I do love a book that takes me into a new world. This memoir by an indie-rock musician whose mother was Korean, her father American did take me to a new place. Her focus is her time growing up in Eugene, Oregon as a difficult child, a more difficult teenager, and then her mother’s cancer diagnosis and death when she was 25 years-old. After reading comments on Goodreads, I wondered if her combativeness as a teenager was a way to survive her mother’s constant criticism.
Though she never learned to speak Korean, she traveled every other year with her mother to Korea where they bonded over food and she knew and loved her aunts and grandmother. Though her description of her teenage years made this a surprise, she did go to Bryn Mawr; after graduation she lived in Philadelphia and worked to become a musician, starting a band called Japanese Breakfast.
She returned to Eugene after her mother’s diagnosis and was determined to make up for her teenage behavior by taking care of her mother. The descriptions of her mother’s illness and her own difficulties in being the person she wanted to be were searing. I admired her honesty in writing about jealousy of another caregiver. Perhaps the most odd thing she did as her mother neared death was to marry her boyfriend to give her mother the opportunity to plan and experience this event. Perhaps that’s an indication of the unhealthy connection between her and her mother. Though their married life was delayed by her mother’s death, the two did become a couple.
Her success in the world of music grew as she used music to express her grief. She tells briefly of her success and ends the book describing a tour in Asia with its last stop in Seoul, an emotional event for her.
I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of Korean food and continue to think of jatjuk, a porridge of rice and pine nuts that sounds like great comfort food. I learned that serious Korean cooks have kimchi refrigerators to promote the fermentation of vegetables for kimchi. H Mart is a large chain of Asian supermarkets and there are several in Northern Virginia.
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart, Knopf, 2021, 239 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.