Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

H Mart is freedom from the single-aisle “ethnic” section in regular grocery stores. They don’t prop Goya beans next to bottles of sriracha here.

My grief comes in waves and is usually triggered by something arbitrary.

I remember these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it.

She believed food should be enjoyed and that it was more of a waste to expand your stomach than to keep eating when you were full. Her only rule was that you had to try everything once.

I remembered watching them from the back seat when I was younger on a drive up to Portland, the two of them holding hands over the center console and just talking about nothing for two hours. I had thought that was what a marriage should be.

Maybe I was just terrified that I might be the closest thing she had to leaving a piece of herself behind.

It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to.

He would have his own grief to confront, but he swallowed it for now. When one person collapses, the other instinctively shoulders their weight.

Grief, like depression, made it hard to accomplish even the simplest of tasks.

They were so small I could fit them in the palm of my hand. 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.

I struggled to keep a cool head and work my way out of the weeds. It was my first shift alone in a busy kitchen and I suddenly understood why all the chefs I’d ever worked with hated front of house.

I wished that my mother could see me, could be proud of the woman I’d become and the career I’d built, the realization of something she worried for so long would never happen.

I hadn’t believed in a god since I was about ten and still envisioned Mr. Rogers when I prayed, but the years that followed my mother’s passing were suspiciously charmed.

If there was a god, it seemed my mother must have had her foot on his neck, demanding good things come my way.