Michelle Zauner’s new book shows that the lauded lyricist of indie-pop band Japanese Breakfast is capable of impressing in longer-form writing. First there was the 2018 essay of the same name in the New Yorker, a viral online hit. Now there is this multifaceted and astute memoir that delves deep into the complicated relationship she had with her mother, who died from cancer when Zauner was 25. Crying in H Mart is at once a testament to a lost loved one, a charting of the ravages of terminal illness and a celebration of a mixed-race heritage that helps one young woman manage her grief.
As a child, Zauner longed for a mother who would comfort and nurture her, the all-American mom of her friends and schoolmates. Instead, her mother was competitive, angry and prone to grudges. There was little sympathy, constant friction. If Zauner hurt herself playing, her mother was “livid, as if I had maliciously damaged her property”.
The teenage years are full of fights, resentments, pressure, both academically and in terms of physical appearance. Zauner is gloriously defiant, rejecting her mother’s militant beauty regime, skipping school to pursue her music dreams, living a solitary, unhappy existence that culminates in a nervous breakdown in her senior year.
Things improve after she moves away from the family home in Oregon to a liberal arts college on the east coast. Her grades are good. Her parents visit occasionally. They come to one of her gigs, even if her mother tells her afterwards: “I’m just waiting for you to give this up.”
Lines such as these haunt Zauner after her mother dies. The story is tragic in a classical sense, full of awakenings that come too late. The year before the diagnosis, Zauner begins to see a different version of her mother, an immigrant who left Seoul to start a better life in the US. The pair speak more often on the phone, share traditional Korean recipes, make each other laugh. Zauner notes that the way her mother loves isn’t open or verbal, “but in subtle observations of what brought you joy”.
In later sections, once the mother is lost, firstly to the pain of chemotherapy, then to the disease itself and death, there is the awful antithesis: Zauner’s realisation that nobody will ever know her as completely as her mother. Simply, achingly put, “She was my champion, she was my archive”.
Cancer, “a form of stage IV squamous cell carcinoma that had likely originated in the bile duct”, puts an end to the promise of a better adult relationship. If anything, the pair are now in reverse. There is a cruel symmetry to how quickly Zauner becomes her mother’s carer. She moves back to the family home. She tries to cook and care for her. She gets a new perspective on the tough love she experienced as a child, the fear and weakness that can lie behind it, how hard it is to get her mother to eat even a few bites of their favourite dishes.
The realities of round-the-clock care are starkly depicted, from washing the patient to checking the texture of her bowel movements: “Everything I had ever done in my life felt so monumentally selfish and insignificant.”
As Zauner documents the final month of the illness – doomed trips to Korea, overwhelming support from friends – the tone is candid, visceral and self-aware. The mother-daughter relationship is the fulcrum around which the action of the book spins. Zauner gives glimpses of her life outside the relationship – her music career, her marriage to bandmate Peter, her fraught relationship with her father – but these aspects are largely peripheral.
Instead, she chooses to celebrate her mother’s life, describing teenage summers spent in Seoul with her mother, her aunts and her poker-playing grandmother. The H Mart of the title is the Korean supermarket where the author goes in the hope of finding the smells and tastes of childhood that forever bind her to her mother.
Zauner writes brilliantly on food and memory. There are pages of delicious descriptions, from soondubu jjigae, a spicy sot-tofu stew, to “thick strips of samgyupsal sizzled over hot coals”. In Crying in H Mart, appetite and food are intrinsically linked to love and nourishment. Her mother might leave Zauner her jewellery, but it is the present of her precious kimchi fridge that matters most:
“My mother always used to tell me never to fall in love with someone who doesn’t like kimchi. They’ll always smell it on you, seeping through your pores. Her very own way of saying, ‘You are what you eat.’”
