Arts & Literature
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Crying in H Mart: A Memoir
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.
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.
Editorial Reviews
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, Time, NPR, Washington Post, Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, Good Morning America, Philadelphia Inquirer, Goodreads, BuzzFeed, and more • One of President Obama's Favorite Books of the Year • One of The Smithsonian's Ten Best Books About Food of the Year
"Michelle Zauner has written a book you experience with all of your senses: sentences you can taste, paragraphs that sound like music. She seamlessly blends stories of food and memory, sumptuousness and grief, to weave a complex narrative of loyalty and loss." -Rachel Syme, New Yorker Writer
"I read Crying in H Mart with my heart in my throat. In this beautifully written memoir, Michelle Zauner has created a gripping, sensuous portrait of an indelible mother-daughter bond that hits all the notes: love, friction, loyalty, grief. All mothers and daughters will recognize themselves-and each other-in these pages." -Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance
"A warm and wholehearted work of literature, an honest and detailed account of grief over time, studded with moments of hope, humor, beauty, and clear-eyed observation. This story is a nuanced portrayal of a young person grappling with what it means to embody familial and cultural histories, to be fueled by creative pursuits, to examine complex relationships with place, and to endure the acute pain of losing a parent just on the other side of a tumultuous adolescence . . . Crying in H Mart is not to be missed." -The Seattle Times
"A profound, timely exploration of terminal illness, culture and shared experience . . . Zauner has accomplished the unthinkable: a book that caters to all appetites. She brings dish after dish ...
"Michelle Zauner has written a book you experience with all of your senses: sentences you can taste, paragraphs that sound like music. She seamlessly blends stories of food and memory, sumptuousness and grief, to weave a complex narrative of loyalty and loss." -Rachel Syme, New Yorker Writer
"I read Crying in H Mart with my heart in my throat. In this beautifully written memoir, Michelle Zauner has created a gripping, sensuous portrait of an indelible mother-daughter bond that hits all the notes: love, friction, loyalty, grief. All mothers and daughters will recognize themselves-and each other-in these pages." -Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance
"A warm and wholehearted work of literature, an honest and detailed account of grief over time, studded with moments of hope, humor, beauty, and clear-eyed observation. This story is a nuanced portrayal of a young person grappling with what it means to embody familial and cultural histories, to be fueled by creative pursuits, to examine complex relationships with place, and to endure the acute pain of losing a parent just on the other side of a tumultuous adolescence . . . Crying in H Mart is not to be missed." -The Seattle Times
"A profound, timely exploration of terminal illness, culture and shared experience . . . Zauner has accomplished the unthinkable: a book that caters to all appetites. She brings dish after dish ...
Readers Top Reviews
Anne J TanyaAud
I was unsure at first because I was worried it would just be super depressing. Having just lost my own father to cancer, I gave it a go despite it being “too soon”. I am so glad I read it. It captured my feelings so well. While losing a mother is different, the sentiments were not. Highly recommend.
JeepMomAnne J T
This was an “easy read” as to style & flow, but very “real” and sometimes downright sad & depressing when describing the care needed for her very ill mother. Don’t read if hungry, as many delicious Korean meals described! It explored the range of emotions for both mixed-ancestry and for death & dying, with the process of self-awareness and strength gradually taking hold.
benJeepMomAnne J
I feel like it reads like a less intense version of The Kite Runner. I'd say the most powerful theme of the book is Michelle finding and comforting herself during her bereavement through learning to cook her mother's cultural cuisine. In doing so, she remembers salient memories that she and her mother shared.
tjobibenJeepMomAn
This will make you ugly cry while still smiling several times. It is so well written. Like a good novel the storytelling is so tangible and beautifully written. The complexity of the child-parent relationship is so well expressed. Very well-paced and developed. This one has it all. Culture, family, food, longing, finding your place, belonging, becoming. I've never been so sad and happy for an author as I was when I finished this book.
Nenia Campbelltjo
For a while, I was seeing this book literally everywhere. I thought it was going to be a typical food memoir, kind of like Nigel Slater's TOAST, and while parts of it were that, about halfway through it undergoes a total tonal shift, where the focus is entirely on her mother's end of life, the stress it put on her relationships, the mental breakdowns it caused, and the agony of seeing someone you love go slowly and painfully as they shed their sense of self. It's incredibly painful and I don't think the summary fully conveys how traumatic this book could be to someone who is losing or has recently lost a loved one. The summary describes this book as having "humor and heart," and while it certainly possessed plenty of the later, I had difficulty finding any of the former. CRYING IN H MART is about Michelle Zauner's identity as a half-Korean/American. Her mother was her anchor to Korean culture, and her entre into the culture was primarily through food. The book opens with her walking through H Mart and talking about how food is a bonding experience in so many different kinds of relationships, and she talks about some of the memories certain dishes gave her. This is a constant theme throughout the book, although it is not as food-focused as the first chapter would have you believe. I liked the raw honesty with which she talked about her family. The alienation she felt from Korean culture because she couldn't speak the language and the existential crisis she had when losing her mother (and therefore, by proxy, part of herself) was powerful and tragic. I also liked how she talked about the ugly side of grief and mourning. All too often, when grief is portrayed, it's as a unifying experience; but sometimes, as it does in this book, it ends up driving people apart and making them selfish. There are different ways to express grief or to mourn, and it was nice to see that here. Apart from the slightly misleading presentation, I really liked this book. I don't think I'd want to read it again but the way that the author described food and relationships was great. 3.5 out of 5 stars
Short Excerpt Teaser
18
Maangchi and Me
Whenever Mom had a dream about shit, she would buy a scratch card.
In the morning, on the drive to school, she'd pull wordlessly into the 7-Eleven parking lot and tell me to wait while she kept the car running.
"What are you doing?"
"Don't worry about it," she said, grabbing her purse from the back seat.
"What are you going to buy at the 7-Eleven?"
"I'll tell you later."
Then she'd come back with a handful of scratch cards. We'd drive the last few blocks to school, and she'd scrub off the gummy film with a coin on the dashboard.
"You had a poop dream, didn't you?"
"Umma won ten dollars!" she'd say. "I couldn't tell you because then it doesn't work!"
Dreams about pigs, the president, or shaking hands with a celebrity were all good-luck
dreams-but it was shit in particular, especially if you touched it, that was license to gamble.
Every time I had a dream about shit, I couldn't wait to ask my mom to buy me a scratch card. I'd wake up from a dream about accidentally shitting my pants or walking into a public bathroom to find some extraordinarily long, winding shit, and when it was time to drive to school I'd sit quietly in the passenger seat, hardly able to contain myself until we were a block away from the
7-Eleven on Willamette Street.
"Mom, pull over," I'd say. "I'll tell you why later."
Shortly after we returned to the States, I started having recurring dreams about my mother. I'd suffered one such episode before, when I was a paranoid kid, morbidly obsessed with my parents' deaths. My father is driving us across Ferry Street Bridge and to skirt traffic up ahead, he maneuvers the car onto the shoulder, weaving through a gap under construction and aiming to vault off the bridge onto a platform below. Eyes focused on the mark, he leans in close to the steering wheel and accelerates, but we miss the landing by several feet. The car plunges into the rushing current of the Willamette River and I wake up breathing heavily.
Later, when we were teenagers, Nicole told me a story she'd heard from her mother about a woman who suffered from recurring nightmares that all revolved around the same car accident. The dreams were so vivid and traumatic that she sought a therapist to help her overcome them. "What if, after the accident, you try to get somewhere," the therapist suggested. "Maybe if you try to get yourself to a hospital or some kind of safe place, the dream will reach a natural conclusion." So each night the woman began to will herself out of the car and crawl further and further along the side of the highway. But the dream kept coming back. One day the woman really did get into a car accident and was supposedly found dragging herself across the asphalt in an attempt to reach some nebulous location, unable to distinguish reality from her lucid dreaming.
The dreams about my mother had small variations, but ultimately they were always the same. My mother would appear, still alive but incapacitated, left behind someplace we had forgotten her.
In one I'm alone, sitting on a well-manicured lawn on a warm, sunny day. In the distance I can see a dark and ominous glass house. It looks modern, the exterior made up entirely of black glass windows connected by silver steel frames. The building is wide, mansion-like, and sectioned off in squares, like several monochromatic Rubik's Cubes stacked next to and on top of one another. I leave my patch of grass, making my way toward the curious house. I open its heavy door. Inside, it is dark and sparse. I wander around, eventually making my way toward the basement. I run my hand along the side of the wall as I descend the staircase. It is clean and quiet. I find my mother lying in the center of the room. Her eyes are closed and she is resting on some kind of platform that's not quite a table but not a bed either, a kind of low pedestal, like the one where Snow White sleeps off the poisoned apple. When I reach her, my mother opens her eyes and smiles, as if she's been waiting for me to find her. She is frail and bald, still sick but alive. At first I feel guilty-that we gave up on her too soon, that she'd been here the whole time. How had we managed to get so confused? Then I'm flooded with relief.
"We thought you were dead!" I say.
"I've just been here all along," she says back to me.
I lay my head on her chest and she rests her hand on my head. I can smell her and feel her and everything seems so real. Even
though I know she is sick and we will have to lose her again, I'm just so happy to discover that she is alive. I tell her to wait for m...
Maangchi and Me
Whenever Mom had a dream about shit, she would buy a scratch card.
In the morning, on the drive to school, she'd pull wordlessly into the 7-Eleven parking lot and tell me to wait while she kept the car running.
"What are you doing?"
"Don't worry about it," she said, grabbing her purse from the back seat.
"What are you going to buy at the 7-Eleven?"
"I'll tell you later."
Then she'd come back with a handful of scratch cards. We'd drive the last few blocks to school, and she'd scrub off the gummy film with a coin on the dashboard.
"You had a poop dream, didn't you?"
"Umma won ten dollars!" she'd say. "I couldn't tell you because then it doesn't work!"
Dreams about pigs, the president, or shaking hands with a celebrity were all good-luck
dreams-but it was shit in particular, especially if you touched it, that was license to gamble.
Every time I had a dream about shit, I couldn't wait to ask my mom to buy me a scratch card. I'd wake up from a dream about accidentally shitting my pants or walking into a public bathroom to find some extraordinarily long, winding shit, and when it was time to drive to school I'd sit quietly in the passenger seat, hardly able to contain myself until we were a block away from the
7-Eleven on Willamette Street.
"Mom, pull over," I'd say. "I'll tell you why later."
Shortly after we returned to the States, I started having recurring dreams about my mother. I'd suffered one such episode before, when I was a paranoid kid, morbidly obsessed with my parents' deaths. My father is driving us across Ferry Street Bridge and to skirt traffic up ahead, he maneuvers the car onto the shoulder, weaving through a gap under construction and aiming to vault off the bridge onto a platform below. Eyes focused on the mark, he leans in close to the steering wheel and accelerates, but we miss the landing by several feet. The car plunges into the rushing current of the Willamette River and I wake up breathing heavily.
Later, when we were teenagers, Nicole told me a story she'd heard from her mother about a woman who suffered from recurring nightmares that all revolved around the same car accident. The dreams were so vivid and traumatic that she sought a therapist to help her overcome them. "What if, after the accident, you try to get somewhere," the therapist suggested. "Maybe if you try to get yourself to a hospital or some kind of safe place, the dream will reach a natural conclusion." So each night the woman began to will herself out of the car and crawl further and further along the side of the highway. But the dream kept coming back. One day the woman really did get into a car accident and was supposedly found dragging herself across the asphalt in an attempt to reach some nebulous location, unable to distinguish reality from her lucid dreaming.
The dreams about my mother had small variations, but ultimately they were always the same. My mother would appear, still alive but incapacitated, left behind someplace we had forgotten her.
In one I'm alone, sitting on a well-manicured lawn on a warm, sunny day. In the distance I can see a dark and ominous glass house. It looks modern, the exterior made up entirely of black glass windows connected by silver steel frames. The building is wide, mansion-like, and sectioned off in squares, like several monochromatic Rubik's Cubes stacked next to and on top of one another. I leave my patch of grass, making my way toward the curious house. I open its heavy door. Inside, it is dark and sparse. I wander around, eventually making my way toward the basement. I run my hand along the side of the wall as I descend the staircase. It is clean and quiet. I find my mother lying in the center of the room. Her eyes are closed and she is resting on some kind of platform that's not quite a table but not a bed either, a kind of low pedestal, like the one where Snow White sleeps off the poisoned apple. When I reach her, my mother opens her eyes and smiles, as if she's been waiting for me to find her. She is frail and bald, still sick but alive. At first I feel guilty-that we gave up on her too soon, that she'd been here the whole time. How had we managed to get so confused? Then I'm flooded with relief.
"We thought you were dead!" I say.
"I've just been here all along," she says back to me.
I lay my head on her chest and she rests her hand on my head. I can smell her and feel her and everything seems so real. Even
though I know she is sick and we will have to lose her again, I'm just so happy to discover that she is alive. I tell her to wait for m...
