CRYING IN H MART: BOOK REVIEW
In poet Cathy Park Hong’s essay collection Minor Feelings, she asks, “Does an Asian American narrative always have to return to the mother?” Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart, an extension of her 2018 New Yorker essay of the same name, suggests the answer might be yes. In Zauner’s debut book, the 32-year-old writer, singer, and songwriter reckons not only with the painful deterioration and loss of her mother Chongmi in 2014, but also wrestles with the shaping of her complex Korean American identity. By centering her memoir around Korean American supermarket chain H Mart, Zauner reveals all one needs to know about the relationships between Asian-American women and their mothers — that expressions of love, anger, grief, and everything in between are rarely ever cut and dried; something always gets lost in translation.
“Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart,” Zauner opens her memoir with the same suddenness with which her mother receives her cancer diagnosis. Zauner is only 25 years old when she finds out about her mother’s stage IV squamous-cell carcinoma. She is living in Philadelphia with aspirations of being a full-time musician. Chongmi is merely 56. She has never smoked a cigarette. She applies QVC cream on her face religiously. This wasn’t supposed to happen, Zauner expresses. Her anger at life’s inexplicable cruelty seeps through the pages.
Instead of describing her mother as she is, Zauner finds it easier to contrast Chongmi with her antithesis: not a “Mommy-Mom.” Chongmi was not the type of mother who showered her daughter in overbearing compliments or wasted her breath on life’s empty promises. Instead, her tough love, or as Zauner calls it, “brutal, industrial strength,” could be found in the lunches that always came neatly packed, or the secrets that were half-spilled during a fight, or the scolding that took the place of a band aid after an accident. For Zauner, perusing the aisles of H Mart and going on a trip to the Noryangjin Fish Market in Seoul with her mother screamed love more than the four-letter word ever could. And so it follows that it’s not the October anniversary of her mother’s death that triggers Zauner’s grief. It’s watching a Korean grandmother innocently slurp on seafood noodles in the H Mart food court — enjoying the sweet broth when her mother cannot. “Stop crying! Save your tears for when your mother dies,” Zauner’s mother would always tell her. And perhaps no one takes this advice as seriously as Zauner does.
Chongmi’s passing in 2014 occurs not as the book’s finale, but rather a critical turning point; that is to say, Zauner intentionally leaves ample space to dissect the way her mother’s absence alters the course of her life — covering ground all the way up to her band Japanese Breakfast’s 2017 tour concert at V Hall in Seoul. In doing so, Zauner eventually learns to delineate between her mother’s physical absence and her spiritual one. Despite not having the opportunity to call Chongmi “Umma'' to her face ever again, her mother’s presence still undeniably looms. And in the book’s final chapters, Zauner makes a return to food, with each dish unlocking a new, potent memory. Shortly after moving to her first apartment in Greenpoint, Zauner finds herself cooking new Korean dishes almost every night — sometimes following step-by-step recipes by Korean YouTube vlogger Maangchi and other times letting her hands and taste buds lead the way. She travels to all her local H Marts — stocking up on salted fish, red pepper flakes, and soybean paste — all the while crying in them too.
A year after Chongmi’s death, Zauner’s father puts her childhood home up for sale and tasks her with the responsibility of cleaning through her mother’s kimchi refrigerator. And instead of throwing away a rotting mix of cabbage and onion, Zauner finds an extensive collection of film photos stashed in jars she thought were filled with kimchi. Whether it’s enduring the long process of making a fermented vegetable dish or capturing her family’s simple joys, Chongmi deeply engages with practices of preservation; instead of letting something rot, she gives it a chance to enjoy new life. “If I could not be with my mother, I would be her,” Zauner concludes. And even after the inexplicable loss of a figure so deeply intertwined with her being, Zauner eventually finds moments of joy once more — relishing a life that, although it will never be the same, has taken on its own form.