand to satisfy his amoral and predatory urges. When he finds a hair in his food, he reveals himself to be a violent sexist: He refuses to be satisfied with Aida and the narrator groveling for forgiveness and requests that the narrator’s employer beat her. Around the time that the narrator leaves the mountain, Kandinsky pulls out of the Mars colonization project. There is speculation that this plays a role in the spaceship’s explosion.