I think I have never been as hungry reading a book as when reading Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. Zauner vividly describes the many Korean dishes her mother used to cook. The recipes sound fiddly and time-consuming but Zauner convinced me there is definitely a pay-off for this hard work. Whilst I have rarely eaten Korean food, and often was not familiar with the dishes Zauner described, her words made me salivate and desperate for some Korean food.
After her mother’s death in 2014, Zauner, daughter of an American father and a Korean mother, finds it difficult to legitimate her Korean heritage. Living in America, and not able to speak Korean as well as she would like, she almost feels like an imposter, claiming an identity that she does not fully feel she is allowed to claim. The death of her mother cements this feeling, and food is the one thing that keeps her connected to the Korean part of her identity.
“Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.
(…)
H Mart is freedom from the single-aisle ‘ethnic’ section in regular grocery stores. They don’t prop Goya beans next to bottles of sriacha here. Instead, you’ll likely find me crying by the banchan refrigerators, remembering the taste of my mom’s soy-sauce eggs and cold radish soup.”
— Zauner (2021, Page:3)
H mart is the place where Zauner still can find glimpses of her mother. The aisles of produce and the smells found there bring a level of recognition that she is not able to find elsewhere.
For people with a mixed heritage, the loss of a parent can feel even more pronounced, as this loss not only marks the loss of the mother figure, but can also feel like losing a ticket to get access to a specific cultural identity.
“Now that she was gone, there was no one left to ask about these things. The knowledge left unrecorded died with her. What remained were documents and my memories, and now it was up to me to make sense of myself, aided by the signs she left behind.”
— Zauner (2021, Page: 223)
Crying in H mart had me hooked from the first page. It is not only a memoir about the complexity of identity but also a memoir that reveals the complexity of the mother-figure and mother-daughter relationships. Zauner’s mother was a mother who loved her, but not a loving mother as is stereotypically portrayed in popular culture. Zauner candidly describes how neither of her parents were perfect people. And neither is/was she. Zauner does not posthumously idealize her mother, but instead highlights the reality of her relationship with her mother, which may not have been the relationship she would have liked, but was the relationship she had.
Memoirs like Crying in H Mart exist around the tension of on the one hand trying to work through grief and to explore this creatively, and on the other hand feeling uncomfortable for ‘benefiting’ from this loss, because the work is successful. Zauner always wanted to be an artist and the success she’s had with her band Japanese Breakfast is (partly) based on the songs that are inspired by the death of her mother.
“I wished that my mother could see me, could be proud of the woman I’d become and the career I’d built, the realization of something she worried for so long would never happen. Conscious that the success we experienced revolved around her death, that the songs I sang memorialized her, I wished more than anything and through all contradiction that she could be there.”
— Zauner (2021, Page: 232-233)
In addition to a successful musical career that celebrates and remembers her mother, Zauner now also has a New York Time bestseller book that does the same. I for one am glad Zauner decided to both write down her story and to publish it. Whilst it might be uncomfortable to profit from death and loss, it is an important story that needs to be told and read by others.
Crying in H mart is a mouth-watering and engaging read that unpacks the complexity of the relationship between loss and cultural heritage and the impact creative practices, such as writing, can have in ‘working’ through your grief.
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