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Summary
Summary
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American--"in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself" (NPR). * CELEBRATING OVER ONE YEAR ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.
As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.
Author Notes
MICHELLE ZAUNER is best known as the two-time Grammy nominated musician Japanese Breakfast. She has won acclaim from major music outlets around the world for releases like Psychopomp (2016) and Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017).
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Musician Zauner debuts with an earnest account of her Korean-American upbringing, musical career, and the aftermath of her mother's death. She opens with a memory of a visit to an Asian American supermarket, where, among fellow shoppers who were "searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves," Zauner was able to grieve the death of her mother, Chongmi, with whom she had a difficult relationship. Her white American father met her mother in Seoul in 1983, and Zauner immigrated as an infant to Eugene, Ore. In Zauner's teenage years in the late 2000s, Chongmi vehemently opposed Zauner's musical dreams and, in one outburst, admitted to having an abortion after Zauner's birth "because you were such a terrible child!" The confession caused a rift that lasted almost six years, until Zauner learned of her mother's cancer diagnosis. After Chongmi's death in 2014, Zauner's career took off, and during a sold-out concert in Seoul, Zauner writes, she realized her success "revolved around death, that the songs... memorialized her." The prose is lyrical if at times overwrought, but Zauner does a good job capturing the grief of losing a parent with pathos. Fans looking to get a glimpse into the inner life of this megawatt pop star will not be disappointed. (Apr.)
Booklist Review
Readers will sense years of reflection built into every sentence of musician Zauner's debut memoir, which began as a 2018 New Yorker article. After losing her mom to rapidly advancing cancer when Zauner was in her midtwenties, the author finds herself in an Asian supermarket chain, devastated that she can't call her mom for shopping advice or eat with her in the bustling food court. Zauner restores her mother in her vibrancy here, as a collector of knickknacks and face creams, an amazing cook who eschewed recipes, a loyal protector of her family. Zauner recalls trips to visit family in Korea, where she and her mother were both born, and moments during her adolescence that felt cruel at the time, but seem obviously born out of love in retrospect. As Zauner lives through her shocking grief, food binds her to her mother, as it always did, and in meditative paragraphs she shares her therapeutic experiences making jatjuk and kimchi. This is a beautiful, forthright memoir about the bewildering loss of a parent, and the complicated process of finding one's art.
Guardian Review
"Save your tears for when your mother dies," is a proverb that singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner heard a lot from her Korean mum, Chongmi, when she was growing up in Eugene, Oregon. Her friends had coddling "Mommy-Moms", always at the ready with a white lie or a verbal affirmation; her own mother, by contrast, provided love tougher than tough. "It was brutal, industrial-strength," Zauner writes in her first book, a vibrant, soulful memoir that binds her own belated coming-of-age with her mother's untimely death, and serves up food, music and, yes, tears alongside insights into identity, grief and the primal intensity of the mother-daughter bond. While she wasn't about to whisk Zauner off to hospital when she fell out of a tree - or, indeed, help her up - Chongmi showed her maternal devotion in other ways. Chief among these was sharing the joy she found in food, and Zauner early on hit on eating as a way of basking in her approval. Biennial trips to visit her grandmother in Seoul were full of opportunities to flaunt her precocious palate, gobbling down everything from spicy soups and exotic banchan side dishes to octopus tentacles still pulsing with life. "This is how I know you're a true Korean," her mother would tell her. In fact, Zauner is only half-Korean, a detail that makes her story more interesting, and also made the reality of her childhood more challenging. In high school, the only Asian kid in her class, she worried that being part-Korean would define her wholly and sought to disown it in favour of whiteness. In her senior year, her always complex relationship with her mother broke down completely - as did Zauner herself. The distance that an east coast college subsequently put between them proved healing, and food became ever more important as "an unspoken language". Just a few years later, when Chongmi was only 56, the cancer diagnosis came. The book's middle chapters make for difficult reading, and yet Zauner never loses sight of the person her mother was. Chongmi is beautifully observed - a woman with a serious QVC habit and unwavering belief in the power of appearances, she counsels her only child to "save 10% of yourself", and takes secrets to her grave. And then there's Zauner's American father, a former addict who later deals with his own grief by moving to Thailand, "filling the void with warm beaches and street-vended seafood and young girls who can't spell the word problem". That droll tone is a vital ingredient in Zauner's prose, but it doesn't obscure her honesty, even when it comes to her motives for rushing to her mother's sickbed. "I would be everything she ever needed. I would make her sorry for ever not wanting me to be there," she confides, confronting her heart's darker yearnings. Zauner is the frontwoman of the band Japanese Breakfast, and music features here almost as prominently as food - not just music, either, but sound in general. It's her husband's laugh that she first falls for - "a high-pitched, honking sound that was like a cross between a Muppet and a five-year-old girl". And the "Korean sob" echoes throughout these pages, a "pained vibrato that breaks apart into staccato quarter notes, descending as if it were falling off a series of small ledges". After her mother's death, she turns to cooking. Slowly, with the help of YouTube tutorials, she begins reconnecting with memories of her mother through food, preserving a cultural inheritance that she had once felt deeply ambivalent about, but now worries will vanish. She still cries when stocking up on ingredients in H Mart, the Korean supermarket, but discovers that making kimchi is far more therapeutic than any shrink. It's this modest scepticism that sets Zauner's book apart from so many other grief memoirs. She isn't looking for readily formulated fixes, and instead remains open to truths that are hard to put into words in any language. The final scene, unfolding in a Seoul karaoke bar, finds her singing along to a local hit from her mother's youth. The Korean characters are moving too fast across the screen but, even so, its melody feels to her like remembrance.
Kirkus Review
A poignant memoir about a mother's love as told through Korean food. Losing a parent is one thing, but to also lose direct ties to one's culture in the process is its own tragedy. In this expansion of her popular 2018 New Yorker essay, Zauner, best known as the founder of indie rock group Japanese Breakfast, grapples with what it means to be severed from her Korean heritage following her mother's battle with cancer. In an attempt to honor and remember her umma, the author sought to replicate the flavors of her upbringing. Throughout, the author delivers mouthwatering descriptions of dishes like pajeon, jatjuk, and gimbap, and her storytelling is fluid, honest, and intimate. Aptly, Zauner frames her story amid the aisles of H Mart, a place many Asian Americans will recognize, a setting that allows the author to situate her personal story as part of a broader conversation about diasporic culture, a powerful force that eludes ownership. The memoir will feel familiar to children of immigrants, whose complicated relationships to family are often paralleled by equally strenuous relationships with their food. It will also resonate with a larger audience due to the author's validation of the different ways that parents can show their love--if not verbally, then certainly through their ability to nourish. "I wanted to embody a physical warning--that if she began to disappear, I would disappear too," writes Zauner as she discusses the deterioration of her mother's health, when both stopped eating. When a loved one dies, we search all of our senses for signs of their presence. Zauner's ability to let us in through taste makes her book stand out from others with similar themes. She makes us feel like we are in her mother's kitchen, singing her praises. A tender, well-rendered, heart-wrenching account of the way food ties us to those who have passed. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
As the daughter of an American father and a Korean mother, Zauner had an Oregon upbringing that was both typically American and undeniably Korean. From an early age, Zauner enjoyed her mother's spicy, aromatic Korean fare; it wasn't until adulthood that she realized that her mother's unique way of expressing love was by preparing particular Korean dishes. As a child and teen, Zauner felt cheated of the cuddly nurturing love that her friends received from their mothers; eventually she chose to attend college on the East Coast, hoping to break free from her mother's control. Zauner was at loose ends until she was confronted by the reality of her mother's cancer diagnosis, after which she threw herself headfirst into researching the disease, caring for her mother, and learning to prepare the particular Korean dishes that her mother might find appetizing. Neither medicine nor Zauner's nourishing cooking was able to save her mother's life, but the journey to the end brought Zauner close to her Korean roots. It also inspired Psychopomp, Zauner's first album under the name Japanese Breakfast (her solo musical project). Zauner herself narrates the audiobook, giving it emotional heft, as well as correct pronunciation of the Korean terms and foods that play pivotal roles. VERDICT This memoir of loss and identity is both personal and universal. Essential for public libraries.--Ann Weber, Bellarmine Coll. Prep., San Jose, CA.
Excerpts
Excerpts
18 Maangchi and Me Whenever Mom had a dream about shit, she would buy a scratch card. In the morning, on the drive to school, she'd pull wordlessly into the 7-Eleven parking lot and tell me to wait while she kept the car running. "What are you doing?" "Don't worry about it," she said, grabbing her purse from the back seat. "What are you going to buy at the 7-Eleven?" "I'll tell you later." Then she'd come back with a handful of scratch cards. We'd drive the last few blocks to school, and she'd scrub off the gummy film with a coin on the dashboard. "You had a poop dream, didn't you?" "Umma won ten dollars!" she'd say. "I couldn't tell you because then it doesn't work!" Dreams about pigs, the president, or shaking hands with a celebrity were all good-luck dreams--but it was shit in particular, especially if you touched it, that was license to gamble. Every time I had a dream about shit, I couldn't wait to ask my mom to buy me a scratch card. I'd wake up from a dream about accidentally shitting my pants or walking into a public bathroom to find some extraordinarily long, winding shit, and when it was time to drive to school I'd sit quietly in the passenger seat, hardly able to contain myself until we were a block away from the 7-Eleven on Willamette Street. "Mom, pull over," I'd say. "I'll tell you why later." Shortly after we returned to the States, I started having recurring dreams about my mother. I'd suffered one such episode before, when I was a paranoid kid, morbidly obsessed with my parents' deaths. My father is driving us across Ferry Street Bridge and to skirt traffic up ahead, he maneuvers the car onto the shoulder, weaving through a gap under construction and aiming to vault off the bridge onto a platform below. Eyes focused on the mark, he leans in close to the steering wheel and accelerates, but we miss the landing by several feet. The car plunges into the rushing current of the Willamette River and I wake up breathing heavily. Later, when we were teenagers, Nicole told me a story she'd heard from her mother about a woman who suffered from recurring nightmares that all revolved around the same car accident. The dreams were so vivid and traumatic that she sought a therapist to help her overcome them. "What if, after the accident, you try to get somewhere," the therapist suggested. "Maybe if you try to get yourself to a hospital or some kind of safe place, the dream will reach a natural conclusion." So each night the woman began to will herself out of the car and crawl further and further along the side of the highway. But the dream kept coming back. One day the woman really did get into a car accident and was supposedly found dragging herself across the asphalt in an attempt to reach some nebulous location, unable to distinguish reality from her lucid dreaming. The dreams about my mother had small variations, but ultimately they were always the same. My mother would appear, still alive but incapacitated, left behind someplace we had forgotten her. In one I'm alone, sitting on a well-manicured lawn on a warm, sunny day. In the distance I can see a dark and ominous glass house. It looks modern, the exterior made up entirely of black glass windows connected by silver steel frames. The building is wide, mansion-like, and sectioned off in squares, like several monochromatic Rubik's Cubes stacked next to and on top of one another. I leave my patch of grass, making my way toward the curious house. I open its heavy door. Inside, it is dark and sparse. I wander around, eventually making my way toward the basement. I run my hand along the side of the wall as I descend the staircase. It is clean and quiet. I find my mother lying in the center of the room. Her eyes are closed and she is resting on some kind of platform that's not quite a table but not a bed either, a kind of low pedestal, like the one where Snow White sleeps off the poisoned apple. When I reach her, my mother opens her eyes and smiles, as if she's been waiting for me to find her. She is frail and bald, still sick but alive. At first I feel guilty--that we gave up on her too soon, that she'd been here the whole time. How had we managed to get so confused? Then I'm flooded with relief. "We thought you were dead!" I say. "I've just been here all along," she says back to me. I lay my head on her chest and she rests her hand on my head. I can smell her and feel her and everything seems so real. Even though I know she is sick and we will have to lose her again, I'm just so happy to discover that she is alive. I tell her to wait for me. I need to run and get Dad! Then, just as I begin to ascend the stairs to find him, I wake up. In another dream, she arrives at a rooftop dinner party and reveals she's been living in the house next door all along. In another, I am walking around my parents' property. I amble down a hill, skidding on the thick clay toward the man-made pond. In the field below, I discover my mother lying alone in a nightgown surrounded by lush grass and wildflowers. Relief again. How silly we were to think you were gone! How on earth did we manage to make such a monumental error? When you're here you're here you're here! Always she is bald and chapped and weak and I must carry her to bring her back into the house and show her to my father, but as soon as I bend down to scoop her into my arms, I wake up devastated. I shut my eyes immediately and try to crawl my way back to her. Drift back to sleep and return to the dream, savor just a bit more time in her presence. But I'm stuck wide awake or I fall into another dream entirely. Was this my mother's way of visiting me? Was she trying to tell me something? I felt foolish indulging in mysticism and so I kept the dreams hidden, privately analyzing their possible meanings. If dreams were hidden wishes, why couldn't I dream of my mother the way I wanted? Why was it that whenever she appeared she was still sick, as if I could not remember her the way she'd been before? I wondered if my memory was stunted, if my dreams were consigned to the epoch of trauma, the image of my mother stuck where we had left off. Had I forgotten her when she was beautiful? After the honeymoon, Peter and I posted up at his parents' place in Bucks County. During the day we updated our résumés, applied for jobs, and looked at apartments online. I attacked these tasks with abandon. I'd essentially spent the last year as an unpaid nurse and cleaner, and the five years before that failing to make it as a musician. I needed to commit myself to some kind of career as soon as possible. I applied indiscriminately to what seemed like every available office job in New York City and messaged everyone I knew in search of potential leads. By the end of the first week I was hired as a sales assistant for an advertising company in Williamsburg. They had long-term leases on nearly a hundred walls around Brooklyn and Manhattan, and an in-house art department that hand-painted mural advertisements like they did in the fifties. My job was to assist the two main account reps, helping them sell walls to prospective clients. If we were going after a yoga clothing company, I created maps that pinpointed every Vinyasa studio and organic health food store within a five-block radius. If we were pitching to a skate shoe company, I charted skate parks and concert venues to determine which of our walls in Brooklyn men between eighteen and thirty were most likely to pass by. My salary was forty-five grand a year with benefits. I felt like a millionaire. We rented a railroad apartment in Greenpoint from an old Polish woman who'd acquired half her husband's real estate in their divorce. The kitchen was small, with little counter space, and the floor was peel-and-stick checkerboard vinyl. There was no sink in the bathroom, just a large farmhouse-style sink in the kitchen that pulled double duty. For the most part, I felt very well adjusted. Everything was so unfamiliar--a new big city to live in, a real grown-up job. I tried my best not to dwell on what could not be changed and to throw myself into productivity, but every so often I was plagued by flashbacks. Painful loops would flare up, bringing every memory I had hoped to repress inescapably to the forefront of my mind. Images of my mother's white, milky tongue, the purple bedsores, her heavy head slipping from my hands, her eyes falling open. An internal scream, ricocheting off the walls of my chest cavity, ripping through my body without release. I tried therapy. Once a week after work I took the L train to Union Square and attempted to explain what I was feeling, though generally I was unable to take my mind off the ticking clock until half an hour in, when time was already up. Then I'd take the train back to Bedford Avenue and walk the half hour back to our apartment. It was hardly therapeutic and seemed just to exhaust me even more. Nothing my therapist said was anything I hadn't psychoanalyzed in myself a million times already anyway. I was paying a hundred-dollar copay per session, and I began to think it would be much more fulfilling to just take myself out for a fifty-dollar lunch twice a week. I canceled the rest of my sessions and committed myself to exploring alternative forms of self-care. I decided to turn to a familiar friend--Maangchi, the YouTube vlogger who had taught me how to cook doenjang jjigae and jatjuk in my time of need. Each day after work, I prepared a new recipe from her catalog. Sometimes, I followed her step by step, carefully measuring, pausing, and rewinding to get it exactly right. Other times, I picked a dish, refamiliarized myself with the ingredients, and let the video play in the background as my hands and taste buds took over from memory. Every dish I cooked exhumed a memory. Every scent and taste brought me back for a moment to an unravaged home. Knife-cut noodles in chicken broth took me back to lunch at Myeongdong Gyoja after an afternoon of shopping, the line so long it filled a flight of stairs, extended out the door, and wrapped around the building. The kalguksu so dense from the rich beef stock and starchy noodles it was nearly gelatinous. My mother ordering more and more refills of their famously garlic- heavy kimchi. My aunt scolding her for blowing her nose in public. Crispy Korean fried chicken conjured bachelor nights with Eunmi. Licking oil from our fingers as we chewed on the crispy skin, cleansing our palates with draft beer and white radish cubes as she helped me with my Korean homework. Black- bean noodles summoned Halmoni slurping jjajangmyeon takeout, huddled around a low table in the living room with the rest of my Korean family. I drained an entire bottle of oil into my Dutch oven and deep- fried pork cutlets dredged in flour, egg, and panko for tonkotsu, a Japanese dish my mother used to pack in my lunch boxes. I spent hours squeezing the water from boiled bean sprouts and tofu and spooning filling into soft, thin dumpling skins, pinching the tops closed, each one slightly closer to one of Maangchi's perfectly uniform mandu. Maangchi peeled the skin off an Asian pear with the giant knife pulled toward her, just like Mom did when she cut Fuji apples for me after school on a little red cutting board, before eating the left-over fruit from the core. Just like Mom, chopsticks in one hand, scissors in the other, cutting galbi and cold naengmyeon noodles with a specifically Korean ambidextrous precision. Skillfully stretching out the meat with her right hand and cutting it into bite-sized pieces with her left, using kitchen scissors like a warrior brandishes a weapon. Excerpted from Crying in H Mart: A Memoir by Michelle Zauner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
1 Crying in H Mart | p. 3 |
2 Save Your Tears | p. 12 |
3 Double Lid | p. 24 |
4 New York Style | p. 36 |
5 Where's the Wine? | p. 49 |
6 Dark Matter | p. 67 |
7 Medicine | p. 78 |
8 Unni | p. 92 |
9 Where Are We Going? | p. 108 |
10 Living and Dying | p. 119 |
11 What Procellous Awesomeness Does Not in You Abound? | p. 130 |
12 Law and Order | p. 145 |
13 A Heavy Hand | p. 149 |
14 Lovely | p. 158 |
15 My Heart Will Go On | p. 170 |
16 Jatjuk | p. 182 |
17 Little Axe | p. 192 |
18 Maangchi and Me | p. 207 |
19 Kimchi Fridge | p. 217 |
20 Coffee Hanjan | p. 228 |
Acknowledgments | p. 241 |