This is a crude, poetic little book that explores the themes of playing God, genuine belief systems vs being bought out, isolation, and the attempts at forming community without true communication. But ultimately, I found this book to be an in-depth exploration of pleasure and the (often) senseless pursuit of it. 

Some aspects of this book reminds me so much of Triangle of Sadness, specifically the scene where all the passengers on the ship are vomiting in the dining hall yet the people surrounding them continue to eat until they, too, are vomiting and shitting. 

Zhang uses visceral language to describe food and the way in which food is eaten in this book. She reduces humans into salivating, unthinking animals as they eat those lower down on the food chain and I found it so interesting to see these characters gorging on food that they knew they’d throw up in the next paragraph—they were eating just because they had the privilege to do so. They were eating simply because the act of exercising said privilege gave them a dose of pleasure. 

Zhang then links this gorging on food to the act of seeking sexual pleasure by using very similar language during sex scenes and dinner scenes. That’s what I loved about the book the most. By doing this, Zhang highlights how our unnamed narrator and Aida’s relationship was an act of pleasure-seeking just for pleasure-seeking’s sake… a meal that they both (reluctantly) knew was never meant to be kept down. 

This concept of senselessly pursuing pleasure threads itself through everything in the book. Not only is it in the things that I’ve mentioned above, but it’s also in the way our narrator’s mother denounces her desire to be a fancy chef because she doesn’t understand the concept of eating food outside of it being a tool of sustenance. The concept also governs our narrator's decision

to leave the mountain behind; Aida doesn’t understand why she would go back to the countries plagued by smog when there’s so little there, but the pleasure our narrator ties to mung-flour is as overpowering as it is senseless so she leaves either way.

I do feel like the book gets almost too literary at points, with scenes that fail at advancing the slight plot that the book does have and some paragraphs so heavy with description that the initial point gets a little harder to grasp, but it wasn’t a big enough issue for me to ignore how beautifully lyrical the prose was overall.