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).
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