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What it argues
Crying in H Mart is Michelle Zauner's memoir of her mother's death from cancer and the loss it made her confront: not just of a parent but of the Korean half of her identity. Zauner is half-Korean, raised in Eugene, Oregon, by a Korean mother and a white American father. The mother, Chongmi, was the carrier of the culture — Korean food, Korean standards, the Korean language, and a particular form of demanding love. When she died in 2014, Zauner found herself without the primary connection to that inheritance.
The book takes its title from a viral essay Zauner published in The New Yorker in 2018, which described the experience of crying in a Korean grocery store after her mother's death, watching older Korean women who reminded her of what she had lost. The memoir expands that essay into a full portrait of their relationship — which was loving and often bruising — and the period of her mother's illness, during which Zauner moved home to Eugene to care for her and learned to cook Korean food as an act of devotion.
What it gets right
- 1.
Food is the book's central metaphor for cultural inheritance: learning to cook Korean food after her mother's death is Zauner's way of preserving a connection to a culture she might otherwise lose entirely.
- 2.
Zauner's biracial identity left her belonging fully in neither American nor Korean contexts — a liminal position her mother navigated for her, and which she had to navigate alone after the death.
- 3.
The mother-daughter relationship was both sustaining and difficult: Chongmi expressed love primarily through care and feeding, and withheld the verbal affirmations Zauner craved.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Michelle Zauner is an American musician and author. She is the lead singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist behind the indie pop project Japanese Breakfast, which she formed in 2013. Her albums Psychopomp, Soft Sounds from Another Planet, and Jubilee have received widespread critical acclaim; Jubilee was named one of the best albums of 2021 by dozens of publications. Crying in H Mart, expanded from her 2018 New Yorker essay, became a New York Times bestseller and was a finalist for several major literary prizes. She grew up in Eugene, Oregon, and is based in the United States.
