Crying in H Mart

From the Blog (www.rtfbpod.com/?s=b&h=22)

I have a theory about crying in the movies; when reading books; listening to music (maybe it's the kind of thing that is actually super obvious and accepted by everyone else and I am just now catching on to it): Art makes you cry more when you're older.

When I was a kid, my mom really loved the movie Beaches. She probably still does, but she used to, too. Nowadays it might not be the kind of movie that everyone has seen, and it's been several years since I watched it myself, but what I remember is that it's about two women who became friends when they were young (and hanging out on a beach) and the story of their lives as one (Bette Midler) goes off to chase her dreams of being a big time singer and the other (not Bette Midler)... I don't remember; decides to get married and become a mom? and then, spoiler alert: gets sick and dies and Bette sings about how she had been the wind beneath her wings all along and adopts the orphaned girl. AND every time we would watch it, we made a point to get a box of tissues ready for mom because she cried every time.

I was baffled.

Sure, the idea was very sad, but, like, she knows this is just pretend right? I wasn't too much older than having figured out that the actors in movies didn't actually die IRL when they died on screen, so I felt she should've known this and been ok.

Fast forward several years, and we took our kids to see Coco when it was out in the theaters. I liked it a lot and I thought it was very sweet and, sure, it tugged on your heartstrings there at the end, but you know, whatever. BUT, son number two fell asleep and missed a lot of the second half on the first viewing, so a few weeks later, I took him to see it again. An important thing to take note of, dear reader, is that in between those two viewings, my grandmother passed away. So this time, despite knowing what was going to happen (and remembering, from when I was young, that this is all pretend anyway), when Miguel sang to his great grandmother I was reduced to a puddle.

Jump cut to this book.

I knew approximately nothing about it when I picked it up, aside from the fact that I'd seen it on the best seller list for months. I suspected it had something to do with Korean food, seeing as it was apparently set in an H Mart, and that there was going to be tears - I assumed due to feeling nostalgic for home when browsing kimchi?

When I got far enough in to my copy of the audio book to realize what it was actually going to be about, I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to listen to it - at least not while I was out on the running trail where people could see me and wonder if I was stable enough to be out and about on my own.

See, the book is about a lot of things: about the author grappling with her Korean heritage growing up in the States, with understanding her mother, her parents' relationship, trying to get a music career off the ground, but principally, it is about her mother battling and ultimately succumbing to stomach cancer. And, another important thing to take note of, at the time, my dad's ongoing battle with cancer had just taken a pretty bad turn.

So, yeah, I was fully expecting to need to listen with a box of Kleenex, probably locked in my office late at night.

And side note: fuck cancer. For real. Can we all agree on that really quick? Double fuck it.

What I found in the book was an interesting and engaging memoir. Usually I would avoid a memoir from anyone under the age of 50, since I really like it when a memoir can have some sort of "and ultimately I learned, after all my years, that X and Y" lesson to wrap things up for me as the reader. I didn't exactly connect 100% with it, being not a woman and not Korean, but I found it all easy to sympathize with (I guess is the right word for it?). I thought her trips with her mom to Korea to meet Aunties and Grandmothers (whom she'd heard about in a kind of mythology and held in such regard and fear) to be very engaging. Her mother's methods of discipline and encouragement (I guess is the word for it?) were relatable. Her efforts to reconnect with her heritage by cooking traditional meals for her mother were charming.

And even the part I feared listening to the most, when her mother's health turned, when she was admitted to hospice care, when family and friends started making special trips before it was too late. You know, the part that was essentially someone holding up a mirror to exactly what was going on in my family at the time... Surely it was sad, heartbreaking, devastating... but it was also a reminder that I wasn't the only one who's ever dealt with something like this. It was a weird kind of promise that, yes, this was all going to hurt, maybe worse than anything else, but here was someone who had felt every pain-filled minute of it and somehow managed to not let it destroy her. So, it strangely became a bit of a comfort to me - though, yeah, I still cried in public, but somehow I felt like... "of course I'm crying; it's what the book wanted us to do. What else are you supposed to do when this happens?"

Probably my favorite part, if you want to think of it that way, was the section where they are hurrying to plan and hold a wedding in time for her mother to be able to attend. The juxtaposition of the two versions of the future; the dread of a terminal illness - the fear of further downturns in health, of not having enough time left, of not being able to share in your family's happiness - with the hope of a wedding - the celebration of love, the intertwining of two families, the excitement for what lies ahead - was really beautiful, tragic, emotional, all rolled together. Something I would've read in my younger years with a dry eye thinking "well, at least her mom got to see her married"; something I need only to think about now to feel the tears beginning to well up.

PS - love you dad. we all miss you

If anyone doesn’t understand how ‘whiteness’ has nothing to do with skin colour you can just show them this book. A book about being half Korean written by the whitest woman in the world.

She manages to make everything about her. The most obvious example is her father. You would think she would have some empathy, after all whatever she is feeling for this distant mother figure she barely interacted with must be a thousand times harder for the man whose life was completely defined by her, who lived with her his entire life. But no, instead she tries her best to demean and belittle his experience, culminating in the weirdest scene in the book, where she asks the reader to join her in smugly judging a grieving widower for committing the sin of acting like a tourist in a foreign country.

Then there’s the food, just endless irrelevant lists that make the eyes glaze over, like you’re at an asian restaurant with a white friend who wants to show off how worldly they are. The best food writers will go out of their way to place food in the context of the place it comes from and the culture it represents, using food as a way to build understanding of another people and another way of thinking. Not this author, for her Korean food only represents a chance to show off how interesting she is. She can’t risk actually engaging with the culture beyond a superficial level because then she might have to consider other people worldviews. There’s something so quintessentially millennial white woman about it. This is the Eat, Pray, Love of grief.

To be fair, this story would be perfect as an article, it would be heart wrenching and beautiful. As a book all it does is reveal the emptiness underneath.

I will say though, if you lost your mum I’m sure it would hit the feels, its so saccharine it can’t not.
And also if you want to know what it’s like to be the worst, this is the book for you.

this memoir was full of the most intimate thoughts, the vulnerability michelle zauner shared in her book really had a grip on my heart. what's funny is that her style of writing kinda reminded me of my own way to write, describing the smallest moments in incredible detail in order to hold on to dear memories. all the descriptions of the high variety of korean food in this book made me incredibly hungry at 2am lol, and i think i might have to do some research on the names of the different meals so that i can picture them better in my head. while the beginning and the end of the book was a little too slow-paced for me, the middle part was gut wrenching and gripping, and sometimes i feared reading the next chapter because being confronted with the imagery of a slowly dying mother just scared the living shit out of me, but still, i think i learned a lot from this. i also love how this is a memoir of a musician who dedicated the first album to her mother, with her face on the album cover, so i immediately developed a kind of relationship to the album as well, even though i didn't really listen to it before. all in all, a sometimes feelingswise-tough, but good read for me!

This is my first written review.

I come to this book from a unique perspective, being that my wife is Korean and we have 2 children (boy 15, girl 12) and while my wife has had some health issues in recent years, thankfully she is still with us. So while I can't exactly empathise with everything Michelle has gone through, I can certainly relate to a lot of it.

The long and short of it that this is a very personal story, I've seen other reviews noting that it feels almost too personal, but I imagine it was a cathartic exercise for her to write this and I applaud her for it.

Not the longest book, I finished it within about 5 days, and felt connected to the story right from the beginning having had similar experiences of Korean culture, firstly through my wife and then vicariously through the children.
Though we aren't based in Korea, I have visit 5-6 times over the last 20 years we've been married to visit her family that are still there, so can easily recall similar scenarios that play out in the story.

I think it's an excellent book and very easy to read, moreso if you have something to relate to it. I've now recommended that the rest of the family read it, starting with my wife, as I'm hugely curious what they will get out of it.
I'm also hoping ours kids take some lessons from it, namely appreciating the sacrifices of their mother, and putting the effort in now to learn 한국어. We also tried when they were younger, but esp. now as teenagers it seems like such a pain in the butt to do, but will be so worth it when they are older, should they decide to visit Korea again one day (I've also been very slowly learning on and off over the last 20 years...so understand the struggle, lol).

"What we're looking for isn't available at Trader Joe's. H Mart is where your people gather under one odorous roof, full of faith that they'll find something they can't find anywhere else."

The author relates her story about growing up Korean American in a way that anyone, of any background, can find something in. She grew up in Oregon to a demanding mother, struck out on her own after troubled teenage years, and then returns to care for the same mom as she's fighting cancer. It's an honest look at self-image, grief, and identity that I absolutely loved to read.

Her way of writing was stellar even as she described the many different faces of grief and loss, and while I don't really cry from books, this one brought me close. And, I know this is a weird thing to bring up in a sober review like this, but the food descriptions? Like, 5 stars, easy. 6 stars. All the stars.

Highly recommend giving this a read. Incredibly moving, incredibly powerful.