Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

We chased our cravings daily.

like somehow this stranger’s survival is at all related to my loss.

So, when I go to H Mart, I’m not just on the hunt for cuttlefish and three bunches of scallions for a buck; I’m searching for memories.

I’m collecting the evidence that the Korean half of my identity didn’t die when they did. H Mart is the bridge that guides me away from the memories that haunt me, of chemo head and skeletal bodies and logging milligrams of hydrocodone.

It was the year her life ended and mine fell apart.

“Mommy is the only one who will tell you the truth, because Mommy is the only one who ever truly love you.”

my mother was loose when it came to the rules regarding food.

but in Seoul, my mom was like a kid again, leading the campaign.

say, “Aigo yeppeu.” “Yeppeu,” or pretty, was frequently employed as a synonym for good or well-behaved, and this fusion of moral and aesthetic approval was an early introduction to the value of beauty and the rewards it had in store.

“Maybe I want wrinkles. Maybe I want reminders that I’ve lived my life.”

I naively condemned, rebuffing the intensive, invisible labor as the errand work of a housewife who’d neglected to develop a passion or a practical skill set.

to understand what it meant to make a home and just how much I had taken mine for granted.

getting into heated discussions on AIM about whether the Foo Fighters’ acoustic version of “Everlong” was better than the original.

DVD of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs live at the Fillmore.

“When I was your age I would have died for a mom who bought me nice clothes,” she said.

this time returned of my own free will, no longer scheming a wild escape into the dark but desperately hoping that a darkness would not come in.

Unlike my mother, he saved no 10 percent. “You have to promise you’re going to be there for me,” he said. “Promise me, okay?”

My own weight loss made me feel tied to her. I wanted to embody a physical warning—that if she began to disappear, I would disappear too.

Her last words were “Where are we going?”

The eye of the storm, a calm witness to the wreckage spinning out into its end.

My mother and I had always agreed that we’d rather end our lives than live on as vegetables. But

When I asked her what she’d want to come back as, she always told me she’d like to return as a tree.

“Rainy Days and Mondays,”

thought of how cyclical it was to be sandwiched between my new husband and my deceased mother.

I was observing all of this and not even really there at all. I wondered

was still getting used to the ring on my left hand, not so much to what it symbolized as to its physical occupancy,

I felt like a five-year-old in a full face of makeup.

Lovely was an adjective my mother adored.

lovely mother was to possess a charm all your own.

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

Religion was a comfort and in that moment I was grateful it was there for her.

pressure to perform and cater to others felt like holding in a sneeze.

“Hội An” means peaceful meeting place.

words imbued with their pure meaning, not their English substitutes.

The anxiety I had carried melted away in her maternal presence. It felt nice to be cared for.

I wondered if I could ever know all of her, what other threads she’d left behind to pull.

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

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.

If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.

It came out in April and that summer I was offered a five-week tour opening for Mitski across the United States.

Not quite my mother and not quite her sister, we existed in that moment as each other’s next best thing.