Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

Zauner, Michelle

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Annotated by:
Schilling, Carol
  • Date of entry: Jun-23-2022

Summary

While Michelle Zauner’s remarkable memoir is an expression of her profound grief after her mother died, her story simultaneously reflects on her complicated relationship with the woman she called Umma and with her own Korean-American identity. The H Mart of the title, an Asian grocery chain, provided the ingredients for the dishes that suffused their relationship, her identity, and her grief. Food and memory animate the memoir itself.  

Zauner was 25 when her mother was diagnosed with an aggressive late-stage, mid-life cancer. Also the only daughter of a white American father, Zauner was a rebellious child, resentful of Umma’s version of tough love. Growing up the lone Asian student in her Oregon community, she felt both othered at school and an outsider among her Seoul relatives. Just as she was beginning to appreciate her Korean heritage and understand her mother’s love, she learned about Umma’s diagnosis.  

The first half of the memoir exuberantly brings to life scenes from Zauner’s childhood and her brief post-college years in New York City, interrupted by her dedicated caregiving. Attempting to save her mother, Zauner at times overwhelmed her with her native foods. “I would radiate joy and positivity,” Zauner pledged. “I would learn to cook for her—all the things she loved to eat, and I would single-handedly keep her from withering away” (69). Her optimistic culinary efforts produce a poetry of exacting descriptions of the flavors and textures and preparation of those foods. It’s grimly ironic that the chemotherapy her mother endured wiped out her ability to taste or digest Zauner’s loving offerings of health.  

The second half turns from living with Umma to living without her. Wishing to sustain her bond with her mother as Zauner grieved, she continued to prepare her Korean family’s recipes. Walking down H Mart’s redolent isles generated “waves” of sorrow that mark the enduring ebb and flow of her grief. Unsuccessful with conventional therapy, she found cooking a preferable form of self-care. “Every dish I cooked exhumed a memory. Every scent and taste brought me back for a moment to an unravaged home. Knife-cut noodles in chicken broth took me back to lunch at Myeongdong Gyoja . . . The kalguksu so dense from the rich beef stock and starchy noodles it was nearly gelatinous. My mother ordering more and more refills of their famously garlic-heavy kimchi” (212-213). As if miraculously, a few years after Umma died, Zauner’s itinerant music career ignited. The band she has fronted, Japanese Breakfast, recorded an album, Psychopop (with a song she wrote about her mother, “In Heaven”). Then they toured the U.S. and South Korea. Although her mother was skeptical about a musical career, Zauner imagined that Umma would be “glad that I had finally found a place where I belonged” (233). 

Commentary

Crying in H Mart is many books in one. All of them worth reading. Yes, it’s a memoir about grief. It’s also a vibrant, reflective coming-of-age story and a caregiver’s narrative. It’s a cancer narrative. It’s a memoir about a mother-daughter relationship and about living in the United States with a hyphenated identity. Food infuses each of those stories. Zauner’s detailed descriptions of cooking and consuming invite readers to her table, reminding us—as previous celebrated writers have—of the power of the senses to evoke memory and the power of food to strengthen human bonds. Food also powers Zauner’s self-understanding and the unexpected transformational love for her mother: “The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me . . . If I could not be with my mother, I would be her” (223-224).  

Zauner’s writing is itself active and effervescent, even through her grief. She holds a steady, unflinching gaze on cancer and on death, her mother’s and other beloved family members’. Writing candidly about her family, Zauner is equally critically reflective about her own life. Her narrative makes the immediacy of her felt experiences, her grief and her joys, palpable. “Let me feel this,” she writes, dismissing her Korean family’s admonition to save her tears (202). An unforgettable image of the process of transformation that Zauner experienced unfolds in her description of making the Korean staple kimche. It is a slow, exacting process of fermenting cabbage that at first strikes her as “controlled death” because “[l]eft alone, a head of cabbage molds and decomposes. It becomes rotten, inedible. But when brined and stored, the course of its decay is altered. Sugars are broken down to produce lactic acid, which protects it from spoiling. Carbon dioxide is released and the brine acidifies. It ages. Its color and texture transmute. It exists in time and transforms. So it is not quite controlled death, because it enjoys a new life altogether” (223). 

Miscellaneous

In 2018 Michelle Zauner published the first chapter of her memoir in The New Yorker as an essay also titled “Crying in H Mart.” The completed book has been enthusiastically reviewed and recognized on many notable “best” lists. The memoir was both accessible and challenging to my undergraduates. Many shared Zauner’s struggles. Almost all chose to write about it. Zauner has been commissioned to write the script for the film adaptation of Crying in H Mart and create its soundtrack.

Publisher

Alfred A Knopf

Place Published

New York

Edition

2021

Page Count

239