Book Review: Crying in H Mart

We’re walking it back a few years to a book both beautiful and poignant, one that rips you open and lets you peer into the reality of grief. Crying in H Mart is a memoir of identity.

Michelle Zauner is the only Korean American girl in her Eugene Oregon school, and right away you can feel her struggling and stuck between two very different worlds. One foot trying to belong to the youth culture of Americana, the other firmly planted in her mother’s Korean heritage. Zauner doesn’t sugarcoat her adolescence, there’s a sadness there, there’s emotional and physical abuse, there’s a solitary childhood and a longing for emotional support. You can feel the tension within her family and from a young age her relationship with her mother is fraught. It’s so full of cracks it sometimes makes you wonder if there’s any love at all.

But it’s in the aisles of H Mart where these feelings start to turn. At its core, this book is about the deep connection of food and how the preparing and sharing of ingredients can be the greatest form of generosity, especially when words fail. The hallways and store shelves in H Mart bring out the delicacies that would shape Michelle’s childhood. Pork belly with seafood noodles, kimchi, jolly pong, tteokguk with gochujang. For Michelle and her mother it is their shared sanctuary, and it’s the bond that binds them.

“Food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she could seem, constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations, I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she prepared.”

Preparing food for Michelle is how her mother was able to best articulate her feelings. And that also becomes Michelle’s immediate response upon learning of her mother’s cancer diagnosis. Having forged a path as a musician as a young adult, the news of her mother’s terminal illness causes her to immediately drop everything and move back home to Eugene to care and cook for her dying mother. It becomes her life goal to make sure her mom is getting enough calories as she recreates the food of her childhood, cooking the very things her mother cooked for her. There is a comfort in preparing food that takes the place of words. It fuels Michelle’s way to process grief and in the aftermath of her mother’s death all she can do is make inordinate amounts of kimchi, it’s the only thing that makes sense.

Crying in H Mart is about the memories we take for granted, and those little moments that we can’t get back, but remember forever. And in the end this book is a tribute to all the ways Michelle’s mother truly cared for her, the words she never said, but the ways her food often said everything.

“In H Mart, I’m collecting the evidence that the Korean half of my identity didn’t die when my mother did. I’m not just on the hunt for cuttlefish and three bunches of scallions for a buck: I’m searching for memories.”

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If you want to know in more detail about all the incredible Korean ingredients and dishes that are talked about in this book, Ars Nihil made an amazing glossary/zine that you can download for free.

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Outside of penning this beautiful memoir, Michelle Zauner is best known as the lead singer of Japanese Breakfast, a dreamy indie-pop band. Their first album Psychopomp was composed of songs written in the weeks after her mothers death.

Her music video for “The Body is a Blade” features recreated photographs of Michelle and her mother. It’s worth a listen and a watch.