Land of Milk and Honey

The color gray goes from symbolizing something negative to symbolizing something positive over the course of the novel. It initially represents the smog, the lackluster food that can be mass-produced during the time of the smog, and the lives of the people in the smog (as opposed to the people living on the mountain, above the smog). Reflecting on the time before the land of milk and honey, the narrator can’t “describe [her] life in the years leading up to this moment except in shades of gray” (68). The lack of variety in food, especially for a chef, makes life seem dull and colorless. Gray also symbolizes exhaustion; when the narrator cannot bear her situation, she “fe[els] only dull weariness. That gray” (111). Gray is placed in opposition to green—a color associated with nature, spring, and fertile soil. On the mountain, the narrator sees “green that is the herald of flavor and pleasure, that says: look, says: wait, says: taste” (43). Green is associated with joy, while gray is associated with unhappiness.

However, when the narrator visits Milan after being on the mountain for almost a year, she starts to see the beauty of gray. She observes a child obviously delighting in eating a gray sandwich. A woman making jian bing, which the narrator finds delicious, is also steeped in the color: “[T]he vendor’s hair was gray, too, as was the dubious batter in her mixing bowl” (184). After the gray food brings both the narrator and Aida joy, they dance in the streets, in the smog: “The shops turn up their artificial lights, and the gray blooms with pinks and purples so unlikely it seems we float through the atmosphere of some softer planet […] We dance until the song is over” (187). Her reconsideration of gray in part informs her choice to leave the mountain: She wants to try other gray foods and improve the gray world rather than escape it.

Eyes, which are connected to both seeing and seeking, are symbols of the inner truth of various characters in the novel. The eyes of the narrator’s employer are almost inhuman. She compares her “employer’s sunken black eye” to that of a swordfish (162)—cold, inscrutable, predatory. He is capable of abusing and murdering women, as well as exploiting and manipulating a wide variety of people. These violent tendencies, and his apparent lack of empathy, can be seen in his eyes. The narrator sometimes thinks that Aida’s eyes are unfeeling like her father’s. However, the narrator also notices “opaline points” in Aida’s eyes (134), finding a little more warmth in her than in her father.

Aida’s gaze is, occasionally, empathetic. She seems to truly see the narrator, particularly when the narrator is engaging in disordered eating. When Aida asks about the narrator’s lack of appetite, the narrator feels deeply understood: “How terrifying, how thrilling, to be seen” (115). Aida’s attention and gaze help the narrator regain her appetite and love of eating; she attempts to use the same kind of affectionate gaze on her cat, whose “gaze […] spur[s] [her] back to the stove: the idea that [she] might, this time, finally stir his appetite” (125). She sees the cat as her family and wants to give him what Aida gives her: hunger.

When Aida and the narrator retreat to the hidden space behind the mirror in her employee bathroom, the narrator imagines it observing her: “a hidden room. Even now I see it as an eye. It bulges, glassy, from the back of the restaurant; through the years, it watches me” (15). Aida reveals that there is a telescope in this hidden room and a direct line of sight to the stars. The telescopic eye represents the secret that Aida keeps from the narrator—that the residents of the mountain are planning to go to outer space. The narrator also uses this room to spy on the kitchen staff’s smoking spot, which “[i]s just visible from the glass eye” (106). She looks at the working-class humans on Earth and cares about their pleasure, while Aida looks away from Earth and longs to leave it.