There are few more universal signs of cultural prosperity than a well-stocked supermarket. At their best, they represent the widest array of what we can offer ourselves, our friends, and our neighbors. At their worst, they’re the embodiment of consumer excess, especially in the United States, as they are easily accessible primarily to people with their own transportation and money to spare. Walking down a football field length of at least a dozen aisles, tempted by everything: natural foods, fresh produce, a delicatessen, crackers, condiments, juices, household cleaners, office supplies and frozen food. We rush supermarkets on the eve of blizzards and in the midst of pandemics to stock up on batteries, milk, and toilet paper. We wander the aisles like masked zombies, grabbing our fair share (and more) of items we deem indispensable. Throughout everything, an overwhelming barrage of choices or nothing at all, the supermarket is always there, tempting us with promises of equality or once again proving that access to goods will not always mean we can acquire them.
In Michelle Zauner’s remarkably evocative 2021 memoir Crying in H Mart, the universality of the supermarket experience becomes political without being politicized. She writes:
“H Mart is freedom from the single aisle ‘ethnic’ section in regular grocery stores. They
don’t prop Goya beans next to bottles of sriracha here.”
Zauner, an indie-pop singer/songwriter who performs under the name Japanese Breakfast, brings a wonderfully careful sense of control to this memoir about food, cultural identity, forgiveness, and salvation in a sense of belonging. Her Korean mother is dead and Zauner finds solace by crying in H Mart. There’s no prelude here, no preparation for the worst. She starts her story in the waves of grief that are triggered by walking through H Mart. (The “H,” she notes, is short for Han ah reum, roughly translating to ‘one arm full of groceries.’) She sees kids eating ppeongtwigi, Korean grandmothers eating seafood noodles, white families in the food court exploring something new, and Asians introducing themselves to entire new worlds of flavors and textures. Zauner is never far away from emphasizing the H Mart as metaphor:
“It’s a beautiful, holy place, a cafeteria full of people from all over the world who have
been displaced in a foreign country…Why are they all here?”
Very quickly, and with remarkable assurance, Zauner lays out her premise: “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.” While on its surface Crying In H Mart is a painfully real narrative about one young woman coming to terms with a conflicted relationship with her Korean mother and recovering drug addict white father, it always comfortably returns to the metaphor of an H Mart as a temple of and for good. Where supermarkets usually marginalize “ethnic” food to one aisle, crowded and illogically displayed, H Mart embraces all aspects of the Asian food experience.
“Food was how my mother expressed her love,” Zauner writes. “…I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed. I can hardly speak Korean, but in the H Mart it feels like I’m fluent.” This is one of the many key points Zauner plants in her memoir, the numerous thesis statements seamlessly laced into these pages rather than painfully and obviously crowbarred. We follow Zauner as she mourns her loss and comes to terms with a childhood conflict with her Korean heritage and with a young adulthood re-embracing it. From that very specific personal experience she widens her canvas to include the universal yearning we all have to find strength from a central place where we can all find common ground.
Zauner’s immigrant Korean mother is a fully formed character in this memoir, a woman we’d all like to know and probably choose to avoid because we see too much of her in our lives. Her perfection is infuriating, her “love…brutal, industrial-strength, and it “never [gives] way to an inch of weakness.” One line that runs through this book, “save your tears for when your mother dies,” could speak to Zauner’s own resilience. She suffers a nervous breakdown in her senior year of high school and barely makes it into college. She doesn’t have the tools to understand her “desire for whiteness” while growing up in Eugene, Oregon. In Seoul, Korea, her identity as defined by others is never absolute. In Seoul, she’s Caucasian, and in Eugene she’s one of the few mixed-race people in school. By default, she’s considered a generic Asian. It’s this careful balancing act she has to play that gives this narrative its suspenseful arc. How will this young woman come to terms with her terminally ill mother and distant father? What will prove to be the common language that can solve all problems?
For those familiar with the cuisine, Zauner’s loving evocation of Korean dishes will be like welcoming back old friends into their lives. There’s gyerenjim (a savory egg custard), tteokguk (a rice cake soup in a mild beef broth), and yaksik (rice cakes rolled in honey, soy sauce, sesame oil, jujubes, and chestnuts.) For those unfamiliar with Korean dishes, Zauner’s careful illustrations of it are the closest we’ll come to an endless dinner, where everything comes to our tables steaming hot and juicy, waiting to be devoured with careful deliberation. After her Mom dies, Zauner and her father go on a rehabilitation retreat to Vietnam. They take solace in the cuisine there, but the bonding over food is not like what she shared with her mother. Her father unabashedly proclaims that he and Michelle are “foodies,” and she’s not having it:
“There are few things I detest more in this world than a grown man proclaiming himself to be a foodie…parading us around as some type of know-it-all food critics and then disparaging the local fare.”
Above all, Crying in H Mart is a story about the dynamics between Korean moms and their children. Zauner learned to read and write during the times of her childhood she spent in Korea. “All the Korean moms took on the names of their children,” she writes. “Jiyeon’s mom was Jiyeon’s umma, Esther’s mom was Esther’s umma. I never learned any of their real names. Their identities were absorbed by their children.” Zauner can’t relate to these Korean children, who seem to be possessed by an obedience to their parents. For Zauner, who manifested an independence from her mother through a nervous breakdown at seventeen, eight years before her mother’s death, filial piety was manifested through a physical connection they shared to the end. Whether it was their time spent in Korean bathhouses (Jimjibang) or simply seeking comfort in bed during dark times, cradled in each other’s arms, her obedience was as strong as these Korean classmates she couldn’t understand. Consider this heartbreaking scene, in which Michelle, her father, and her new husband Peter spend a few moments with her recently deceased mother’s body:
“I thought of how cyclical it was to be sandwiched between my new husband and my deceased mother…I imagined our four bodies in an aerial view. On the right side, two newlyweds beginning their first chapter, on the left, a widower and a corpse, closing the book on over thirty years of marriage.”
The greatest strength of Crying In H Mart is that it will linger long after the reader closes the final pages. It does not impose or intrude so much as stand tall with some of the best recent grief texts, including Joan Didion’s Year Of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. Michelle Zauner, a half century younger than the recently departed Didion, writes with an equally unsparing view of death and our ability to transcend grief. We can’t ignore or delay the process of grieving because it’s going to come for all of us, one way or another. We can only read, relate, and perhaps understand the back story the next time we see somebody alone in the back aisle of an H Mart, crying because they’ve run out of words.
SAMPAN, published by the nonprofit Asian American Civic Association, is the only bilingual Chinese-English newspaper in New England, acting as a bridge between Asian American community organizations and individuals in the Greater Boston area. It is published biweekly and distributed free-of-charge throughout metro Boston; it is also delivered to as far away as Hawaii.
