I am an absolute sucker for a memoir read by the author, and particularly fond of celebrity memoirs. I’ve been aware of the buzz around this book for a while, but wasn’t familiar with Japanese Breakfast (the author’s band), and didn’t really have intentions of picking it up for myself. …And then I found myself scrolling through Libby looking for an “available now” audiobook and decided to give it a try.
Crying in H Mart is, at its heart, a book about the author’s relationship with her mother, and her mother’s illness and death. This is a book about grief, and love. Zauner was born in Seoul to an American father and Korean mother. The family moved to the US when Zauner was still very young, and settled in Eugene, OR. Zauner spends a lot of time on her experience as half-Korean, feeling like she doesn’t fit in with her largely white classmates while also feeling estranged from her Korean family and heritage. Her relationship with her stay at home mother, Chong Mi, was by turns loving, contentious, smothering. But the one thing the two women always shared was a love of food, and more specifically, Korean food. When Chong Mi was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Zauner moved back to Eugene from the East Coast to care for her until her death.
Crying in H Mart is Zauner’s way of processing her grief, and coming to terms with the idea of a life without her mother in it. Korean food, and eventually learning to cook Korean food, is a way to reconnect with her memories of her mother, and to deepen her connection with her Korean heritage. I am not super close to either of my parents, so seeing the relationship between Zauner and her mother is a window into another world. I can’t even begin to imagine how devastating it would be to lose a parent at such a young age, but I do come from a family that expresses love with food, so that part felt very familiar to me. This is a beautiful meditation…and made me really want to go eat Korean food!