Memoir Review: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

´Save your tears when your mother dies´.

I never been in a H Mart (a supermarket selling Korean food) and I bet my mother haven´t been either, but I´ve cried and cried while listening to Crying in H Mart - in the audiobook format, read by Korean-American author and musician Michelle Zauner. Mothers should never be allowed to die. My mother, or your mother or my enemy´s mother. 

´I miss how many people in H Mart miss their family´.

Crying in H Mart is Zauner´s coming at term with the death of her mother, when she was 25. No matter how old or how young you are, being deprived by your mother´s presence, although all those disagreements and fights, is hard to live with. My mother, of blessed memory, died over 10 years ago but either I or my siblings ever come to terms with it. My stepfather is still using her phone number and every time I call him, I shiver when realizing it is not she who would answer the phone.

Zauner´s language for reading her Korean heritage is food. By cooking - learning to mostly - the dishes she used to share with her mother, she is connecting with her past, the past she shared with her mother. The food is the centerpiece of the world, altogether with beauty forming the identity bond. Cooking is deconstructing the love she took it for granted, without trying to hard to understand the love she shared with her own mother. Later, after the passing of her mother, through photographs and family memories, it is her mother, as an individual who is becoming more real than before. She had a life of her own and hobbies and loved to be pretty. 

Zauner offers a glimpse into fragments of the everyday life of the Korean community living in the US, with its religiosity and food habits and adjustments (mostly on women´s side) to their American children and husbands. Born in Seoul, her Korean language never developped and she calls herself ´barely literate´ but there is something about the words she grew up with which made her be part of the Korean cultural realm. There are those words that one cannot really explain or translate to anyone. Those words one grew up with will stay with us, no matter how much we will assume we forgot them.

The memoir is witnessing her own transformation and the process at the end of which she built her own feeling of belonging. Still, her mother will never abandon her. She will always be present in her life. Mothers will never leave us. And yes, I may be crying again.

Rating: 5 stars