Michelle Zauner’s memoir “Crying in H Mart” is proof that most people have no business writing memoirs in their 30s. Offering a similar atmosphere of hazy undigested raw experience as J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” Zauner’s book would make for a great article, which, in fact, it began its life as—and as such it should have remained. Granted, both Zauner and Vance were propelled to relative stardom by the live-action, real-time memoir genre, but one wonders if these works will have staying power.
As a love letter to Korean food, the book succeeds tremendously. One cannot read the book without searching for and venturing to the nearest H Mart to sample the offerings of the food court and bakery, awed by the steaming contents of hot stone bowls with visions of K Pop on the television screen overhead. One leaves the book with the resolve to learn what gochujang is and how one can sample as many banchan—small side dishes, some of them picked—as possible. It’s downright compelling.
However, the story is primarily about a daughter’s grief. Zauner, who was born in South Korea to an American father and Korean mother, grew up in the Pacific Northwest. She developed a strained but close relationship with her mother that was mediated by the language of food. In 2014, Zauner’s mother was diagnosed with cancer and died following a brief and intense illness.
There is a likely unintentional but nonetheless searing indictment of our hypermobile society. Separated by thousands of miles, language, and a generation or more from a coherent cultural context, Zauner watches her mother drift into death devoid of ritual, community, or reassuring familiarity of “this is what we have always done.” The American frontier, whether literal or figurative, is one of novelty and invention. This is enticing in young adulthood but crushing in the face of death. Zauner observes her Korean aunt’s fervent Christian faith following her mother’s death with none of the tools or experience to understand what she is witnessing.
In the years following her mother’s sudden death, Zauner discovered a Korean cooking channel on YouTube and learned to reconnect with the tastes and smells of her upbringing, finding an outlet for her grief and stronger sense of identity. Having been in a strained relationship with her mother for many years, living on different coasts in her post-college years seems to have provided new stability and connection that was cut short by the sudden and traumatic loss.
The focus on a child’s memories of her mother is also a story about parenting. In addition to hypermobile agnosticism, Zauner’s mother displays the American spirit in her intensive parenting. This is not uniquely American, and may, in fact, be as Korean as it is American given that South Korea has a birth rate plummeting to one of the lowest in the world. Zauner, an only child isolated on semi-rural property outside a small city in Washington state, bore the unrelenting focus of her mother’s aspirations and ambitions. Zauner’s father ran a business that allowed Zauner’s mother to work solely as a housewife, maintaining a meticulous home, each night preparing a full Western style meal for Zauner’s father and Korean meal complete with banchan.
Zauner’s description of her teen years is a hellscape many an American adult will recognize. There is a near total lack of real-world responsibility, a fixation on collegiate success, and acute loneliness. Zauner experiences some kind of depressive mental breakdown, which to the distant observer seems possibly to be the logical response to such a frivolous and lonely adolescence. Notably, Zauner never learned to make Korean dishes from her mother. How many mothers refuse to surrender control over the kitchen and the pristine rooms of the house, refuse to allow their children to learn practical skills, refuse to bestow meaningful and essential responsibility on their offspring in the name of love and care?
Few are the people, teen or otherwise, who would wish to be constrained by arbitrary schoolwork that has no lasting import, isolated, and continually commanded to be grateful for the privilege of that triviality and isolation.
On a melancholy vacation in the aftermath of death, Zauner and her father recall her teen years briefly in a heated argument. Her father claims he and her mother would wonder to each other how Zauner could be so cruel after everything they had done for her. This is the almost inevitable result of overly intensive motherhood and fatherhood. Having spoiled the child, the parents are shocked to discover their precious child is, indeed, spoiled. The unkindness of doing too much for a child is that the mother and father send an underdeveloped and unhappy child out into the world to be disciplined by the harsh realities of life rather than to learn discipline within the loving confines of the home.
Having overextended in an attempt to show a child love, mothers and fathers will almost inevitably feel resentment. With the knowledge that Zauner’s mother will die at a relatively young age and Zauner will be estranged from her father, the isolation and strained communication of youth are all the sadder.
Zauner’s mother deserves no special condemnation for her intensive parenting. Indeed, we only happen to know many of its gritty details because of the confessional writings of her daughter who resulted from that intensive parenting. They are not special but rather emblematic of a generation of few children and towering parental expectations.
The last intervention the angst-ridden, miserable adolescent needs is more being done to by the parent. Do not make the unhappy teen a special dish to cheer her up; it will certainly fail and build walls of further resentment. Have the teen work in the food court of the local H Mart, care for fragile children and elderly people. In short: get them out of the house. Zauner’s tortured teen years and strained relationship with her mother seem not the necessary fertilizer for artistic vision but rather the temporary stifling of a thoughtful and talented mind.
Take aways: try more Korean food; avoid intensive parenting.
