‘Crying in H Mart’ is Pemoir 2021 by Michelle Zauner, singer, and guitarist from the Japanese breakfast music project.
This is the expansion of the Zauner essay with the same name published in New Yorker on August 20, 2018.
The title is a reference to H Mart, a chain of a North American supermarket that specializes in Korean and Asian products.
Following the loss of his mother Chongmi for cancer, and his grandmother’s death, Zauner found himself regularly to H Marters.
“When I went to H Mart, I was not only in the hunt for Cuttlefish and three bunches of leeks for money: I searched for memory.
I gathered evidence that half of my identity didn’t know death when they did it,” Zauner wrote.
Like every mother, Chongmi expressed her love with enthusiasm through food: “No matter how critical or cruel she can – constantly encourage me to fulfill her hopes that are difficult to catch – I can always feel her love radiating from lunch and food she prepared .
I like I like it.
”
This is the type of treatment carried out by Zauner to pay for his mother when he was diagnosed with stage squamous cell carcinoma in his stomach at the age of 56.
After his mother’s diagnosis in May 2014, Zauner, then to the house, ready to support Chongmi through chemotherapy with Korean cuisine.
Zauners prepared to honor Chongmi’s wishes to stop care after two rounds of chemotherapy who failed.
Together, they try to live as much as possible before death.
Against medical advice, they traveled to Korea so Chongmi could say goodbye to his birth country, where his condition deteriorated.
When Chongmi pulled quite a lot for the family to return to Oregon, Zauner married his girlfriend and band friends.
Towards the end of the book, Zauner meditated in the Kimchi fermentation process, and how it allows cabbage to “enjoy a new life at all.” He realized that he needed to tend to memory and his inheritance in the same way: “The culture we share is active, efervesen in my intestine and in my genes, and I have to catch it, foster it doesn’t die me …
If I can’t with my mother , I’ll be him.
”
How criticizes to see books:
“Michelle Zauner has written a book that you experience with all your senses: sentences you can feel, paragraphs that sound like music.
He smoothly combines food and memory stories, luxury, and sadness, to put out the narrative of loyalty and complex losses .
“-Rachel syme.
“Crying on H Mart is a miracle: a beautiful story and moving deeply about mothers and girls, love and sadness, food and identity.
That surprised me, even when it destroyed my heart.” -Adrienne Brodur, Wild Writer Game: My mother, her lover, and me
“Description of books from Jjigae, Tteokbokki, and delicious Koreans are prominent as a token of deep love and includes all that includes between Zauner and his mother …
The zauner truth around death feels like an unexpected gift but is very necessary.” – Vogue.
Review: ‘cry at h mart’ by Michelle
