May 31, 2021

Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner

I loved Michelle Zauner’s memoir, Crying in H Mart, a book which was born from a 2016 award-winning essay in Glamour about how learning to cook Korean food helped Zauner begin to heal from grieving her mother’s death. An experience made all the more complicated by the fact that Zauner, at age 25, had only just began knowing and appreciating her mother again after the tumultuous drama of her teenage years. Zauner’s mother was as strong a character as her daughter is—she writes about how her mother would yell at her when she got hurt, the opposite of the other mothers she knew who’d be all cuddles and consolation. That Zauner’s mother is Korean only underlines the gulf between them as Zauner is growing up in Oregon—her American father had met her mother while working abroad and then they’d come to America together. In many ways, Zauner and her mother are alien to each other for must of her life, and in this book she explores how much of that was culture versus the particular person her mother was.

Crying in H-Mart is a coming-of-age story, about how Zauner connects to her place in the world through losing the person who delivered her here. It’s not just about loss, but as much about abundant love—as her mother is dying, Zauner hastily organizes her wedding so her mother can be in attendance. She also becomes committed to caring for her mother during her illness, though has not idea what she’s signing up when she decides this. Her efforts are also thwarted by other caregivers to whom Zauner is just in the way—the connection between mother and daughter is ever being negotiated. As in any real story about death and dying, nothing ever goes according to script and there’s never anything close to closure. And the end is also its own kind of beginning, Zauner beginning to take control of her narrative, and as she starts to achieve success in writing and music (which Zauner performs as “Japanese Breakfast”). She also begins to see her mother as a more complicated person than she’d first supposed, as an artist in her own right, and that perhaps she and her mother aren’t as different as she thinks.

I’ve read other stories about children of immigrants growing up between cultures, about stories of Asian parenting ala Tiger Moms. Crying in H Mart takes on similar things, but with a depth and texture I haven’t encountered before. It’s a familiar story, but also a particular one, powerful for how it stands for itself most of all and one extraordinary ordinary mother-daughter relationship.