Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

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

I wonder how many people at H Mart miss their families. How many are thinking of them as they bring their trays back from the different stalls. If they’re eating to feel connected, to celebrate these people through food. Which ones weren’t able to fly back home this year, or for the past ten years? Which ones are like me, missing the people who are gone from their lives forever?

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. “Even from Daddy, I save,” she would add.

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.

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 assumed the seven years I’d lived away from home had healed the wounds between us, that the strain built up in my teenage years had been forgotten.

couple of nocturnal teens bonded together by a deep, inexplicable loneliness and AOL instant messenger.

There was nothing he was too proud for—whatever it took, he was going to be the last one standing.

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.

There was a Paris Baguette nearby, a Korean chain that serves French baked goods with a Korean twist.

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.