I'm not crying in H Mart, you're crying in H Mart
The bestselling memoir on grief, family, and food by Japanese Breakfast bandleader Michelle Zauner — who is playing the Austin City Limits Festival — was worth the wait.
I’m glad I didn’t read Michelle Zauner’s New Yorker essay “Crying in H Mart” when it was published in 2018.
I’m glad I didn’t read her bestselling memoir of the same name, which came out in 2021, until this year.
I wasn’t ready for it.
First, a little backstory: The 33-year-old founder of the band Japanese Breakfast, who is in Austin this week for the Austin City Limits Musical Festival, came onto my radar as a musician when I first heard her music on local radio stations about three or four years ago.
I didn’t realize she was a serious writer until her memoir about how food helped her grieve her mother’s death was published to rave reviews just as I was leaving the Statesman last year. The “H Mart” in the book’s title is a popular Korean supermarket that has grown quickly in the past decade.
In another timeline, I would have reviewed her book for the paper. In another timeline, I wouldn’t know anything about what she was writing about.
But in this timeline, I do.
I don’t write traditional book reviews, but I do occasionally write about books that move me, such as the 2021 memoir Wonders All Around by Austinite Bruce McCandless, whose dad was the first astronaut to walk, untethered, in space.
When I sat on an airplane last weekend, wiping away tears as I finished Zauner’s book, I knew I wanted to write something about it for The Feminist Kitchen, but what? I write about my dad’s death with a frequency that makes me wonder if I write too much about my dad’s death.
I’m not a Korean American, and I don’t share Zauner’s bi-cultural experience of growing up with a parent who so clearly longed for what she left “back home.” I haven’t spent hours looking up YouTube videos about how to cook my beloved parents’ native cuisine.
I haven’t cried in H Mart.
I haven’t even cried in H-E-B.
But great books don’t require us to live the experience of the author. Sometimes, they help us imagine other’s experiences or prepare for scenes we know we’ll encounter at some point.
Other times, they force us to relive our worst days.
I wasn’t ready to relive those worst days, which is probably why I hadn’t sought out a copy of Zauner’s book. But when a friend had an extra copy that she thrust into my hands a few months ago, I figured that was the universe’s way of saying, “It’s time.”
I’m glad I waited.
Zauner’s exceptional recounting of losing her mother when the author was in her 20s is a story no one should have to write, but when death finds you, you deal with it any way you can. If only we all had the ability to see, write and feel with such clarity.
She writes about getting drunk with her friends in Brooklyn and asking her boyfriend to marry her so they can have a wedding in Eugene before her mom succumbs to cancer. She remembers her mother carping at her when she used to cry as a child: “Save your tears for when your mother dies.” She describes dressing her cold body in preparation for her cremation.
It’s painful, hard, important stuff that I’m grateful she took the time to try to put into words. Words that, in my experience of writing about grief, never quite feel enough.
She writes:
“My mother took the phone from my father. In a voice that was soft but resolute, she told me she wanted us to all take a trip to Korea. Her condition felt stable, and though the doctor had advised them against it, it felt like a time to choose living over dying. She wanted the chance to say goodbye to her country and her older sister.
“‘There are small markets in Seoul you haven’t been to yet,’ she said. ‘I never took you to Gwangjang Market, where ajummas have been there for years and years making bindaetteok and different types of jeon.’
“I closed my eyes and let my tears flow. I tried to envision us together again in Seoul. I tried to envision the mung bean batter sizzling in grease, meat patties and oysters sopped and dripping with egg, my mother explaining everything I needed to know before it was too late, showing me all the places we’d always assumed we’d have more time to see….
“I tucked my knees to my chest and blubbered loudly, hiccuping rapid, shallow breaths, my face red with agony. I rocked back and forth on the wooden floor of my bedroom, feeling as if my whole being would just give out. For the first time, she didn’t scold me. Perhaps because she could no longer fall back on her staple phrase. Because here they were, the tears I’d been saving.”
The book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year, and in May, Zauner, who was named one of Time magazine’s top 100 most influential people this year, recently finished the screenplay.
To think that Zauner almost gave up music and writing altogether.
I’m amazed at Zauner’s ability to navigate both the music and food writing world, refusing to choose between these artistic pursuits.
Zauner poured her anger, confusion, and melancholy about her mother’s death into songs that became Japanese Breakfast’s breakout album in 2016.
In interviews, she has said that, before her mother’s death, she tried to write fiction, in part, because she wasn’t comfortable writing about centering her Korean-ness.
But death changes everything, including how we see ourselves and our role in the world.
In this book, Zauner — in a way that resonates more than any food-related memoir I’ve read since I can’t tell you when — uses food as a gate to walk through, not for us to learn how to make Maangchi’s pine nut porridge, or jatjuk, which plays a prominent role in the book, but to think about the smells, tastes, and sounds of our own experience with life, death and dying.
She’s not the first writer to explore relationships and identity through food, but for so long, the publishing industry didn’t seek out young writers of color because they didn’t think their books would sell. Then there’s the whole field of critique that says memoirs are for navel-gazing narcissists.
But Zauner broke the glass ceiling with Crying in H Mart, and I’m so grateful that she turned her grief into a gift that helps people like me with their own.
Zauner has lived so much life after death, which I hope she writes about in future books. Grief keeps going, even after you learn how to cook your way through your tears.
Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day, friends!
I hope this week’s newsletter finds you well, perhaps honoring the indigenous people who thrived, survived, and lost their lives before, during, and after colonization, wherever you live. I have been trying to do more than a simple land acknowledgment in my day-to-day activism, but it feels worth repeating that I write this newsletter and raise my family and make a life on unceded Tonkawa, Comanche, and Lipan Apache territory.
I am an uninvited guest on this land, and it is my commitment to continue to unpack what that means every day of the year, not just today.
I’m resting from a busy weekend where Julian cooked at his first professional food gig. OK, it was an unpaid internship type of thing, but he was so excited about having been part of The Line that he’s asking when he can do it again. (We’ll talk about when to draw the line between paid and unpaid labor soon, I promise.)
I’m getting ready for this press trip to Lubbock tomorrow, squeezing in dog walks and tarot readings today before hopping on a plane first thing in the morning with my best cowboy boots in tow.
A note about Michelle Zauner: If you like her music, she’s playing the second weekend of ACL on Sunday and she has a second gig playing one of ACL’s Fest Nights on Saturday at Stubb’s. Tickets to the Saturday night show are available here, and you can buy her book wherever you buy them. (She also had her ACL TV debut in August, which you can catch on PBS.org.)
And lastly, if you’re looking for a local bookstore to support, don’t forget about Reverie Books, that little South Austin shop that I wrote about last year. The owner, Thais Perkins, who is already doing remarkable work in my old neighborhood, is hosting a Let’s Pretend We’re Grand Opening celebration Saturday from 4 to 10 p.m.
Be well,
Addie
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Sweet friend, never stop posting about the process. When you share about you and you share other stories (like this wonderful one) it gives people a moment to pause and feel for a moment what grief is and how different yet alike it is for us all. Thank you for introducing me to this author and book. I'm not sure I would have known about her had you not taken the time to share your experience reading it. Love you.
It's been nearly 5 years since my dad passed and it's still hard to read about parental loss. Glad you waited for the right time. <3