Crying in H Mart
Michelle Zauner
- 6 minutes read - 1120 wordsAuthor: Michelle Zauner
Rating: ★★★
After seeing their excellent performance on SNL Season 47’s finale, I was very into the band “Japanese Breakfast.”
As I read up on the band, I realized that the name of their vocalist rang a bell from a display I’d seen at The Strand earlier that day by chance: Michelle Zauner. Creative, dreamy, shoegaze-inspired rocker and memoirist? The reviews of the book were strongly positive and so I put it in my library queue.
With recent “The challenges of growing up (half-?)-Asian in America as a dutiful, Asian daughter” media front of mind with Stephanie Hsu’s turn Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, Pixar/Disney’s Turning Red, and Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Zauner’s book is part of a millennial movement that sees the “dutiful daughter” being investigated with tools from anti-racism, feminism, and outmoded Orientalist hangover.
You know you’re in for “why did my parents cook this for school lunch?” à la the comedy of Margaret Cho from the 90’s, but you’re also going to get questions about the sexual politics between her (white) father and his wife, the feminism of an thorough homemaker, and a peek into the closely-held heartbreaks of South Korean women. On top of all that, Zauner sets the stakes high in the first pages: we know that her mother doesn’t live through this story and that tragedy lies ahead.
While these sorts of stories always have the “cringe, why is our family’s food so weird” moment, its the food that serves as a thread throughout the challenged youth, painful decline, and tragic death of her mother. Paragraph after paragraph features Zauner describing the comfort foods, the smells, and the flavors of her mother’s Korean cuisine. After I finished, it’s no surprise I bought a bulgogi package at Trader Joe’s. Zauner has a real talent for food writing. I wish she’d open a restaurant based on the dishes in the book so we could taste what she so lusciously described.
Zauner is also adept at describing the painful awkward years of middle school:
Such was puberty, one big masochistic joke set in the halfway house of middle school, where kids endure the three most confusing and sensitive years of their lives…girls who’ve already sprouted D cups and know about blow jobs sit beside girls in trainers from the Gap who still have crushes on anime characters.
And can be gently touching:
Her art was the love that beat on in her loved ones, a contribution to the world that could be just as monumental as a song or a book.
I enjoyed Zauner’s invitation to see life through different eyes.
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"author": "Michelle Zauner",
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"highlight": "H Mart is where your people gather under one odorous roof, full of faith that they’ll find something they can’t find anywhere else.",
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"highlight": "White people were always going to the doctor. But when I got hurt, my mom was livid, as if I had maliciously damaged her property.",
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"highlight": "Observing Colette made me question my mother’s dreams. Her lack of purpose seemed more and more an oddity, suspect, even anti-feminist. That my care played such a principal role in her life was a vocation I naively condemned, rebuffing the intensive, invisible labor as the errand work of a housewife who’d neglected to develop a passion or a practical skill set. It wasn’t until years later, after I left for college, that I began to understand what it meant to make a home and just how much I had taken mine for granted.",
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"highlight": "tried to see myself through my mother’s shrewd eye, pinpoint the parts of me she’d pick apart. I wanted to impress her, to demonstrate how much I’d grown and how I could thrive without her. I wanted to return an adult.",
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"highlight": "I could not even cry in his presence for fear he would take the moment over, pit his grief against mine in a competition of who loved her more, and who had more to lose.",
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"highlight": "After two weeks of fermentation, it was perfect. The ideal complement to every meal, and a daily reminder of my competence and hard work. The whole process made me appreciate kimchi so much more.",
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"highlight": "She was my champion, she was my archive. She had taken the utmost care to preserve the evidence of my existence and growth, capturing me in images, saving all my documents and possessions.",
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