Information
Goodreads: Crying in H Mart
Series: None
Age Category: Adult (Memoir)
Source: Library
Published: 2021
Official Summary
A memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.
Michelle Zauner 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.
Review
Crying in H Mart has rave reviews and won a 2021 Goodreads Choice Award, so I was excited to dive into it, in spite of never having heard of the author before. Unfortunately, while the memoir touches on themes of grief, maother-daughter relationships, and navigating one's identity, the story didn't real engage me or strike me as something particularly uniqu.
The core is Zauner's relationship with her mother and how she comes to grips with her mother's death when she is only twenty-five years old and has barely started a life of her own; she has no career or long-term plans, or something she can point to that would make her mother proud. The difficulty with the book is that Zauner seems to have a more complicated relationship with her mother than she herself really digs into through the course of the memoir. She points out the contention they had when she was growing up and focuses on a lot of negatives: she didn't respect her mother because she was a stay-at-home mom, her mother seemed distant and not like the "Mommy-Moms" her friends had who seemed to care if they actually got hurt, her mother was constantly critical of her and her appearance, etc. There's a brief mention of some struggles the family went through when Zauner was a teen, when she basically ran away to couch surf, smoke, and play truant from school--with no mention of her parents attempting to remedy the situation. The follow-up scene is all three of them getting into a physical altercation.
Zauner insists her mother truly loved her, that when her mother scolded her for getting injured instead of coddling her or taking her to a doctor, this is really because her mother loved her too much to show actual care. However, she seems able to come to these conclusions and paint her mother as the other half of her whole, as someone she adored and constantly relied on and who loved her unconditionally only because her mother's death allows her to romanticize their relationship. One gets the distinct impression that, were her mother still alive, their relationship would continue to be complicated, perhaps even adversial. And the memoir doesn't recognize this.
The other half of the story focuses on Zauner's relationship with Korean food, which she grows up loving but doesn't know how to cook. She leans into learning after her mother's cancer diagnosis but only really has the opportunity to do it after her mother's death. She finds connection with her mother, who always loved food and having new experiences, by leaning more into her Korean heritage through the recipes. I do think this part of the story could have been better integrated with the focus on grief and her relationship with her mother, but I see what the author is trying to do.
It's possible this book will speak more to readers who have more personal experience with this type of grief than I do. I thought it just just okay--even the prose is a bit bland--and I don't really get the hype.
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