Crying in H Mart by Michelle ZauneR
I’ve been dreaming about grocery stores.
I have these big dreams where I walk in and the shelves of all the aisles are full of larger than life flowers that respond to my touch like a family pet, nuzzling into the palm of my hand.
I have even bigger nightmares, where I’m in an abandoned grocery store at night, during a torrential rain storm. I’m clawing my way onto the shelves, to hide behind the products as some unseen monster, or person, hunts me down. I always wake up as dream-me is crying behind the fruit loop boxes, terrified.
Grocery stores have always lived at this weird intersection of mortality and creation.
In some ways, grocery stores are like taxes. Everyone has to do the grocery shopping. It’s painfully routine and predictable. Grocery stores are incredibly vulnerable places, saturated in florescent lighting, like tiny time capsules of dread and anxiety. I swear sometimes I can step one toe into a Jewel Osco and it’s somehow 2005 all over again.
But then there is this other facet of grocery stores, the dreamlike, wonder-state of comfort and humanity. Places that hold the cake mix that your mom used for your 9th birthday cake. Or the soup that your grandmother made you when you had the chicken pox. The shelves in the pasta aisle hold memories of your second wedding anniversary and that specific pesto sauce you bought to impress your wife.
Grocery stores are memories.
Throw all of that delicate, messy humanity through the wringer of a pandemic and all of those aspects of grocery stores get stretched and warped into funhouse like qualities. Suddenly, your nightmares and your dreams are alive and integrating into one another. You’re trying to find comfort in your favorite childhood cereal while and unseen virus slowly stalks your every move.
It’s so interesting to me to see how grocery stores have started to populate different art spheres. They’ve been the topic of so many art installations, music videos, and now, books.
Crying in H Mart is one big love letter. It’s a love letter to grocery stores, to mothers, and to grief. Michelle Zauner expertly depicts the heaviness of grief in poetic prose that knocks the wind right out of my chest. I’ve not felt even a percentage of the grief or mourning that Michelle has felt, and yet, her words make me ache in sympathy in a way that I haven’t experienced with other authors.
Zauner’s writing is best described as vibrant. You can taste the passages where she writes about her precious Korean dishes that connect her to her mother and her heritage. They’re cinematic and aromatic scenes that she paints delicately onto the page, leaving no detail untold. I. Loved. That. So. Much.
Food is culture, and by default that makes grocery stores, like H Mart, beacons of home, identity, and connection. There’s a passage in the opening chapter where Zauner describes various kinds of individuals eating at an H Mart food court and how they all come from different backgrounds, different countries, and yet they all are in the same place, enjoying the same things together. There’s only one other thing that I know of that consistently connects people like that. Live music.
Prior to Crying in H Mart, Zauner was best known for her musical endeavors in Japanese Breakfast. I’d describe the debut album from Japanese Breakfast as a kind of lo-fi, alternative pop sound. There’s a softness to Zauner’s vocals that’s incredibly endearing. She’s an incredibly open musician. You see that in her writing too. But what I love most about her writing in this book is that her musical parts are just a footnote in her life.
A lot of the time, artists struggle switching to different mediums. Especially in the world of writing a book. Not everyone is an author like they are a songwriter. Michelle is the beautiful exception because she’s both. She’s the and.
I didn’t know what to expect going into reading this, but I was relieved to find that this wasn’t actually some autobiography where Zauner depicts her rise in the music industry. Instead it was a brutal, unflinching look into a very real and shimmeringly authentic mother daughter relationship. Zauner doesn’t shy away from the ugly, or the difficult. She embraces it and it’s so stunning.
I think sometimes it can be so difficult for us to accept that our parents are not superheros from other planets with other worldly strengths. Our parents are just human.
While there are so many gold threads sewn into this book, I so appreciated how Michelle wrote about the struggle to find herself in between both of her cultures. I think so many multicultural individuals can identify themselves in this feeling of being torn between two places, wanting to be accepted by both sides, but somehow never quite fitting the bill, never being “whole”. It’s painful to read, but it’s where Zauner is at her strongest. She just gets right to center of the hurt, without apology.
While reading this, I kept thinking about another book I read in college about grief, A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis. I can’t tell you one thing about that fucking book other than the cover of the edition I have is yellow. I can’t tell you how that book made me feel, or how it helped me understand myself.
But I can tell you exactly the ways that Crying in H Mart has done all of those things for me. How it’s dissected grief into it’s ugliest parts and displayed them on the page. How it’s shown that love and grief and anger are all intrinsically tied and can’t exist without each other. That the entire spectrum of experience, the pain, the hurt, the loneliness, the trying, the healing, the rebuilding, the love, the celebrating, the joy, is all worth it. That they’re all beautiful reminders that we’re here. I hope colleges and high schools will start swapping out their C.S. Lewis for Michelle Zauner. We need more books that are exactly like Crying in H Mart.