Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner
A Review of Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart
“I wonder how many people at H Mart miss their families. How many are thinking of them as they bring their trays back from the different stalls. If they’re eating to feel connected, to celebrate these people through food.”
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (2021). Published by Knopf.
I have a disclaimer to make before starting this review: I am a huge Japanese Breakfast fan, and I coincidentally realized she had a memoir coming out.
I had no idea she wrote The New Yorker essay “Crying in H Mart,” the one that I had coveted years before. In my mind, Michelle Zauner and Japanese Breakfast were two different entities, ones separate from each other.
But once I found out she had written this memoir, I preordered a signed copy immdistely. And if you know me, I never knew that.
Once I knew that the first chapter was indeed The New Yorker essay that had gone viral, I was sold. That is an extremely solid first chapter, and oh my god, this memoir did not disappoint and lived up to the hype.
I tried to remove my bias for Japanese Breakfast while reading this, so this is only a slightly biased review. But, before we begin to unpack everything, I’m going to say this: this was one hell of a memoir, one of the best I’ve read. I literally cried and could not put this down.
Content
Obviously, if you want a sneak peak into what the memoir is about, go read the essay that she published in The New Yorker. That’s literally the first chapter.
But for those who don’t want to go and read that, and would rather have a physical copy and be surprised, the memoir is about Zauner’s experience growing up as a half-Korean, half-white kid who was removed from her culture. Not capable of speaking Korean, but vaguely able to read and write hangul, it all comes back to haunt her when her mother dies when she is twenty-five.
This is very much a food memoir, if you couldn’t tell by the title. Often we’re fleshed out with the relationship between Zauner and her mother with the love and tenderness it takes to share and prepare a meal for each other. Her first word was “eomma,” or mother in Korean, and this strong bond is visible throughout the memoir, as we follow her through her childhood and the events leading up to her mother’s death.
We get this rich, luscious details about the food they’re preparing, how whenever she went to Seoul as a child, her halmeoni slurped the jjajangmyeon they ordered while on the floor. As her mother lays dying in her bed, she slowly shifts from eating Ottogi cream soup to light Korean dishes, like jutguk. But, in the end, as she lays dying, she essentially starved.
In the absence of her mother, Zauner turns to the mythical queen of Korean food YouTube, Maangchi. Like she asks in the title essay, who is there to tell you what everything is when your remaining tie to the culture is gone?
Her other aunt, her mother’s sister, also died of the same cancer. Both sisters were young. That left Zauner with only her father and her other aunt, who virtually spoke zero English.
God bless Zauner’s husband. He’s a sweetheart, the way he’s depicted so tenderly in this memoir. We also get an interesting glimpse into her relationship with her father, and how their mother essentially was the only tie that kept them together at the end of the day.
We start from childhood, with little cuts of present Zauner adding in commentary of sorts, all the way to the present, where she has found niche success as Japanese Breakfast, although when her mother died, her mother thought she was going to be a starving artist on the streets. But, as she states in the memoir, it’s like her mother has a foot on God’s neck, threatening him to make sure that her daughter is the most successful indie-writer-person ever.
Writing
Zauner is an extremely good writer, which is so surprising considering this is her debut as a writer. She’s had a couple of essays published here and there, and her music, specifically Psychopomp, were all about her coping with grief over her mother’s death. It’s really sad, but her best writing forced its way out because of this grief perhaps.
The memoir flows very well, and follows a sequential order. Sometimes we have some bouncing back and forth between times and eras, but it’s not too cumbersome or confusing.
I thought that structure worked really well, because if she had written this in present tense, she would have to completely change a lot of things about the details she included, and I found that she would incorporate certain details because it was past tense.
Overall Thoughts
Oh. My. God. This is a memoir that made me cry, and, if you know me, I never cry over books or movies. This was insanely good, and actually exceeded my expectations from a newbie writer making their debut.
I’m also a major foodie, and her attention and care towards crafting a narrative using food as a key characteristic of interaction between characters was absolutely stunning. I swear I’m going to sign up for a food writing class, because this is how my father and I communicate with each other as well.
It also really hit home as a half-white half-Iranian kid who can’t speak much Farsi, let alone read it. That when my father dies, I will lose all knowledge of Iranian dishes, because he doesn’t write these things down or explains what he’s doing.
They just do it. Reading about Zauner and her mother really, really, hit me hard in the gut. This is a reality for a lot of immigrant kids; when our parents are gone, who will be left to teach us what goes in her culture’s food?
Read this memoir. Trust me, you won’t regret it.
