Michelle Zauner
Nonfiction Memoir 2022 / 239 pages
I call this a "tender" book. It is about a biracial Korean American young woman and her relationship with her mother, Chongmi. Her relationship is beautiful ... even though mother and daughter do not share their values completely. Michelle's mother is much more focused on her daughter’s beauty than Michelle is herself, for example. And yes, there are conflicts and stress when she is a teenager, but what woman did not have a challenging time with her mother in those years? This part of the story is bookended by a loving, tender and respectful relationship between mom and daughter.
Both when Michelle is little and when she comes home to Eugene Oregon at 25 and finds her mother has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she works hard to establish and keep a relationship with Chongmi. This non-fiction story focuses shamelessly and without hesitation on the pain and sorrow of watching your mother deteriorate and die and tells us the gripping-ly honest story of her and her father's grief. It is powerful in its honesty.
The thread of the book, however, is food. Michelle and her mom relate through Korean food all their lives, as they search for authentic ingredients when living in Eugene, and Chongmi attempts to teach Michelle how to cook tasty Korean food, and they share an inordinate number of meals, both in Eugene, and during the summers they spend is Seoul. There is considerable description of food, how it is prepared, what good, fresh ingredients are. I did not truly understand a bit of this, as all the food they eat, I have never eaten! Sheltered cuisine life, I guess!
I gave it three hearts because if what feels to me Iike filler. Michelle writes a lot about her days in college, as a struggling musician, and as a new entrant into the workforce. But these do not seem to matter much to the central theme of Chongmi’s death and Michelle’s subsequent loss. But Ms. Zauner is telling her own story, and I suspect she believes these years impacted her latter years with her mom in a way I do not understand.
Crying in H-Mart is definitely worth a read, for the insight you may gain into both Korean-American culture and the intimate processes of death.
This book is one of the GoodReads books of the year, 2021.
May 2025
I read this earlier this year and share some of your reactions to it. While most mother-daughter relationships have struggles, each is unique so I found reading about this pair as well as the father-daughter dynamic insightful.
I felt the emphasis on food a bit too much. I’ve enjoyed some Korean dishes and found myself craving some the one described. But it felt like a bit of filler and I was skimming over it after awhile.
This was a selection for my book club but I missed the meeting. It would have been interesting to hear others reactions.