Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

 

My Thoughts:

This memoir by indie rockstar Michelle Zauner is the best kind of eulogy to the author's Korean mother. It captures through metaphors of culture, language, place, face moisturizers, food, even a kim chi refrigerator the complex relationship between a mother and a daughter. As a mixed Asian daughter of a mixed Asian daughter of an Asian daughter. . . this series of essays/chapters makes that obvious connection to my own relationship with food as love as mother and grandmothers, sisters, and daughters, even granddaughters.

What this book made me remember was that I have always liked memoirs, even when I was actually a middle grades and high schooler. I especially liked memoirs of people that were not widely known because when I got to the end, searched for more information about them to continue the journey. This is no exception. I ended up looking on my Amazon Music account to find Psychochomp, the album she started writing as her mother was dying. She chose to put a picture of her mother on the cover, reaching toward the camera.

I even found a Youtube interview where Maangchi, the Korean food blogger that helps Zauner to heal through food,  is talking to Zauner and Sarah Lee of Kimbap Lab about Budae Jjigae "army base stew" with ramen noodles, Spam and Vienna sausage.

Finally, as I read this, I thought about my students in both middle and high school who were also in the middle of caring for their own dying mothers. They are etched in my memories as we tried to figure out how to both support them and bring some sort of normalcy into the time away from home. I hope they are well. I hope that a piece like this will help them heal and be a mirror for their own complex experience. I hope this is a sliding glass door and a window for students to think about their own relationships with their parents. Mostly, I hope they learn to cook the kinds of comfort foods that will give them peace later in life. 

From the Publisher:

From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.