Brought to you by Penguin.

Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about writing.

I'm Nihal Athen, and today I'm speaking to

the Beijing-born American author, C. Pam Zhang about her book, Land of Milk and Honey. A wonderful,

morally complex novel that plays on ideas about power and resistance. Her first book,

How Much of These Hills is Gold, was not only long listed for the

Booker Prize in 2019, but it was also one of Barack Obama's books of the year. I think he'll

like this one too. I certainly did. Now, Pam, I'm so pleased you can join us and welcome to the

Penguin Podcast. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Have you, or should I say, how close have you been to extreme wealth?

Have you been in those rooms?

Have you met those people?

It depends on one's definition of extreme wealth.

I used to work in tech in San Francisco,

so I certainly was in close quarters with millionaires. I would say that those in my book are the 0.001%. I have not been in rooms with them, but the book came about partly as a

result of a year I spent living

in a strange little town in Washington State called Medina, where my neighbors included at the time

Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. And so a good deal of the imaginative quality of the book

comes from walking around, and I was never

invited in. I never, you know, rubbed elbows with them. But just wondering about what kinds of

lives people were living behind these massive gates, these hedges that cut out the rest of the

world and what kinds of communities they did or did not have there.

...