Crying in H Mart

What's inside (10 sections)

1. Crying where no one looks twice
2. Growing up in Eugene with summers in Seoul
3. Teenage fights and getting out
4. The diagnosis that splits time in two
5. The last months in Eugene
6. Learning to cook after the teacher is gone
7. What lingers and what feels thin
8. A note on reading it
9. Key takeaways
10. FAQ

I picked this one up because a friend kept talking about the grocery store scenes. She said she cried reading about soup. I thought that sounded like an exaggeration until I got to the second chapter and found myself standing in my own kitchen thinking about my family.

The book is a memoir by Michelle Zauner, who most people know as the singer behind Japanese Breakfast. It was published in 2021 by Knopf and runs 256 pages. It follows her childhood in Oregon, her close and often tense bond with her Korean mother Chongmi, and the months when her mother got sick and died. Food runs through all of it, not as decoration but as the way love and guilt and memory actually moved between them.

Crying where no one looks twice

The opening takes place in an H Mart, the Korean American supermarket chain where you can buy kimchi by the tub and seaweed in bulk and frozen dumplings for weeks. Zauner goes there after her mother has died. She is in her late twenties, living in New York and Philadelphia and on tour, and she finds herself crying near the prepared foods.

She describes watching older Korean women shop, wondering if her mother would have shopped the same way. She wonders if they can tell she is Korean, if she looks like she belongs there, if she knows enough to buy the right cut of meat or the right kind of fermented shrimp. That worry sets up the whole book. She was raised by a Korean mother in a mostly white town, and after her mother is gone she is afraid the thread connecting her to that half of herself will snap.

What I liked here is how plain she keeps it. She does not explain Korean food for beginners at length. She names dishes and lets the feeling carry. She admits she goes to H Mart partly to feel close and partly to punish herself for not learning more when she had the chance.

This is also where you learn the stakes. Her mother Chongmi died of cancer in the fall of 2014. Zauner was just starting to get traction with music. The grief is fresh through the whole book even when she is writing about childhood. That backward pull, present loss coloring old memories, gives the early chapters more weight than a straight timeline would.

Growing up in Eugene with summers in Seoul

Zauner grew up in Eugene, Oregon, with her mother Chongmi and her American father Joel. Her mother had grown up in Seoul and moved to the United States after marrying. Her father worked and traveled, her mother ran the house with clear rules and high standards.

At home, food was care and control at once. Chongmi cooked Korean meals from scratch and also learned to make American birthday cakes and holiday spreads. She pushed Michelle to practice instruments, to study, to present herself well. She kept the house ordered. Zauner writes about being embarrassed by packed lunches that smelled different from other kids lunches, then later craving those same lunches when she was away.

Summers in Seoul did a lot of the balancing work. There she stayed with her grandmother and aunts, ate street snacks, went to markets, got spoiled in a way Eugene did not allow. Her grandmother, who she calls Halmoni in the book, made a porridge called jatjuk when someone was sick, pine nut porridge that took time and patience. Those visits made Korea feel warm and crowded and full, while Oregon could feel quiet and exposed.

Being half Korean in Eugene in the 1990s meant fielding questions about where she was really from. She writes about wanting to blend in and also wanting her mother to ease up. Chongmi could be sharp with criticism about appearance and manners and grades. Zauner loved her mother fiercely and also found her exhausting. That mix feels honest. It never reads like she went back and softened it after the death.

Teenage fights and getting out

The middle school and high school years are rough. Zauner gets into alternative music, starts drinking with friends, pushes against curfews and expectations. Her mother responds with punishment and cold disappointment rather than long talks. Her father tends to stay out of the direct fight, which leaves the two women locked together.

One stretch I remembered clearly involves school performance slipping while music and social life take over. Zauner talks about forging a kind of independence by being difficult. She dyes her hair, she stays out, she argues about small things because the big things feel unfixable. Chongmi, who gave up a life in Korea to raise a child in Oregon, sees wasted opportunity where Michelle sees selfhood.

She applies to college on the East Coast and gets into Bryn Mawr. Distance helps at first. She can call home on her own terms. She studies, she plays in bands, she figures out she wants to write songs. But the calls home stay loaded. Her mother still comments on her weight, her clothes, her plans. Zauner still hangs up hurt and then feels guilty for being hurt.

I think this section is one of the stronger parts because she does not turn herself into a victim or her mother into a villain. She shows a teenager who was sometimes careless and a mother who was sometimes harsh, and she lets both be true. If you grew up with a parent who expressed love through correction, a lot of this will feel familiar in a way that aches.

Her early twenties bring Little Big League, a punk leaning band in Philadelphia, and then the start of Japanese Breakfast as a side project. She meets Peter Bradley, a fellow musician who becomes her boyfriend and later her husband. Peter is patient in the way the book needs. He shows up, he drives, he sits through awkward family dinners. Chongmi is slow to warm to him, partly because he is not Korean and partly because no one would have been good enough at that point.

The diagnosis that splits time in two

In 2014, while Zauner is in her mid twenties and trying to make music work, Chongmi is diagnosed with advanced cancer. The book handles the medical details without turning into a hospital log. There are scans and oncology visits and talk of surgery and chemo, but the focus stays on what the illness does to their daily life.

Zauner and Peter pause their life on the East Coast and go to Eugene to help. Her father Joel is there, overwhelmed. The house that once felt strict now feels fragile. Food becomes medicine and test. They try to get Chongmi to eat. They make soft foods, broths, porridge. Some days she can keep things down. Some days she cannot.

Zauner writes about the particular fear of watching a parent who was once forceful become thin and tired. Chongmi, who used to tell her daughter what to do about everything, now needs help getting to the bathroom. That reversal hits hard because neither of them knows how to talk about it directly. They talk through cooking instead. Can you eat this. Did I make it right. Should I add more garlic.

Peter earns his place in this part. He does dishes, he drives to appointments, he learns to be quiet in the house. Zauner is grateful and also frayed. She is trying to be a good daughter while watching the person she wanted approval from slip away before they ever fixed the old fights.

The last months in Eugene

This is the longest and hardest stretch of the book. Zauner essentially moves home. She sleeps in her childhood room. She tracks medications. She goes with her mother to treatments. She learns the names of nurses. The seasons change outside and time inside gets small, measured in appetite and pain and sleep.

There are scenes built around specific foods. Jatjuk again, the pine nut porridge her grandmother made, which she tries to make correctly. Kimchi fried rice when her mother can handle flavor. Seaweed soup, miyeokguk, the soup Korean women eat after giving birth and on birthdays, which starts to feel like a circle closing. She shops for ingredients with a new attention, asking her aunts for help, writing things down.

Her aunts fly in from Korea, especially her mother sister Kye, who brings both comfort and friction. Kye knows how to care for a sick sister in a way Zauner does not. There is tension over who decides what, how traditional to keep the care, how much to push Western doctors. Zauner feels like a child again around these confident older women, and also like an outsider who cannot speak the language well enough to help.

Chongmi dies in October 2014. Zauner does not dress it up. She describes the quiet after, the paperwork, the clothes left behind, her father sitting in a house that suddenly has too much space. She and Peter stay a little longer, then have to decide what going back to normal even means. There is no normal to go back to.

A fair criticism here is that grief makes the pacing uneven. Some days get pages and pages, others pass in a sentence. Twice I lost track of how much time had gone by between treatments. But that unevenness also feels true to caregiving, where one afternoon in a waiting room can feel longer than a whole month before.

Learning to cook after the teacher is gone

After the funeral, Zauner becomes determined to learn Korean cooking properly. She watches videos, she calls her aunts, she practices. She burns things. She over salts. She starts to understand how much knowledge her mother carried without writing down, the pinch of this, the feel of that dough, the smell that tells you the stew is ready.

She travels to Korea with Peter after a stretch of mourning. They visit family, they eat a lot, they visit places tied to her mother youth. Her grandmother health is failing too, which adds another layer. Zauner realizes she is now the link. If she does not learn and keep these recipes, they thin out in her family line.

The chapters about Seoul as an adult work well because she is no longer the kid being dragged to relatives houses. She chooses to go. She asks questions she was too impatient to ask at fifteen. Her aunts teach her to make kimchi in big batches, to trim cabbage, to salt and rinse and season. Her hands cramp. She laughs about how hard it is. For a while cooking gives grief a job to do.

Music comes back in this section too. Japanese Breakfast grows from a small project into a real career. She writes songs that touch on loss without turning the book into a press release. She is clear that work did not heal her. It gave her somewhere to put the energy that had nowhere else to go.

What lingers and what feels thin

What stays with me is not a big speech about mothers and daughters. It is smaller images. A mother tasting soup and nodding. A daughter standing in a grocery aisle listening to strangers speak Korean. A husband washing rice without being asked. The book trusts those moments more than explanations, which is why the sad parts land without feeling pushed.

I also appreciated that Zauner admits where she failed. She did not learn the language well when she could have. She wasted time fighting about clothes and boyfriends that she wishes she had spent asking about her mother life before marriage. She says this without asking the reader to forgive her. She just lays it out.

On the critical side, the father Joel can feel distant. He is present, he pays bills, he grieves, but we get less of his inner life. Part of that is the book focus on mother and daughter, and part of it may be privacy. Still, after 256 pages I wanted one more honest conversation between father and daughter about what their house had been.

The music career thread can also feel compressed if you know Japanese Breakfast well. Tours and recording sessions pass quickly compared with pages spent on a single meal. That choice makes sense for a book about family rather than fame, but readers coming only for backstage stories may want more.

Still, as a memoir about grief and food and being mixed race in a white town, it holds together. It does not try to speak for all Korean American families. It stays close to one specific mother and one specific daughter, their fights about hair and homework, their shared love of markets and late night snacks, and the way a recipe can keep a voice alive after the person is gone. I closed it wanting to call my own relatives and ask how they make the dishes I grew up eating, which seems like exactly the response she hoped for.

A note on reading it

If you read it, give yourself time with the middle caregiving chapters. They are slow in places and sad in a blunt way. Keep snacks nearby, not as a joke but because the food writing will make you hungry even in sad scenes. And if you have lost a parent, know the H Mart opening is the lightest version of what comes later. The book earns its tears, but it does ask for them.

I came away thinking less about death and more about practice. How you practice a language by speaking it badly for a while. How you practice a dish by ruining it twice. How you practice loving someone difficult by staying in the room. Zauner lost her main teacher early, then chose to remain a student anyway. That choice, repeated across markets and kitchens and tour vans, is what turns a sad story into something useful to carry.

FAQ

When was Crying in H Mart published?

It was published in 2021 by Knopf, runs 256 pages, and follows Zauner from childhood in Oregon through her mother illness in 2014.

Who is Zauner mother in the memoir?

Chongmi, her Korean mother, raised her in Eugene, Oregon with her father Joel. summers in Seoul with her grandmother shaped her tie to Korean food.

Does the book cover Korea trips and her music career?

Yes. She travels to Seoul as an adult, learns kimchi and porridge from aunts, and builds her music career while mourning.