Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

Posted by Ms K on April 24, 2025 in All | Leave a comment

Crying in H Mart is a memoir and does exactly what the title says, but it had me Crying in K Mart. If you pick this one up (and I hope you do), grab a box of tissues when you check out because if you’ve lost someone you dearly, dearly loved, your wee heart will be splitting in two.

My daughter Mia pushed this one into my hands along with a card she had written to me closing with one of the most lovely lines in this book “Even then I must have known that no one would ever love me as much as she would.” Oh here come the tears again.

This is the story of Michelle Zauner, a young Korean American woman coming to terms with the early death of her mother. She wants to understand their complicated, sometimes turbulent relationship, and in contemplating the highs and lows, she realises food was always at their epicentre.

H Mart is the supermarket chain specialising in Asian food and the H stands for Han ah rum, a Korean phrase that roughly translates to “one arm full of groceries”. It is the place that feels and smells like home for Koreans and is where everyone wanders the aisle delighted at being freed from the single aisle ethnic section in traditional western grocery stores.

This memoir is an exquisite telling of family, food, grief, and courage. With humor and heart, the author shares growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s high expectations; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over steaming, delicious plates of food. 

As Michelle grows up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band and meeting the man who would become her husband, her Koreanness begins to fade and feel more distant. It’s her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle is twenty-five, that forces a reckoning with her identity and brings her to home to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, love and the history that her mother had given her.

This was on BARACK OBAMA’S BEST BOOKS of 2021 so I’m late to the reading party I’m afraid but this one, Readheads, is timeless so I think I’m off the hook.

And that is my 2 cents worth.