Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

It’s the only place where you can find a giant vat of peeled garlic, because it’s the only place that truly understands how much garlic you’ll need for the kind of food your people eat.

They don’t prop Goya beans next to bottles of sriracha here.

!!!

“We can always get divorced if things go sour,” I said to him on the phone. “We can be, like, hip young divorced people.” “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?”

“Did you accept Jesus into your heart?” I asked. “Ya, I guess so,” she said.

“I promise to love you perfectly, and this is what I mean by that,”

With my mother’s ring on my right hand I felt like a five-year-old in a full face of makeup. I twisted it back and forth, trying to get comfortable, its facets glistened in the light of breaking dawn, oversized and out of place on my undiscerning finger. It felt heavy. A weight emblematic of loss, a tug I’d notice every time I went to lift my hand.

I tried to imagine how she must feel, to be the eldest and have watched her two baby sisters die within a few years of each other of the same disease.

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.

She would have been so tickled to have seen the past few years, me dressed up and shot for a fashion magazine, watching the first South Korean director win an Academy Award, YouTube channels with millions of views dedicated to fifteen-step skin-care regimens. And though it felt contrary to my beliefs, I had to believe that she could. And that she was glad I had finally found a place where I belonged.