Crying in H Mart

How do you remember where you come from when the person who connected you to that place is gone? In Crying in H Mart, musician and writer Michelle Zauner transforms that question into an exquisite meditation on food, identity, love, and loss. When her Korean mother dies of cancer, Michelle finds herself unmoored—suspended between her American upbringing and her Korean heritage. H Mart, the Korean-American supermarket chain, becomes both literal and symbolic ground where she rekindles her identity. Amid shelves of nostalgic snacks and familiar smells, she rebuilds her relationship to her roots, her grief, and herself.

Zauner contends that food is memory made edible. Her memoir argues that through taste, smell, and ritual, you can reconnect to the people who have passed, and to a culture that might otherwise fade with them. Yet to do so, you must confront pain—the pain of losing family, of cultural dislocation, and of resentment. Her story is not just about mourning a mother, but about learning to inhabit the spaces that her mother left behind. Through Crying in H Mart, Zauner develops a new lexicon of love built from recipes, rituals, and small acts of devotion.

The Heart of the Book: Food as an Emotional Language

At its core, Crying in H Mart is about how food serves as the primary way Koreans express affection—especially within families that might not verbalize love openly. Zauner recalls her mother’s constant culinary care: tender short ribs, perfectly fermented kimchi, and steaming noodle bowls crafted just the way her daughter liked them. Food was a form of connection, control, and communication. After her mother’s death, each Korean dish becomes a portal to memory and mourning. When Michelle stands crying in the aisles of H Mart, what really breaks her is the smell of gochujang and the sight of tteokbokki—pieces of her mother’s love rendered as ingredients.

Through H Mart’s aisles, Zauner reconstructs familial intimacy, one jar and one bite at a time. Her journey mirrors the experiences of second-generation immigrants who find themselves distanced from ancestral culture and language. For Michelle, food remains her only fluent dialect of Koreanness.

The Daughter’s Inheritance

Zauner’s emotional core is her relationship with her mother, Chongmi—a formidable, elegant woman whose exacting standards and fierce love shaped Michelle’s early life. Their bond roils with tension: her mother’s criticism, her teenage rebellion, and the chasm of cultural misunderstanding that often sits between immigrant parents and American-born children. Yet even through fights and resentments, food and shared rituals tether them together. Her mother’s recipes serve as the threads binding a fragile legacy, a way of teaching Michelle who she was and how to exist in the world.

When cancer enters their lives, their kitchen becomes a battlefield. Cooking replaces words neither can muster. Michelle tries to nourish her mother with small, careful dishes, trying to reverse time. In the process, she learns that cooking is not a cure—but it is a prayer, a conversation that grief can’t silence.

A Journey of Identity and Inheritance

Beyond the immediate grief, Crying in H Mart reflects on belonging. As a biracial Korean-American woman, Zauner struggles to locate herself between worlds: never fully American, yet not fully Korean. Her fluency in the kitchen becomes a way to prove her belonging. When Korean family members doubt her authenticity, she turns to learning dishes—doenjang jjigae, jatjuk—as proof of her cultural legitimacy. In doing so, she joins a long literary lineage of writers who tie identity to food (see also Ruth Reichl, M. F. K. Fisher, or David Chang’s essays on Korean-American food identity). Through recipes and rituals, she claims her heritage in her own voice, no translation needed.

From Memory to Music: Transformation and Art

The memoir eventually expands beyond mourning into creation. The same pain that breaks Michelle transforms into art. Writing songs for her band Japanese Breakfast becomes her way of preserving her mother’s memory and expressing what cooking cannot. Where recipes restore the past, art projects her love into the future. This duality—feeding and creating—mirrors her growth from dependency into authorship, from daughter into artist.

Grief, Zauner shows, is not about getting over loss but about metabolizing it. Like fermentation, it changes what’s left behind into something sustaining—a new flavor, a new life.

By the end of Crying in H Mart, you understand that Michelle’s story is both intensely personal and universally human. To mourn is to cook, to love is to feed, and to remember is to taste again. This memoir offers an unforgettable recipe for how to survive the loss of home, heritage, and mother: one bite, one song, and one memory at a time.

Zauner’s lifelong relationship with her mother, Chongmi, forms the book’s emotional backbone. Their dynamic oscillates between fierce love and equally fierce criticism. Chongmi’s love was hands-on, practical, and often harsh—a distinctly Korean form of affection that measures care in vigilance and correction rather than in words. For Michelle, this constant scrutiny created a deep sense of inadequacy, but also the discipline that enabled her later success as an artist.

A Tough Love Shaped by Migration

Chongmi immigrated from Korea to the United States to build a stable life for her daughter but refused to abandon her culture’s values. She demanded poise, manners, and achievement—virtues she considered essential armor in an unkind world. She measured her daughter’s future through comparison, always urging her toward perfection. But to Michelle, that insistence felt unbearable. Growing up in Eugene, Oregon, among mostly white peers, she longed to fit in, not to be reminded of her otherness.

When Michelle rebelled in her teens—through music, dressing differently, and eventually leaving for college on the East Coast—it felt like a betrayal to her mother, who had sacrificed everything for her comfort. These clashes symbolize a broader immigrant generational rift: the parent who clings to cultural memory versus the child who must adapt.

Illness as Reconciliation

The cancer diagnosis reverses their roles. The mother who once nursed, coached, and demanded excellence becomes fragile and dependent. Michelle, desperate to right years of defiance, transforms herself into the caretaker she believes her mother deserves. Their dynamic softens in the hospital rooms of Oregon and Korea, where tenderness replaces critique. The familiar rituals of washing, feeding, and brushing hair become sacred acts of love.

During these last months, Michelle learns that her mother’s sternness was another expression of devotion, shaped by fear, migration, and love. Their eventual reconciliation doesn’t come through speech but through endurance—Michelle holding a basin as her mother vomits, or teaching herself how to make jatjuk, the pine nut porridge her mother once spoon-fed her when sick. These simple caregiving gestures replace apologies neither could fully articulate.

Inheritance Through Action

In one of the most poignant revelations of the book, Michelle realizes her inheritance isn’t just genetic—it’s behavioral. When she painstakingly plans her mother’s funeral, organizing flowers and music down to the smallest detail, she sees that she has become her mother. The meticulousness that once suffocated her now becomes a comfort. Through this echoing transformation, Zauner shows how grief often morphs into imitation—the living embody traits of the dead as if to resurrect them through daily acts.

To become your parents is not failure—it’s the completion of their love story within you.

By writing Crying in H Mart, Zauner simultaneously commemorates and continues this inheritance. The memoir becomes an offering—half confession, half thanksgiving—reflecting how daughters and mothers carry each other long after the physical world has quieted.

Throughout the memoir, every meal Michelle describes operates as a time capsule—a means of preserving memory long after language fails. In Korean culture, food is often the medium through which emotions are conveyed, and for Michelle’s family it functioned as a kind of sacred emotional shorthand. Her mother never said “I love you” outright, but you knew it when she peeled fruit for you, or when she scolded you for eating cold rice. For the daughter who later loses her mother, cooking becomes an act of resurrection.

Korean Food as a Bridge Between Worlds

Zauner portrays Korean food as both comfort and confrontation. As a biracial American child, she initially resisted her Koreanness; later, she feels starved of it. After her mother’s death, every visit to H Mart turns into a pilgrimage to Korea’s culinary soul. Standing among jars of kimchi, she feels herself conversing with ghosts. Each dish—bibimbap, doenjang jjigae, miyeokguk—re-creates the sensory world of her childhood and reconnects her to a heritage she once took for granted.

Cooking becomes Michelle’s chosen ritual for grief. When she learns to make jatjuk, the pine nut porridge her mother once made for her, she follows YouTube chef Maangchi’s guidance as if it were a spiritual text. Stirring the pot, she feels her mother’s presence—proof that grief, like fermentation, is an alchemy that turns pain into sustenance.

Cooking as Devotion

Many scenes portray food preparation as sacred work. When Michelle cooks Korean dishes alone after the funeral, she finally masters what her mother had embodied: attentiveness, resourcefulness, care. She learns that flavorful cooking requires patience and practice—the very qualities needed to live through loss. In this sense, cooking doubles as meditation and penance. Each recipe becomes both memorial and prayer.

Food may not resurrect the dead, but it keeps them near. The act of eating, shared or solitary, collapses distance between the living and the departed. For readers, Zauner’s descriptions invite reflection on their own edible memories—the dishes their loved ones made, the smells that reconstitute entire histories in a single inhalation.

Cooking is not remembrance alone—it’s conversation. Through food, the dead are not gone; they just eat with you invisibly.

Zauner’s meticulous attention to flavor, texture, and ritual invites readers to see food as the ultimate act of transformation. By learning to feed herself the way her mother once did, Michelle discovers how grief can be digested—one meal, one recipe, and one lingering taste at a time.

You can’t read Crying in H Mart without recognizing its sharp insight into the immigrant experience. Zauner writes as someone raised between cultures—half Korean and half white American—never feeling fully included in either. Her mother served as her living map to Korean identity, and once she died, that compass vanished. Michelle’s attempts to cling to her heritage become both desperate and redemptive, teaching her what identity really requires: continual rebuilding.

Between Two Languages

Growing up in Eugene, Oregon, Michelle attends Hangul Hakkyo, a Friday Korean language school. She learns to read but never becomes fluent, assuming her mother would always translate. Later, standing by her mother’s deathbed, she realizes too late that language was the glue of intimacy she had neglected. After her mother’s death, Michelle’s use of Korean recipes and phrases—miyeokguk, doenjang, Umma—becomes a way to reclaim fluency, if not through speech, then through flavor and memory. Her linguistic gaps echo her cultural loss; she feels not Korean enough for relatives, too Korean for Americans.

Proving Belonging

When Michelle visits Korea after her mother’s death, she worries that her aunts will see through her—a girl playing at being Korean. This insecurity pervades the lives of many bicultural children: the performance of authenticity in front of gatekeepers. But through her aunt Nami’s gentle reassurance—“That’s blood ties”—Zauner recognizes that identity isn’t earned by purification. It’s carried in the body and deepened through action.

Her culinary training, writing, and even the act of mourning become her rituals of belonging. She learns that to honor her Korean half doesn’t require perfection—it requires participation. Each imperfect pronunciation and approximate recipe is an act of return.

Immigrant identity, Zauner teaches, is not a fixed inheritance but an ongoing practice: you re-create the culture every time you choose to keep it alive.

Through this journey, Crying in H Mart reframes what it means to return home. Home isn’t a place you go back to—it’s a flavor, a recipe, a memory you carry forward.

Much of Zauner’s memoir revolves around grief—not as something to overcome, but as something to inhabit and reshape. From hospital scenes to funerals, she reveals grief’s physicality: its exhaustion, hunger, and routine. Yet what makes her story powerful is how she slowly converts pain into creation, showing that mourning is a process of transformation rather than erasure.

The Daily Work of Sorrow

Zauner’s description of caregiving exposes the indignities of dying and the exhaustion of love. She documents bedpans, feeding tubes, and the monotony of watchful nights with both intimacy and courage. Grief begins long before death—when the parent becomes a body to be managed, and the child, a nurse. Through her matter-of-fact prose, Zauner reveals that caretaking is not only an act of love but also a rehearsal for loss.

After her mother’s death, grief mutates into obsession. Michelle scrubs the house, catalogues possessions, arranges jewelry boxes, and cooks compulsively—each task an attempt to control an uncontrollable absence. This mirrors cultural rituals around jesa (Korean ancestral rites), where meticulous preparation bridges living and dead. Her cleaning frenzy becomes its own memorial service.

Fermentation as Metaphor

In one striking image, Zauner likens grief to fermentation: left alone, memories rot; tended carefully, they transform. She recognizes that both fermentation and mourning depend on patience, temperature, and time. Making kimchi becomes her ritual for metabolizing sorrow—salt the cabbage, wait, and let something living arise from decay. This metaphor, inspired by both biology and spirituality, encapsulates her entire healing process.

Grief, like fermentation, requires tending. Unattended, it spoils; nurtured, it becomes something that nourishes.

The transformation culminates when Zauner channels her pain into art. Writing music under her stage name Japanese Breakfast, she produces songs that honor her mother while reaching strangers worldwide. By the memoir’s end, creating art and cooking both serve the same purpose: to preserve what would otherwise vanish. In this way, Crying in H Mart becomes less a eulogy than a recipe for surviving.

Michelle Zauner’s metamorphosis from grieving daughter to professional artist is intertwined with her ability to make meaning from pain. Before her mother’s illness, she was a struggling musician touring with little success. After her mother’s death, her creative vision sharpens, as if mourning stripped away everything unnecessary. She begins to write not just for survival, but for understanding.

Art as Continuation of Care

The songs on her album Psychopomp and the essays that became Crying in H Mart are extensions of her caretaking—now expressed through chords and words instead of meals and measurements. She treats each lyric like a recipe, balancing sweetness and salt. The process of art-making, like cooking, allows no shortcuts. Both demand endurance and faith that something worth tasting will emerge from chaos.

Zauner’s eventual success as an indie musician touring globally mirrors her mother’s aspirations for her—discipline merged with passion. On tour in Seoul years later, performing before her extended family, she reclaims the parts of herself her mother once feared were aimless. Through music, she finds her way back home.

A New Voice Rooted in Heritage

By writing her story, Zauner also defies stereotypes about Asian-American women in media. Her artistic voice merges Korean sensitivity with American candor, bridging both cultures. Like Nora Ephron and Joan Didion, she writes grief as precise observation—a way of reclaiming control through narrative form. Yet unlike those predecessors, her art carries the texture of gochugaru and barley tea, embedding cultural memory in every sentence.

In transforming loss into song, Zauner ensures her mother lives not only in memory but in sound—vibrating across audiences who weep for their own mothers through hers.

Art, for Zauner, is both resurrection and reinvention. Her mother’s meticulousness becomes her aesthetic; her mother’s toughness, her resilience. Every note, essay, and meal is a continuation of her mother’s will to make beauty out of effort. To read or listen to Zauner now is to feel that ethos alive: work hard, feel deeply, remember everything.