Articles
Book Review
Crying in H-Mart
Crying in H-Mart
Written by Michelle Zauner
Crying in H-Mart is a 2021 autobiography from musician and singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner, detailing her life up to and beyond the devastating sickness and death of her mother. An American-Korean woman, Zauner's story touches on themes of race, culture and immigrant identity, tying them all together with traditional Korean cuisine that Zauner has eaten all her life. Crying in H-Mart is a favourite of Hayley McCarthy-Stuart, an Education Coordinator at MHERC, who kindly agreed to review the book. This review is her opinion, collated and edited by MHERC's Librarian, Nicholas Hansen.
Some of my favourite things to read are the stories of people who have lived very different lives from my own. This interest has led me to read a lot of literature from East-Asia, whose writers often impress me with their beautiful, meaningful prose. When a friend told me that Crying in H-Mart was a good way to get into Korean literature, I checked it out. The first impression I got was that this book wastes no time. From the first pages, you learn that Michelle Zauner has lost her mother to a painful, traumatic illness, something that still affects her deeply. The rest of this book has that awful event as a palpable presence, either looming on the horizon of her childhood and young adulthood or as a shadow cast on her life in the aftermath. It makes for a gripping read, and as the narrative jumps around, creating tension as you turn the page to yet another chapter. I read the whole thing in one sitting because of that tense momentum.
As important as Zauner's relationship with her mother is that of her culture, a relationship which changed over the course of her life. Aptly illustrated using food, Zauner recalls how her mother, a first-generation immigrant from Korea to the USA, used traditional Korean cooking to keep her culture present in her daughter's life. However, as Zauner grew older, her desire to fit in with her American peers distanced her from her culture and lunchbox. Like many immigrants, Zauner felt like her heritage on her mother's side would keep her from ever being accepted by society. It was only after she became an adult that she wanted to get closer to her culinary roots but struggled to catch up with her mother's expertise in the kitchen. This isolation only got more acute when her mother was diagnosed with stage four cancer. While undergoing the ordeal of chemotherapy, traditional Korena cuisine disappeared from their home, replaced by "protein powders and tasteless porridge".
To Zauner, the cancer wasn't just taking her mother away from her; it was taking the last connection that she had to her Korean heritage. Even when a family friend who was also Korean moved in to help Zauner look after her mother (her father was primarily hapless in this matter), that friend wouldn't help Zauner develop those skills before it was too late. When her mother died, as Zauner recalls with perhaps a shade of hyperbole, it felt like she wasn't even Korean anymore. It's from this that we get the title, "Crying in H-Mart", as Zauner's memories of her family and the culture that she feels unconnected to are tied so profoundly with food that even a mundane shopping trip to an Asian supermarket chain was enough to get her to break down.
For a time, that connection felt lost. However, as astute readers will have noticed, even though Zauner was mourning her connection to her Korean heritage, she was doing so inside a place that sells Korean food. And that's because, for Zauner, food would explore that connection. Like food, Zauner explained the relationship between herself, her mother, and their culture; Zauner then used food to pursue and develop her connection with her heritage. She does this through some remarkably untraditional sources, and her story is not quite the same, but as she writes, "My dishes are never exactly like my mom's, but that's OK—they're still a delicious tribute. The more I learn, the closer I feel to her."
You can borrow this book here.