Crying in H Mart: A Memoir by Michelle Zauner is the October/November selection for Cook the Books.  Simona from briciole is hosting. You can read her announcement post here.  

About the book:

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American—“in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself” (NPR). • CELEBRATING OVER ONE YEAR ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST.

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.

About the author:

Michelle Zauner is best known as a singer and guitarist who creates dreamy, shoegaze-inspired indie pop under the name Japanese Breakfast. She has won acclaim from major music outlets around the world for releases like Psychopomp (2016) and Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017). Her forthcoming album Jubilee will be released in June 2021. Her first book is Crying in H Mart.

What I thought…

This book was not what I expected. I did no research, just nabbing a copy from the library toward the middle of November. I hate to say it, I almost put it down a couple of times. The opening chapter did not prepare me for what was to come.  Zauner establishes an honest voice in this opening nostalgic and sentimental essay. She describes H Mart, a specialty chain Asian food market, as a magical place where one can find themselves and experience both memories and longings: “H Mart is freedom from the single-aisle ‘ethnic’ section in regular grocery stores” (3).  Chapter one prepared me for a work of remembrance and while Crying at H Mart is that, her tone changes in chapter two and she becomes brutally honest. 

As Zauner’s story progresses, I was appalled by her mother and her childrearing tactics.

…my mother’s unique style of parenting, an adage on hand for every tantrum I threw, be it a scraped knee or twisted ankle, a messy breakup or fumbled opportunity, the confrontation with mediocrity, my shortcomings, my failures. (202)

Zauner was convinced by her family that she was a bad girl from her toddler stage on. As her mother, Chongmi, is diagnosed with cancer and starts on her final journey, I still had a hard time connecting and finding her sympathetic.

Crying in H Mart is a memoir and while I did feel like I felt Zauner’s pain, in not only her early relationship with her mother but also caring for her as she struggled with cancer, I really wanted more of what made her tick. She seems to gloss over her own issues. 

It was somewhat of a miracle that I managed to get into college, having just barely graduated from high school. Senior year I had a nervous breakdown that resulted in a lot of truancy and therapy and medication, and my mother convinced all of it was a direct attempt to spite her, but somehow I managed to come out on the other side. (37)

Maybe another book will be forthcoming.

Then there’s her father and his life issues:

He spent six weeks in jail before moving to a rehabilitation center in Camden County, where he became a guinea pig for a new psychotherapy treatment. He was made to wear a sign around his neck that read I’m a people pleaser and engaged in exercises in futility that would supposedly stimulate moral fiber. Every Saturday he dug a hole in the yard behind the institution, and every Sunday they made him fill it back up again. Any trouble I might be in seemed minor by comparison. (51)

The Food:

Zauner and her mother do seem to bond over food. Korean-Chinese food was the first thing they would seek out when they arrived in Seoul for their scheduled family trips. Some of Chongmi’s more gentle lessons seemed to revolve around cuisine: “She believed food should be enjoyed and that it was more of a waste to expand your stomach than to keep eating when you were full. Her only rule was that you had to try everything once” (22).

I came to realize that while I struggled to be good, I could excel at being courageous. I began to delight in surprising adults with my refined palate and disgusting my inexperienced peers with what I would discover to be some of nature’s greatest gifts. By the age of ten I had learned to break down a full lobster with my bare hands and a nutcracker. I devoured steak tartare, pâtés, sardines, snails baked in butter and smothered with roasted garlic. I tried raw sea cucumber, abalone, and oysters on the half shell. At night my mother would roast dried cuttlefish on a camp stove in the garage and serve it with a bowl of peanuts and a sauce of red pepper paste mixed with Japanese mayonnaise. (23)