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Following the loss of her mother Chongmi to cancer, as well as the deaths of her grandmother and aunt, Zauner found herself going regularly to H Mart.
“When I go to H Mart, I’m not just on the hunt for cuttlefish and three bunches of scallions for a buck: I’m searching for memories. I’m collecting the evidence that the Korean half of my identity didn’t die when they did,” Zauner writes.
Like every mother, Chongmi expressed her love vigorously through food: “No matter how critical or cruel she could seem – constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations – I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.”
It is this kind of care that Zauner attempts to repay for her mother when she is diagnosed with stage IV squamous-cell carcinoma in her stomach at age 56. After her mother’s diagnosis in May 2014, Zauner, then 25, moves home, ready to support Chongmi through chemotherapy with Korean cooking.
The Zauners prepare to honor Chongmi’s wishes to discontinue treatment after two failed rounds of chemotherapy. Together, they try to live as much as possible before death. Against medical advice, they make a trip to Korea so Chongmi can say goodbye to her birth country, where her condition severely deteriorates. When Chongmi pulls through enough for the family to return to Oregon, Zauner marries her boyfriend and bandmate Peter.
Near the end of the book, Zauner meditates on the process of fermenting kimchi, and how it allows cabbage to “enjoy a new life altogether.” She realizes that she needs to tend to her memories and heritage in the same way: “The culture that we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me…If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.”
How critics view the book:
“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
“Crying in H Mart is a wonder: A beautiful, deeply moving coming-of-age story about mothers and daughters, love and grief, food and identity. It blew me away, even as it broke my heart.” –Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me
“The book’s descriptions of jjigae, tteokbokki, and other Korean delicacies stand out as tokens of the deep, all-encompassing love between Zauner and her mother . . . Zauner’s frankness around death feels like an unexpected yet deeply necessary gift.”—Vogue
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