Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Title: Crying in H Mart
Author: Michelle Zauner
Published: 2021
Type: Non-fiction
Pages: 239
If I’m being honest, there’s a lot of anger. I’m angry at this old Korean woman I don’t know, that she gets to live and my mother does not, like somehow this stranger’s survival is at all related to my loss. That someone my mother’s age could still have a mother. Why is she here slurping up spicy jjamppong noodles and my mother isn’t? Other people must feel this way. Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it.
I screamed in her language, in my mother tongue. My first word. Hoping she’d hear her little girl calling, and like the quintessential mother who’s suddenly filled with enough strength to lift the car and save her trapped child, she’d come back for me. She’d wake up for just a moment. Open her eyes and tell me goodbye. Impart something, anything, to help me move forward, to let me know it’d all work out. Above all, I wanted so desperately for her last words not to be pain. Anything, anything at all but that.
In Brief:
My favorite book so far this year! It’s gorgeous – I’m just blown away by Zauner’s writing. It’s almost musical; you can practically taste the food she describes; she goes into the mother-daughter relationship, grief, love, and identity in a way that’s so so moving. A very strong recommendation!
Rating: 4.8 *
Plot Summary:
Building on the 2018 essay that went viral, Crying in H Mart is part memoir, part love-letter to Zauner’s mother Chongmi, part homage to Korean food. Born in Seoul and raised in Oregon, Zauner has a complex relationship with her mother growing up. They bond over food, but clash over just about everything else – Chongmi is exacting, Zauner rebellious.
At age twenty-five, when Zauner is living as a musician in Philadelphia and finally reconciling with her mother, Chongmi is diagnosed with cancer. Zauner moves back home, determined to make up for the years by tending to her, specifically cooking all the food they both love – only to find the treatments have ruined Chongmi’s appetite. She dies just five months later.
This is just over halfway through the book. Zauner takes the time to dwell on the grief. She grapples with how to process her loss – not just with her mother, but with the closest tie she had to her Korean culture. Eventually, she takes to visiting H Mart and cooking Korean food to connect to her memory and heritage. This helps, but the loss is enduring, without the cliche of a silver lining.
Where I’m At:
I have a hard time writing about this book – I just loved it too much. Just flipping through my highlights and notes, I’ve started crying again. My “review” section will likely just be throwing quotes into this document and crying some more.
On paper, it’s maybe surprising that I felt as personally moved as I do. I consider myself very empathetic, sure, but there’s still the daunting fact that I have nothing obviously in common with Zauner. She’s a rebellious musician; she’s biracial; her mother is dead. I’m an anxious rule-follower, squarely white, with a luckily healthy mother/family.
But I think in some ways, this past year has caused some general, unprocessed grief. Death has been everywhere, hovering nearby even if, for me, it remained something abstract and nameless. Zauner dives straight into it, and she doesn’t let the reader look away. She’s painfully specific, perhaps humanizing the pain that I’ve had difficulty naming.
Getting Into it:
This damn book broke my heart so many times. I’ll give just a few examples:
1. Zauner shows her love for her mother through her memorization of the foods she loves, all the details she collects, remembers specifically despite not being able to remember the date her Chongmi died:
What I never seem to forget is what my mother ate. She was a woman of many “usuals.” Half a patty melt on rye with a side of steak fries to share at the Terrace Cafe after a day of shopping. An unsweetened iced tea with a half a packet of Splenda, which she would insist she’d never use on anything else. Minestrone she’d order “steamy hot,” not “steaming hot,” with extra broth from the Olive Garden. On special occasions, half a dozen oysters on the half shell with champagne mignonette and “steamy hot” French onion soup from Jake’s in Portland. She was maybe the only person who’d request “steamy hot” fries from a McDonald’s drive-through in earnest. Jjamppong, spicy seafood noodle soup with extra vegetables from Cafe Seoul, which she always called Seoul Cafe, transposing the syntax of her native tongue. She loved roasted chestnuts in the winter though they gave her horrible gas. She liked salted peanuts with light beer. She drank two glasses of chardonnay almost every day but would get sick if she had a third. She ate spicy pickled peppers with pizza. At Mexican restaurants she ordered finely chopped jalapenos on the side. She ordered dressings on the side. She hated cilantro, avocados, and bell peppers. She was allergic to celery. She rarely ate sweets, with the exception of the occasional pint of Haagen-Dazs, a bag of tangerine jelly beans, one or two See’s chocolate truffles around Christmastime, and a blueberry cheesecake on her birthday. She rarely snacked or took breakfast. She had a salty hand.
I know it’s a lot. But that’s the point. Cutting it off, even for the purposes of this post, wouldn’t do it justice. Zauner shamelessly goes on and on, overwhelming the reader, showing a vulnerable desperation to hold onto every little detail. She doesn’t give you a break or lighten her grief, because she doesn’t have that privilege.
2. Zauner’s earnest attempts to make amends for her childhood totally destroyed me. She’s child-like, naive, desperate. She was the same age as me when she moved home – twenty-five, an adult yet still close enough to childhood to revert when it came to her mother.
This could be my chance, I thought, to make amends for everything. For all the burdens I’d imposed as a hyperactive child, for all the vitriol I’d spewed as a tortured teen. For hiding in department stores, throwing tantrums in public, destroying her favorite objects. For stealing the car, coming home on mushrooms, drunk driving into a ditch. I would radiate joy and positivity and it would cure her. I would wear whatever she wanted, complete every chore without protest. I would learn to cook for her – all the things she loved to eat, and I would singlehandedly keep her from withering away. I would repay her for all the debts I’d accrued. I would be everything she ever needed. I would make hre sorry for ever not wanting me to be there. I would be the perfect daughter.
3. When it finally happens, Zauner doesn’t look away from her mother’s death, doesn’t gracefully move onto the funeral like so many stories might. She lingers on the physicality of it, the difficulty of dressing Chongmi’s dead body, her own physical pain. She’s totally raw, so that it’s almost embarrassing to read – as if you’re reading her diary.
Rigor mortis made it extremely difficult to dress her. Her arms were so stiff I was afraid of breaking them as I pushed them through the sleeves. Her body was heavy and when I set down her weight, her head plopped onto the pillow and her eyes bounced open. I let out a wail so full of anguish, neither Peter nor my father dared to enter. I kept at it, pushing at her dead limbs. My own body collapsing beside her every other moment to writhe and cry and scream into the mattress. Overwhelmed by wretchedness, I had to pause to let it settle. I was not prepared for this. No one had prepared me for this. Why must I feel it? Why must I have this memory? They were just going to put her in a bag, like trash to be removed. They were just going to burn her.
This passage reminds me, again, of how young Zauner is. How unfair that she must go through something so difficult. I’m reminded of my Nana, whose mother died when she was very young as well. I’m reminded of a close high school friend, whose mother died just about a month ago. I’m reminded that I should call my other mother more often.
Okay, moving on from just the sad parts. You should already be able to tell that Zauner’s writing is fantastic, but what stood out to me specifically was the descriptions.
If you’ve read a few of my posts, you may have caught on that I don’t exactly fall into the Hemingway school of thought. I like a good, well-chosen adjective, a detailed and complete vision. Zauner achieves this beautifully, both in her descriptions of people, and of food:
I was afraid of my grandmother. She spoke harshly and loudly, and knew maybe fifteen words in English, so it always seemed like she was angry. She never smiled in pictures and her laugh was like a cackle that ended in loud hacking and coughing. She was as hunched over as an umbrella handle and always wore pajama pants and shirts with glittering, rough fabrics.
Crispy Korean fried chicken conjured bachelor nights with Eunmi. Licking oil from our fingers as we chewed on the crispy skin, cleansing our palates with draft beer and white radish cubes as she helped me with my Korean homework. Blean-bean noodles summoned Halmoni slurping jjajangmyeon takeout, huddled around a low table in the living room with the rest of my Korean family.
It’s the food that really makes the book magical. Korean food conjures memories for Zauner, and she transports the reader right along with her – from the taste on her tongue to the stories swirling in her head.
Gosh, I could go into so much more but I’m fast approaching the self-imposed limit I have for these posts. There’s so much more reflection on the parent-child relationship – of the strangeness of being part of someone and yet entirely different, the slow process of discovering and accepting that fact. There’s so much more on Zauner’s identity as Korean-American, the way that belonging was something to prove, yet also something out of her control.
But I guess you’ll have to read the book for that. And you absolutely should. I’ll try to stop crying now.
*If you’re curious, this is the highest I’ve rated a book since I started keeping track in ~2017. The other ones that also received a 4.8 were Mother Night, American War, Educated, and The Nickel Boys (reviewed here last year). I don’t totally remember what was so terribly special about American War (though it was very good), but will stand by past-me’s reaction. I track my books here.
EDIT - Actually, I gave Less, possibly my all-time favorite book, a 4.9.
