Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

On my birthday, we ate miyeokguk—a hearty seaweed soup full of nutrients that women are encouraged to eat postpartum and that Koreans traditionally eat on their birthdays to celebrate their mothers.

Left with her in the woods, I was overwhelmed by her time and attention, a devotion that I learned could both be an auspicious privilege and have smothering consequences.

If it wasn’t for my mother, I might have wound up just like the pet alligator at the Chinese restaurant. Caged and gawked at in its luxurious confinement, unceremoniously disposed of as soon as it’s too old to fit in the tank.

I didn’t know the comforting words she probably longed for the way I long for them now. I didn’t know then the type of effort it can take to simply move.

Just started crying

My mother had either finally given up, conceding in her efforts to try to shape me into something I didn’t want to be, or she had moved on to subtler tactics, realizing it was unlikely that I’d last another year in this mess before I discovered she’d been right all along. Or maybe the three thousand miles between us had made it so she was just happy to be with me. Or maybe she’d finally accepted that I’d forged my own path and found someone who loved me wholly, and believed at last that I would end up all right.

Back then, I didn’t know what a scarcity mentality was.

She let out a little cluck, the kind of sound let out when you think something is a real shame, like passing a dilapidated building with beautiful architecture.

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.

a man who was not raised with the privilege of being cared for.

having spent the last three months holed up in a house in the woods. I could tell my friends had no idea what to say to me. They gave me looks like they had spent some thought on it, but talked themselves out of whatever they’d come up with.

Even as she was dying, my mother offered me solace, her instinct to nurture overwhelming any personal fear she might have felt but kept expertly hidden. She was the only person in the world who could tell me that things would all work out somehow. The eye of the storm, a calm witness to the wreckage spinning out into its end.

about how love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor.

There wasn’t a dry eye left in the tent.

I think she is allowing us to celebrate what she knows even when it seens crass because fuck, you have to say it if its true mean it and tell it as ir is and i love it

Maybe I wanted to go there because it was a place where I could pretend that my mother was still alive, waiting for me at home.

The weather was nice and sunny, the chill of fall still at bay. It didn’t feel like a day on which someone had died.

Im not exactly sure why but the last sentance hit me hard

lovely would be the one she’d choose. She felt it encompassed an ideal beauty and ardor.

To be a loving mother was to be known for a service, but to be a lovely mother was to possess a charm all your own.

a place where I could fall against the earth, collapse on the ground, and in the various seasons weep in the grass and dirt,

When one person collapses, the other instinctively shoulders their weight.

Christianity was a language she understood. Religion was a comfort and in that moment I was grateful it was there for her.

I wanted to do something for them, to make them feel comfortable as my mother would have. I was the woman of the house now.

keeping your Korean teapot which you had started drawing just before you got sick. I had started to believe in a miracle. I could have returned the teapot to you right after you stopped coming to class, but I thought if I held on to it you would get better and be the happy lady you had always been.

I wondered, why hadn’t she written it in Korean? Had she translated it specifically for me? There was a part of me that felt, or maybe hoped, that after my mother died, I had absorbed her in some way, that she was a part of me now. I wondered if her art teacher felt this way, too, that I was the closest she could get to being heard.

Fucked up after the notes

Porcelain ballerinas, one in fifth position, one in third, my accidental maiming left unrendered.

“It is,” she said. “You know what I realized? I’ve just never met someone like you.”

was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.

The relentless honking of scooter horns we’d become accustomed to as Vietnam’s second national language was not as fluently spoken.

“Michelle,” I said. “I’m just on vacation. I’m staying at a hotel nearby.” “Michelle,” she repeated. “What does it mean?”

Didnt relize her name was Michelle and now im sad

Instead, I began to cook. Mostly the kind of food you could crawl into and that required sleeping off. The kind you’d order on death row.

I held one of the sandals and started to cry. I thought of the foresight a mother must have to preserve this kind of thing, the shoes of her baby, for her baby’s baby someday. A baby she’d never get to meet.

cartoons my aunt dubbed.

She was my champion, she was my archive. She had taken the utmost care to preserve the evidence of my existence and growth, capturing me in images, saving all my documents and possessions. She had all knowledge of my being memorized.

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

I had thought fermentation was controlled death. Left alone, a head of cabbage molds and decomposes. It becomes rotten, inedible. But when brined and stored, the course of its decay is altered. Sugars are broken down to produce lactic acid, which protects it from spoiling. Carbon dioxide is released and the brine acidifies. It ages. Its color and texture transmute. Its flavor becomes tarter, more pungent. It exists in time and transforms. So it is not quite controlled death, because it enjoys a new life altogether. 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.

The Korean soundscape of my infancy and all my years of Hangul Hakkyo had spawned a literate mimic,