Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

Food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she could seem—constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations—I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.

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.

We’re all searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves.

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.

When my peers started dating, I developed a complex that the only reason someone would like me was if they had yellow fever,

For dessert, strawberry Häagen-Dazs provided a momentous win,

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.

Nothing my therapist said was anything I hadn’t psychoanalyzed in myself a million times already anyway.

Real

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.