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BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION

Of noodles and NOSTALGIA
Japanese Breakfast releases memoir on caring for an ailing mother
In Crying in H Mart , Zauner painstakingly details not only this fraught personal journey, but the severe complications added to it by the untimely losing of her mother, Chongmi, to cancer.
MEHRUL BARI
“Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart”, reads the stark opening line in Michelle Zauner’s 2021 memoir, Crying in H Mart (Knopf), starting the same as in her preceding The New Yorker essay. Tellingly, the next line differs. The New Yorker piece reads: “For those of you who don’t know, H Mart is a supermarket chain that specialises in Asian food.” In the memoir, released three years after, the line reads, simply: “H Mart is a supermarket chain that specialises in Asian food.” Gone are the over-explanation that dominates the foreigner’s world, the feeling sorry, as Zauner puts it, for even existing, for taking up space in someone else’s world.
Born to a Korean mother and American father, singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner, or Japanese Breakfast, has had to, from the very start, don numerous and often self-limiting identities—ever one and not the other. In Crying in H Mart , Zauner painstakingly details not only this fraught personal journey, but the severe complications added to it by the untimely losing of her mother, Chongmi, to cancer.
It would be a shame, though, to boil it down to just race relations. What the book exhibits often is the same quality that exudes much of Japanese Breakfast’s music. Zauner has that uncanny ability for crafting things that feel like they’ve always existed. In her finest songs, like “Everybody Wants to Love You” and especially 2021’s “Be Sweet”, the words and melodies alike burst with a fond familiarity.
About her father, a glaring omission of a parental figure, she writes: “Over time our conversations became a lot like explaining a movie to someone who has walked in on the last thirty minutes.” In the immediate aftermath of Chongmi’s passing, she notes, crammed between an assemblage of strangers: “It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to.”
Crying in H Mart is perhaps at its most captivating when its writer veers straight into an under-observed territory of grief—the confused feelings of ownership. “I could not even cry in his presence”, she writes of her father, “for fear he would take the moment over, pit his grief against mine in a competition of who loved her more, and who had more to lose.” The introduction of her mother’s friend Kye, a fellow middle-aged Korean-American resident, is where the memoir shifts into second gear. The woman not only moves into their home, but soon takes up all the waking hours of the heavily-sedated Chongmi, communicating with her exclusively in Korean, while being standoffish to the other two, closer, parties of the house. Kye’s bond with the ailing woman, one which no doubt reminds the latter of the home she left behind, cuts in on Zauner’s plans to be there in every possible moment for her mother. This jealousy is so cruel, so petty, and so very understandable, that it’s worth almost another book dedicated to it.
One dimension I found the book lacking in, however, was the incomplete picture the writer leaves of her adolescence. There are several mentions of Zauner being difficult and harsh as a teen, but they are all instances of telling rather than showing. Given the nature, and focus of the book, Chongmi receives the full biography treatment, which makes her out to be a personality capable of great love and great cruelty, whereas the narrator’s shortcomings, which are said to have scarred her parents, feel largely insignificant and easily forgivable. It doesn’t help when her mother not only gets violent but takes a stern stand against her aspirations as a musician, against pursuing a dream that would ultimately make her, well, the very reason I read this book.
It is a testament to Zauner’s writing ability, though, that Chongmi is never a hateable figure. In her daughter’s limning, Chongmi is life incarnate. And not to mention love. “Mommy is the only one who ever truly love you”, she had told her daughter numerous times, a line that reverberates all throughout the memoir. Sure, Michelle makes it through journeys of her own, she sticks the landing and is a beloved indie musician now, but this book really isn’t about her, sometimes to its detriment. What we do have in this book is what nonfiction excels at—the messy and the real and the exciting average.
Mehrul Bari S Chowdhury is a writer, poet, and artist. He is currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Kent and has previously worked for Daily Star Books.
DESIGN: MAISHA SYEDA