Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

stands for han ah reum, a Korean phrase that roughly translates to “one arm full of groceries.”

Sobbing near the dry goods, asking myself, Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?

My grief comes in waves and is usually triggered by something arbitrary.

Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it. Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.

I wonder how many people at H Mart miss their families. How many are thinking of them as they bring their trays back from the different stalls. If they’re eating to feel connected, to celebrate these people through food. Which ones weren’t able to fly back home this year, or for the past ten years? Which ones are like me, missing the people who are gone from their lives forever?

We sit here in silence, eating our lunch. But I know we are all here for the same reason. We’re all searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves. We look for a taste of it in the food we order and the ingredients we buy.

I remember these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it.

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A Mommy-Mom is someone who takes an interest in everything her child has to say even when there is no actual way she gives a shit, who whisks you away to the doctor when you complain of the slightest ailment, who tells you “they’re just jealous” if someone makes fun of you, or “you always look beautiful to me” even if you don’t, or “I love this!” when you give them a piece of crap for Christmas.

But every time I got hurt, my mom would start screaming. Not for me, but at me. I couldn’t understand it. When my friends got hurt, their mothers scooped them up and told them it was going to be okay, or they went straight to the doctor. White people were always going to the doctor. But when I got hurt, my mom was livid, as if I had maliciously damaged her property.

Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial-strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn’t care if it hurt like hell in the meantime. When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction. She was guilty only of caring too much. I realize this now, only in retrospect. No one in this world would ever love me as much as my mother, and she would never let me forget it.

Mommy is the only one who ever truly love you.” Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always “save ten percent of yourself.” What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always,

so there was something to fall back on. “Even from Daddy, I save,” she would add.

My mother was always trying to shape me into the most perfect version of myself.

She believed food should be enjoyed and that it was more of a waste to expand your stomach than to keep eating when you were full. Her only rule was that you had to try everything once.

came to realize that while I struggled to be good, I could excel at being courageous. I

was not exposed to fine art at a young age or taken to any museums or plays at established cultural institutions. My parents wouldn’t have known the names of authors I should read or foreign directors I should watch.

But my parents were worldly in their own ways. They had seen much of the world and had tasted what it had to offer. What they lacked in high culture, they made up for by spending their hard-earned money on the finest of delicacies. My childhood was rich with flavor—blood sausage, fish intestines, caviar. They loved good food, to make it, to seek it, to share it, and I was an honorary guest at their table.

“You’re going on a journey and you have five animals,” Eunmi said. “A lion. “A horse. “A cow. “A monkey. “And a lamb.” We were seated outside on a café terrace and she was teaching me a game she’d learned from a coworker. On the journey there were four stops where you had to give up one of the animals; in the end you could only keep one. It was the first time I’d been in Seoul since Halmoni died. I was nineteen, in between my freshman and sophomore years at Bryn Mawr, and I’d enrolled in a summer language program at Yonsei University. I was staying with Eunmi Emo for six weeks. I’d never traveled to Korea without my mother. For the first time it was just Eunmi and me in the apartment I’d grown up visiting. Us and the obnoxious white toy poodle she’d adopted and named Leon, because when combined with the family name, Yi Leon sounds like the Korean word for come here.

Was this my mother’s way of visiting me? Was she trying to tell me something? I felt foolish indulging in mysticism and so I kept the dreams hidden, privately analyzing their possible meanings. If dreams were hidden wishes, why couldn’t I dream of my mother the way I wanted? Why was it that whenever she appeared she was still sick, as if I could not remember her the way she’d been before? I wondered if my memory was stunted, if my dreams were consigned to the epoch of trauma, the image of my mother stuck where we had left off. Had I forgotten her when she was beautiful?