Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

This is one of those books that I’ve acquired a copy of and genuinely don’t remember how, where or when it came into my possession…

The copy of Crying In H Mart that I possess is a battered second-hand copy that has what seems to be food residue all over the cover.

What this means is that it’s unlikely to be something that I purchased in a bookshop, however as it is an English rather than a North American edition (I used to live in Canada), it isn’t something I took from a Toronto Little Free Library during the period of my life when I escaped England…

I can only assume, then, that I must have found it in one of the very rare British equivalents of those boxes…

My lover had read the book at some point and had been unenthusiastic about it, yet something drew me to it, as it sat yellowing and stained on a pile on a shelf when – as it usually is when I start reading a new book – it was late and I was sad…

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Crying in H Mart is a 2021 memoir by a moderately successful musician who releases work as Japanese Breakfast (not my kind of thing (i.e. guitars and lyrics but not country (yes, generally speaking I listen to ambient (combining both electronic and acoustic instrumentation), jazz and country) and that’s fine), but this isn’t a memoir about entering into the music industry in contemporary America, it is instead something far more universal and – to be blunt – relevant to the average person: is grief and grieving, cancer and loss…

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Whoever owned this paperback copy before I did, made a note to themselves on the inside of the rear cover:

I suppose ultimately I can’t say much more than that, really.

This is a nice book about loss, and it is good to read…

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Michelle Zauner is Korean-American, and this book is about the death of her Korean mother from cancer in the middle of Zauner’s twenties.

Her father is the American archetypal memoir father figure (big white guy, reasonably affluent but “self-made”, cheats on his wife but (essentially) loves her very much, victim of abuse but an alcoholic rather than an abuser as a response etc etc etc), while her mother is depicted as perhaps less complex, she is less complex in a way that feels less familiar, less archetypal, etc… While Zauner’s father is someone I’ve encountered in literature plenty of times, her mother is less so. And that’s why – imo – the book is able to hold such interest…

Zauner’s mother is an immigrant, living out in the countryside of Oregon, lonely but not totally alone… Not working but not impoverished, not raising a brood of children (Zauner is an only child), not pining for her homeland but living some version of “the American dream”, acquisitiveness and materialism, self flagellating and solitude… and alongside that she also maintains a connoisseurial relationship with food, especially – but not only –with Korean food.

Zauner writers about food and eating (the community found around a shared table etc) throughout, and though most of the dishes she discussed are too meat and seafood heavy for me and my nothing-with-eyes-or-eyelike-flesh diet to be genuinely intrigued by, I think it’s overall difficult to not pick this book up without becoming hungry!

Food – not just the Korean recipes Zauner learns to make as her mother is dying (and after she has died) as part of a process of remembrance that begins as an attempt to produce favourite dishes for someone who is sick – is key, and important, and something I think is often a signifier of a healthy attitude not just to eating but to life…

People who don’t put thought into what they eat tend to be people who don’t put thought into anything…

How they spend their time, who they spend time with, the cultural products they consume and engage with…

Not a hard and fast rule, but generally not engaging with food often aligns with a life where one engages with nothing…

I don’t know.

It sounds nice, y’know, to grow up with flavour and thought going into food.

When you grow up with essentially zero cultural capital – and exploration of food is an easy thing to do as big supermarkets with a wide variety of produce are an universal of the “West” – it’s hard to not be envious of someone whose parents engaged with cuisine and culture from all over the world. It’s not hard, is it? To not only eat beige, unseasoned potatoes and boiled to death cabbage and factory farmed meat, the consumption of which is essentially a moral evil????

It’s really not hard to engage with your own nutritional input.

Sorry.

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With the focus on food, and travel, too, there’s no getting away from the fact that this is a distinctly middle class memoir, however Zauner manages to make this feel fresh, engaging, and unlike the examples of this that have gone before.

While there may not be anything fundamentally unique or groundbreaking about this memoir (“my relationship with my parents wasn’t perfect, then one of them died and I reassessed my life and priorities and came out happier”), the combination of blunt honesty, genuine excitement and knowledge of the things in which the narrator is interested in – and a lack of rose-tinted reconfiguring that -– a few lines aside – texts like this are usually filled with makes it a great example of a popular genre. (There are counter examples, such as the narrator saying something along the lines of planning to begin believing in the afterlife for the sake of her mother’s soul, and a very strange episode where Zauner receives a pair of shoes through the post as a gift from her mother (during a period when they’re less close) and chooses to believe that the fact that the boots are “already broken in” is a sign of maternal care planned so they would comfortably fit Zauner’s identically-sized feet from the first wear, rather than – as seems obvious to me(!) – the mother bought herself a pair of shoes she didn’t like and sent on as a gift instead of chasing a refund!)…

The other thing this book does far better than many other texts of this type is to never lose a sense of reality as regards blunt economics.

Sometimes Zauner, as a budding musician, is broke, or is living in a shit hole rental apartment, or is working a dead end but flexible job, but never anywhere in this book does she forget that the reader has seen her parents’ home, has read about the family holidays and hobbies they have, and try to seek sympathy for not being super rich.

It’s refreshing, tbh! And it’s important that people have a realistic understanding of their own class position. Lots of people don’t! It’s hard to realise how little money it is that separates the comfortable from the poor… And how much money separates the comfortable from the “super rich”…

I dunno.

It’s Sunday night. It’s a good book.

I liked it.

I gotta go.

See you next time.