By Louise Kim
When I sat down on my couch one September afternoon to read Crying in H Mart, the sun was streaking across the sky and I was eager to thumb through the brand-new paper. When I flipped over the last page, the sky was pitch-black, I was deeply dehydrated, and the mountains of used tissues around me rivaled those of the Himalayas. I’m writing this not to scare you away from Michelle Zauner’s masterpiece, but to draw you to it. After all, this is the first book I’ve ever read that caused me to burst into tears by the third page.
Crying in H Mart is a memoir by indie singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner, better known by her group name, Japanese Breakfast. Zauner recounts the story of her bittersweet childhood and adolescence as a biracial Korean American in the rural, majority-white town of Eugene, Oregon, struggling with her mother’s high expectations and a world that seeks to sort her into two categories: Korean or American, Asian or white. She recalls her treasured biennial trips to Seoul, where she and her mother would bond over night-time refrigerator raids in her grandmother’s apartment.
Zauner writes about her increasing distance from her Korean identity as she moves out for college, finds work as a waitress, and performs with her band. However, when Zauner is twenty-five, her mother is diagnosed with cancer, which both Zauner and her father hope her mother will overcome. Her mother’s decline and eventual death lead Zauner to reckon with her identity as a Korean American and reclaim her mother’s gifts of taste, language, and tradition. In the process of reclaiming these, Zauner attempts to keep her mother’s memory alive through cooking Korean meals that her mother had made for her and through frequent trips to Korean supermarkets such as H Mart.
Zauner’s book is truly a sensory experience — I could taste the sentences and hear the musicality of her words. Her storytelling is lyrical, honest, and exquisite. The shifts between stories of food, loss, and family are seamless. It is her intimate anecdotes that shine the brightest — throughout the book, these memories are painted with the richest details and a special kind of universality.
One of the most salient qualities of this memoir is the evocation of food. Zauner’s mouth-watering descriptions of Korean dishes like tteokbokki, jatjuk, and doenjang jjigae bring the senses to life, transport us right to her table, and invite us into her story. These cuisines serve as tokens of the profound love between Zauner and her mother, and repair the connection between Zauner and her Korean heritage.
Crying in H Mart is, at its core, about Zauner’s relationship with her mother and its complexity, nevertheless enduring through hardship, friction, loyalty, pain, and love. Zauner recounts the details that bring this relationship alive, like eating rice crackers together after school. She explores this personal bond while writing in a universal, relatable way — I could see both myself and my mother throughout the pages. Zauner captures the entire experience of her mother’s illness and death and the grief that follows with candor and tenderness.
Zauner’s writing, frank and beautiful and heart-wrenching, moved me to tears throughout the book. There are many similarities between me — a Korean American navigating my third culture experience and bonding with my mother, especially through food — and Zauner, which likely led me to see myself directly in her shoes and feel her life events more profoundly. Yet, every reader can be touched following Zauner’s grief and love, finding a part of themselves woven into this memoir. Reading the book is like experiencing her life alongside her, or even as her.
Zauner passes me the baton: it’s my turn to cry in the H Mart food court while eating Korean food — the various colorful side dishes, the spicy seafood noodles, the boxes of crispy Korean fried chicken — and connect with my heritage. Zauner inspires us all to accept the heartbreak in our lives, celebrate the joyous and nostalgic moments, and find a way to channel our emotions. For Zauner, it’s through making and eating Korean food, and creating music that honors her and her mother’s experiences and identities. Crying in H Mart is a poignant, must-read masterpiece of loss and growth, endurance and resilience, and above all, hope.
“In fact, she was both my first and second words: Umma, then Mom. I called to her in two languages. Even then I must have known that no one would ever love me as much as she would.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart
Crying in H Mart is available from Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Eastwind Books, Powell’s City of Books, and Vroman’s Bookstore.
Louise Kim is a Korean American student at the Horace Mann School in The Bronx, NY. Their writing has been published in a number of publications, including Brown Sugar Lit, Green Ink Poetry, Gypsophila Zine, The WEIGHT Journal, and Panoply Zine. Her work has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and the National High School Poetry Contest.