Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

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.

I was not given an old edition of Catcher in the Rye as a preteen, copies of Rolling Stones records on vinyl, or any kind of instructional material from the past that might help give me a leg up to cultural maturity. But my parents were worldly in their own ways.

her long-standing campaign to realize my ideal form.

“Yeppeu,” or pretty, was frequently employed as a synonym for good or well-behaved, and this fusion of moral and aesthetic approval was an early introduction to the value of beauty and the rewards it had in store.

I didn’t think about the guilt she might have felt for all the years spent away from her mother, for leaving Korea behind.

That my care played such a principal role in her life was a vocation I naively condemned, rebuffing the intensive, invisible labor as the errand work of a housewife who’d neglected to develop a passion or a practical skill set.

this time returned of my own free will, no longer scheming a wild escape into the dark but desperately hoping that a darkness would not come in.

How cyclical and bittersweet for a child to retrace the image of their mother. For a subject to turn back to document their archivist.

The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.