Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

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 developed this compulsion to clean as a sort of protection ritual performed when I felt even the slightest bit abandoned, an eventuality that tormented my young imagination.

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

this fusion of moral and aesthetic approval was an early introduction to the value of beauty and the rewards it had in store.

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?”

Spring was giving way to summer and people getting off work were shedding their jackets, folding them over their forearms to carry. A familiar itch was creeping in. That aching toward something wild—when the days get longer and a walk through the city becomes entirely pleasant from morning to night, when you want to run drunk down an empty street in sneakers and fling all responsibility to the wayside.

I was determined to impress them with my knowledge of the city and my self-sufficient, albeit flimsy version of young adulthood,

who like me was always in a rush, quick to give up on any task at the first sign of failure and delegate it to someone else.

For many years, I suspected my parents might have been exaggerating or that they were ill prepared for the realities of a child’s temperament, but I have slowly come to accept, based on the unanimous recollection of multiple relatives, that I was a pretty rotten kid.

Her lack of purpose seemed more and more an oddity, suspect, even anti-feminist. 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. It wasn’t until years later, after I left for college, that I began to understand what it meant to make a home and just how much I had taken mine for granted.

Such was puberty, one big masochistic joke set in the halfway house of middle school, where kids endure the three most confusing and sensitive years of their lives, where girls who’ve already sprouted D cups and know about blow jobs sit beside girls in trainers from the Gap who still have crushes on anime characters.

She believed in some higher power but didn’t like the cultishness of organized religion,

In the face of life and death, the open road—once so full of grit and possibility, the strangers it harbored so creative and generous, the light of the lifestyle—I had once found so glamorous began to dim.

There was a dangerous and unspoken prospect looming, that without my mother to bond us, my father and I would drift apart. I was not essential to him in the way I knew I was to my mother,

“We’re not going to get a divorce,” Peter said. “I know but if we did, don’t you think ‘my first husband’ would make me sound so full of maturity and mystique?”

In spite of my secret knowledge, I had always believed that he truly loved her. That life was just like that sometimes.

I had starved myself, not just of food, but of a reckoning. I had tried to be stoic.

My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her.

Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations,

Sure, I had taken my upbringing for granted, I had lashed out at the ones who loved me the most, allowed myself to flounder in a depression I perhaps had no real right to.

The nuances of the feelings I so desperately wanted to communicate felt impossible to express.

My salary was forty-five grand a year with benefits. I felt like a millionaire.

For the most part, I felt very well adjusted. Everything was so unfamiliar—a new big city to live in, a real grown-up job. I tried my best not to dwell on what could not be changed and to throw myself into productivity, but every so often I was plagued by flashbacks.

to preserve the evidence of my existence and growth, capturing me in images, saving all my documents and possessions.

If there was a god, it seemed my mother must have had her foot on his neck, demanding good things come my way. That if we had to be ripped apart right at our turning point, just when things were really starting to get good, the least god could do was make a few of her daughter’s pipe dreams come true.