Crying in H Mart - Part I : a book full of emotion designed to devastate me

I’ve been putting off reading Crying in H Mart, the year-long New York Times bestseller by Michelle Zauner, most known for her band Japanese Breakfast because I was certain it would devastate me. I was right about that, as each chapter I read brings me to tears.

There are a lot of reasons for that. First, the artistic: Zauner’s writing is glorious. A perfect combination of to-the-point observation along with poetic license and deep nostalgia-drenched memory showcase her skills as a writer. It also highlights how she can create gut-punching lyrics in her albums: she is just really really that good.So far I’ve read through chapter seven and still have about half a book more to go, but already her descriptions of food have resulted in me immediately scrolling through Doordash or favor to find anything remotely related to the described dish. Her insight into her mother’s experience, how it shaped her, and how she grew and reacted are expertly crafted. It’s the type of writing I wish I could do. The type of writing you can only do when you have something distinctive to say and you’re not afraid of sharing it with the world.

Second, there’s a throughline of how it connects. The memoir is about her mother who is dying of cancer and the way it shaped her life and her mother’s life. It’s a book about a lot of big and small ideas:

• Death

• Intergenerational trauma

• Asian-American identity

• Transitions

• Cancer

• Growth and abandonment

• The soft and tender ways we love another

• The hard and rough ways we fail to love another

I didn’t think it would envoke what it did in me. But reading through her mother’s early fight and struggle with cancer brought back distant memories of my grandmother, also dying before my eyes of lung cancer. The tragedy of her death, the trauma of her slow and progressive dying, her clinging to life, and her eventual fading from the fabric of my life remained a constant throughout my early childhood life.

Her death’s impact on me was grand. It’s how I lost my religion. It was my first real experience with death. It was the first time I understood what it meant to be lonely, or alone in a universe so massively big. A talk she had with me when she was in the hospital has been the single biggest driver of the way I love other people. Her love for me, and my internal promise to do right by her, kept me alive as a teenager. She was the reason I came out of the closet, even if she never knew it.

All of that came rushing back after reading through the first half of this book. I have no connecting thread here, just some quotes I loved and what they made me think of. I will probably do part two of this once I finish. Maybe a part three.

“I’d never seen my mother’s emotions so unabashedly on display. Never seen her without control, like a child. I couldn’t comprehend then the depth of her sorrow the way I do now. I was not yet on the other side, had not crossed over as she had into the realm of profound loss.”

When I read this quote I thought of two memories, both tied to the feeling of profound loss and the sensation of seeing your parents as human for the first time.

The first was when a memory of my father and mother at my grandfather’s (on my dad’s side) funeral. It was a catholic funeral, the type with pomp and circumstance, where the grieving family members walk up in a procession to the alter, following behind the casket.

I have never seen my father cry. Never seen real tears form in his eyes from overwhelming emotion. I’m not sure if I remember it then. I’m sure he cried that day. But what I remember most of all was my father, in his black suit, and my mother by his side, walking slowly up to the front of the church. As the music started and the funeral began, my mother reached out and took my father’s hand. Behind the two of them, I could not see their faces. They did not turn to face each other, instead her response was automatic. She needed no conversation, no prompting. My father reached out his hand and she took it. Together they walked down the long path to the front of the church, reliving the ritual for one last time. Here, by the end of the day, neither of them would have parents left alive. They too would join the ranks of others who had lived long enough to see their parents fade before them. There they would experience the same feelings, unknowable to all of us without this profound loss.

Seeing the action broke me. The idea of love as automatic tore me up. I too had never seen my parents emotions so transparent, so performed, the ritual of their love could easily be missed if you did not know where to look.1

The second was a shorter memory. After my oldest brother left for college my mother spent the night on the couch wailing. I am certain she had no clue anyone was listening to her, but from my room upstairs (his former room) I listened, terrified as she wept into the empty air. I remember at the time understanding that loss could be so complicated. You could lose someone who was still there. You could lose a life you had, a role you played.2 You could gain something in that loss, sure, but it was still a loss. Perhaps to my mother, this was the first time she understood that her role as a mother had been successful, that she would have to now find some other form of motherhood to occupy her time.

“‘I made gyeranjjim!’ My mother winced at the sight of it. She turned her face away with distaste. ‘Oh no, baby,’ she said. ‘ I really don’t want this one right now. I tried to temper my frustration, transform my disappointment into the anxious patience of a new mother with a. colicky infant.”

When my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer and going through chemo, I remember her commenting on how it changed the taste of everything she tasted. Each thing she placed in her mouth with a taste like metal. Still, she would get up each morning and cook a full breakfast for our family. On Sunday she would pace around waiting for my mother to stir, so certain that breakfast had to be served before 8:30 AM otherwise the day was wasted.

It never occurred to me that she could not eat. That her admission of metal taste could leave her starved but nauseous, enviously drinking ensure cans stashed in our garage fridge. I had no clue at the time that they weren’t there to help her keep weight off, but instead to not lose what was left.3

“That night, lying beside her, I remembered how when I was a child I would slip my cold feet between my mother’s thighs to warm them. How she’d shiver and whisper that she would always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you…Now, more than ever, I wished desperately for a way to transfer pain, wished I could prove to my mother just how much I loved her, that I could just crawl into her hospital cot and press my body close enough to absorb her burden. It only seemed fair that life should present such an opportunity to prove one’s filial piety. That the months my mother had been a vessel for me, her organs shifting and cramping together to make room for my existence, and the agony she’d endured upon my exit could be repaid by carrying this pain in her place.”

“In the same full-length mirror where I had watched her pose for more than half my life. The same mirror where I’d watched her apply cream after cream to preserve her taut, flawless skin. The same mirror where I’d find her trying on outfit after outfit, runway walking with perfect posture, examining herself with pride, posing with a new purse or leather jacket. The mirror where she lingered in all her vanity. In the mirror now there was someone unrecognizable and out of her control. Someone strange and undesirable. She started to cry.”

In old videos of my grandmother she is impossibly cool: showing up to a birthday party in a standard issue white jumpsuit or watching as her husband (and ex and my grandfather who also died when I was young) dove straight down from the tip of a cruise ship. Even when she lived with us she still looked effortlessly fabulous, at least to me. She would wear a brilliant purple silk robe around in the morning as she read the news or drank coffee. As she went through treatment after treatment her image faded. She would balloon up from the treatments, her hands swollen and no doubt aching. She lost all her hair and someone bought her a wig which she kept on a styrofoam white head in her bathroom. At night if I would sneak downstairs, sometimes the head would be staring back at me. It always frightened me, even in the mornings. I had no memory of my grandmother as anything else than grandmother, this figure I saw before me—too young to fully internalize the pain and suffering this form must have caused her. Reading this memoir I thought a lot about my mother. The pain she must have gone through to watch someone she loved grow frailer. I was having my struggle, my sadness, my grief. But my mother was having it so much worse. I wish I understood that at the time.