Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

It was by sheer coincidence I’d wound up in Philadelphia. Like many a kid trapped in a small city, I felt bored and then suffocated. By the time I was in high school, the desire for independence trailing a convoy of insidious hormones had transformed me from a child who couldn’t bear to sleep without her mother into a teenager who couldn’t stand her touch. Every time she picked a ball of lint off my sweater or pressed her hand between my shoulder blades to keep me from slouching or rubbed her fingers on my forehead to ward off wrinkles, it felt like a hot iron puckering against my skin. Somehow, as if overnight, every simple suggestion made me feel like I was overheating, and my resentment and sensitivity grew and grew until they bubbled up and exploded and in an instant, uncontrollably, I’d rip my body away and scream, “Stop touching me!” “Can’t you ever leave me alone?” “Maybe I want wrinkles. Maybe I want reminders that I’ve lived my life.”

When I slipped them on I discovered they’d already been broken in. My mother had worn them around the house for a week, smoothing the hard edges in two pairs of socks for an hour every day, molding the flat sole with the bottom of her feet, wearing in the stiffness, breaking the tough leather to spare me all discomfort.

But as I grew older the secret began to fester. The same stories grew tiresome and repetitive, his violent past less the exploits of a hero than excuses for his shortcomings.

All the Korean moms took on the names of their children. Jiyeon’s mom was Jiyeon’s umma. Esther’s mom was Esther’s umma. I never learned any of their real names. Their identities were absorbed by their children.

I could tell my father was not ready for my mother to give up on treatment. It felt like he was waiting for me to protest, for the two of us to band together and encourage her to continue. But it was hard not to feel like the chemo had already stolen the last shreds of my mother’s dignity, and that if there was more to take, it would find it.

It used to be so clear to me, the difference between living and dying. My mother and I had always agreed that we’d rather end our lives than live on as vegetables. But now that we had to confront it, the shreds of physical autonomy torn more ragged every day, the divide had blurred. She was bedridden, unable to walk on her own, her bowels no longer moving. She ate through a bag dripped through her arm and now she could no longer breathe without a machine. It was getting harder every day to say that this was really living.

Fran was the ultimate Mommy-Mom, the type that scooped Peter up if he got hurt and told him “That’s beautiful!” when he got her a piece of crap for Christmas. She ran a day-care center out of their home when her boys were growing up and dressed as Frumpet the clown for their birthday parties. She made homemade trail mix and something called muddy buddies and chicken stock from scratch and sent you home with leftovers in repurposed cottage cheese containers. She exuded a motherly nurturing that made you feel like you weren’t any kind of bother at all. “How ya doing, hon,” she said, enveloping me in a big hug. I could almost feel in the embrace that my concerns had been her concerns, my pain had been her pain.