Crying in H Mart

This memoir very much reads as the author trying to work through and process their own feelings about everything that's transpired and what it means for them to be Korean at this stage in their life. Because of that is has a raw authenticity to it that given the reviews obviously resonates with a large number of people.

The book doesn't work for me though based on my own feelings towards how I was raised. It's very hard for me to see lines like “there was no one in the world that was ever as critical or could make me feel as hideous as my mother, but there was no one not even Peter, who ever made me feel as beautiful” and chalk that up as being overly devoted or “small criticisms”.   That to me crosses the line of devotion and if criticism tears you down to that degree, then is it actually small? This and many other examples just spoke to me in an incredibly negative way that was always in the back of my mind, through all the heartwarming moments and the bittersweet. 

Crying in H Mart won the 2021 Goodread Choice Awards for Memoir & Autobiography.

This is a hard book to rate and review as it is such a personal account from Michelle Zauner to the point I was sometimes thinking “Am I supposed to be reading this?”

This is a story about family and grief, the search for connections, validation, and identity.
Michelle beautifully tells us about her relationship with her mother while growing up, their fights and friction points and her last days alive.

I felt privileged to be able to read these episodes of Michelle's life, as well as her love story. I wish there was a little less food involved, hence the 4 stars. Yet again, be advised that I was suffering with stomach flu while reading which may have negatively affected the experience.

I definitely recommend the reading.

How can you write ah honest review to a book with which you can relate in so many ways and in others, you just can nod in understanding?! This book arose in me so many emotions that were long forgotten as you can easily see it's written from deep inside the author's soul. The writing is good, so raw at times that it can hurt but at the same time it's too good to put down. Yes, it can make you sad, make you think and reflect even if it wasn't maybe intended to have that result.
If you're interested in culture, food and people, especially from a different country, this can be your book. It's depressing at times, you can expect that from a book with the title this one has. You can also expect swearing three or so times and mentioning of lovemaking but it's brief and not so disturbing to want you throw the book. My book club chose this book, it's wasn't my choice but don't regret reading it.

Crying in H Mart tugs at the heartstrings of the reader, making them live in the world of Michelle Zauner. The book is an ode to the feeling of losing someone, it describes Zauner's battle with self-identity inside an American landscape while raised by a Korean mother.

Strong words are abundant in the book, picturing a heavy sense of not only grief, but also hope. Zauner logs her emotional journey in a manner that is true to life and honest, not holding back on uncomfortable subjects.

It's a very good book to reflect upon life and relationships.

i listened to the audiobook & it is beautifully read & the text was written with so much grief & love & thoughtfulness, it is tough to have so many conflicting emotions & find a way to put them into words so concisely but michelle achieved that. i saw japanese breakfast open for alex g in 2017 without knowing much about them outside of the music & i really enjoyed experiencing this book, it is emotional to now know some of what michelle was going through in the years leading up to the show i saw

3/5 - Not to be that person, but I absolutely do not know why this book is rated so high. While I've gone through the same grief when it comes to losing a mother so tragically, the story was ok. I can say her father was a trash husband, father and caregiver. I do not care how hard his upbringing was.

4:

In my heart I'm almost certain this could have been a 5 star book, but I can't give it that in good conscience, because there's something deeply unsettling buried in Michelle's memoir, and it rattled me in the worst of ways.

Michelle bared herself in this book. It's raw and authentic, almost seems like too personal a story to be shared. Her grief and hurt run deeply, and they're so palpable, it's almost like they're an entity of their own; and it's made clear that her mother was intrinsically woven into every single facet of her being, so it comes as a shock to absolutely no one that Michelle was ripped to pieces and lost her sense of identity after her death. And that's exactly my issue.

Look, I know as much as every daughter in the history of ever, that the relationship a girl has with her mother is always its own shade of complicated, and everyone processes things differently and whatnot. But I was uncomfortable at so many points in the story. It is one thing to showcase the abuse you've endured, as there are countless valid reasons to do this, and I fully support it. It is another thing entirely to make it seem as if everything that was done to you was fine, forgiven, and forgotten in the end because: 1. Your abuser got cancer and died, 2. You were a “terrible child” and a “troublesome daughter to raise”, 3. That's how immigrant parents are and they got worse done to them from their parents and, 4. They only ever did those things because they are your mother!!! They LOVED you and had your best interests at heart!!!

Fuck outta here. There were some straight up disturbing snippets in the book. She literally said that now it was her turn to be her mother (???). She got MARRIED just because her mother was dying, and the whole ‘I'm only beautiful if my mom thinks I am and without her I am nothing' deal? Shivers.

That being said... well, I did like the book haha. I genuinely felt seen in many of the things Michelle said, as I mentioned, I think every mother/daughter relationship is always complex. I love my mom, but at times she can be my harshest critic, it's true. And yet there's the moments when it really does feel like your mom is the one who'll love you the most. Complicated shit.

I enjoyed her style, and the fact that it was so engaging; I was having a mild reading slump and it took me right out. Her incorporation of food and cooking and culture as healing mechanisms is enthralling, and it may sound weird but my favorite parts in the story were her descriptions of what and why she was cooking, it was delightful.

The book grew out of a viral essay of the same name that appeared in the New Yorker. It's about growing up in Oregon with a white father and Korean mother. A mother whom Michelle lost to cancer when she was 25.

We see her mother succumbing to the cancer and Zauner navigating that time with her father. In that sense it is a novel exploring her grief, but for me it's the recollections of food that evoked such strong memories of my own. So much shared experience buried in the food. The miyeokguk served on birthdays, the bitter herbal remedies insisted upon, the foraging of banchan in an aunt's fridge, the quick comfort found in jjajangmyeon, the long unbroken apple peels. Even the discovery of Maangchi and her enthusiastic recipes for Korean food follow a familiar to me trajectory.

It is also Zauner discovering her own Koreanness that hit home. Recollections of Hangul Hakkyo, her pat Korean phrase to explain her lack of fluency, and growing up in a mostly white suburb. In writing a deeply personal book Zauner manages to evoke an incredible amount of resonant emotions. It's not going to hit the same way for everyone else but I couldn't help but love this read.

For a biting epilogue that shows how sharp her writing remains, read her essay in Harpers Bazaar (When My Mother Died, My Father Quickly Started a New Life. I Chose to Forgive Him) where she writes about how her father moved on after his wife's death by dating an Indonesian woman 7 years younger than Michelle herself.

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.

As the plane descends in the dark into Hong Kong, I greedily finished the final few pages of Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart. (It may also interest you to know that the seat belt sign switched off during the second post-credit scene of Eternals on my out-bound flight... serendipity?) “Heartbreaking” “Fascinating” were adjectives printed on the cover but I found myself not entirely clearing the bars despite trying hard to.

Of course, the visceral moments of grief were indeed gut-wrenching. But when blended with the difficulties of navigating a third-cultured identity, almost seemed too stereotypical — perhaps even spoiled.

On one hand it was a beautiful, raw encounter that would resonate with a lot of halpus or overseas-educated Asians. On the other hand, perhaps it was heartbreaking for some other reason — to witness the facets of filial piety and generational trauma manifesting as “too little too late” in Asian kids.

My favourite thing about the read: it totally made me fall in love with Korean food again, the same way watching David Chang cook with his umma did.

PS one thing that really bugged me was that Myeongdong Kyoja was described two times — but only one mentioned the name. Why?

Edit: read other 1-star reviews to sooth my chicken-self and would also agree that it was kinda boring and her husband seemed like a bit of a convenient tool for her (unless a lot of other things have gone unmentioned). Yes memoirs are not really for other's judgement but I can't really see why it's so highly rated.

I wouldn't normally read a grief memoir. There has just been too much sadness in the world of late. What I appreciated about Michelle's hand in dealing with the loss of her mother was the relation to food. Her description of meals with her family were mouth-watering. There were some notable exceptions, but I'll let you find out for yourself.