{"id":44998,"date":"2022-09-16T06:00:38","date_gmt":"2022-09-16T11:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/?p=44998"},"modified":"2022-09-12T14:15:07","modified_gmt":"2022-09-12T19:15:07","slug":"crying-in-h-mart-by-michelle-zauner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/crying-in-h-mart-by-michelle-zauner\/","title":{"rendered":"Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Michelle Zauner\u2019s wildly popular memoir, <\/span>Crying in H Mart<\/i><\/strong><\/a>, is everything everyone said it would be: devastating and beautifully written. Zauner is a musician who rose to fame with her band Japanese Breakfast with their breakout album <\/span>Psychopomp<\/span><\/i> which came out in 2016. Her memoir, though, is not about her musical fame, but about her mother\u2019s terminal cancer diagnosis and the months following her death.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Zauner grew up in Eugene, Oregon, which is the backdrop of her contentious childhood and difficult relationship with her mother. She describes her mother as \u201cnot a mommy-mom,\u201d compared to the mothers of her classmates. She was not as warm or affectionate as Michelle thought she ought to have been, but as she grew into adulthood the two became much closer. Her mother\u2019s diagnosis only cemented her filial love, and they ultimately became \u201cinnately, intrinsically intertwined.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Food fuels the story. The title, for one, references the Asian grocery store chain H Mart, but Korean food is also woven into every aspect of the narrative: The fish covered in gochujang Zauner\u2019s mother makes for her before she leaves for college; the \u201ctender short rib\u201d with \u201cHard-boiled soy-sauce eggs sliced in half, crunchy bean sprouts flavored with scallions and sesame oil, doenjang jjigae with extra broth, and chonggak kimchi, perfectly soured\u201d she prepares when she comes to visit after the initial cancer diagnosis; the jatjuk (pine nut porridge) Zauner makes for her mother during her final months and continues to make for herself when she is gone; the doenjang jjigae (fermented soybean soup) she makes the day after her funeral.<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps the most powerful element of Zauner\u2019s story is how she ties the living memory of her mother to the Korean food she ate as a child and learns to cook in her mother\u2019s absence. Each dish holds a piece of her mother. Each conversation she stumbles through in Korean grasps at her mother. She found a home in her mother\u2019s culture, thus allowing her to embrace that culture as her own.<\/span><\/p>\n

Zauner\u2019s memoir is striking in many ways, but one of the most profound is how she brings a humanity to her mother that we sometimes struggle to do with a parent. After her mother\u2019s death, she learns more about her than she ever knew while she was alive. She realized how similarly she and her mother saw the world, how their emotional turmoil was inseparable, and how the memory of her mother would continue with her. Even as just a reader and spectator at the sidelines of Zauner\u2019s relationship with her mother, <\/span>Crying in H Mart <\/i><\/strong><\/a>feels like a tether between the two that now lives beyond their physical bodies. It was beautiful to read about and I think Zauner did an excellent job memorializing her mother with this book.<\/span><\/p>\n

This title is also available in the following formats:<\/p>\n

Large Print<\/a><\/p>\n

Libby eBook<\/a><\/p>\n

Libby eAudiobook<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Zauner\u2019s wildly popular memoir, Crying in H Mart, is everything everyone said it would be: devastating and beautifully written. Zauner is a musician who rose to fame with her band Japanese Breakfast with their breakout album Psychopomp which came out in 2016. Her memoir, though, is not about her[Read more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[361,5249,1,8],"tags":[5607,194,844,5585,1187,676],"class_list":["post-44998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio-books","category-digital-content","category-reference","category-staff-picks","tag-asian-american-women","tag-food","tag-illness","tag-koreans","tag-memoir","tag-nonfiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd0CXx-bHM","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44998"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45373,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44998\/revisions\/45373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}