Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it.

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.

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?

We sit here in silence, eating our lunch. But I know we are all here for the same reason. We’re all searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves.

He is quiet and looks tired and doesn’t talk to her much. I want to tell him how much I miss my mother. How he should be kind to his mom, remember that life is fragile and she could be gone at any moment. Tell her to go to the doctor and make sure there isn’t a small tumor growing inside her too.

She was fifty-six years old.

A Mommy-Mom is someone who takes an interest in everything her child has to say even when there is no actual way she gives a shit, who whisks you away to the doctor when you complain of the slightest ailment, who tells you “they’re just jealous” if someone makes fun of you, or “you always look beautiful to me” even if you don’t, or “I love this!” when you give them a piece of crap for Christmas.

Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial-strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn’t care if it hurt like hell in the meantime. When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction. She was guilty only of caring too much. I realize this now, only in retrospect. No one in this world would ever love me as much as my mother, and she would never let me forget 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 came to realize that while I struggled to be good, I could excel at being courageous.

“thin ear”—someone who is too easily swayed by the advice of others.

I couldn’t comprehend then the depth of her sorrow the way I do now. I was not yet on the other side, had not crossed over as she had into the realm of profound loss.

A familiar itch was creeping in. That aching toward something wild—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.

Her lack of purpose seemed more and more an oddity, suspect, even anti-feminist.

That my care played such a principal role in her life was a vocation 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.

I yearned for my mother to speak to me but tried to appear stoic, knowing full well my constitution was much weaker than hers. She seemed unfazed by our distance right up until the day I packed to leave for Bryn Mawr, when at last the silence was broken.

They had lost touch after my parents moved to Germany

I never learned any of their real names. Their identities were absorbed by their children.

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.

Even with three of us there to labor, caretaking often felt like a herculean feat.

I was not essential to him in the way I knew I was to my mother, and I could see that in the aftermath, there would be a struggle to coexist.

I loved that she did not fear god. I loved that she believed in reincarnation, the idea that after all this she could start anew. When I asked her what she’d want to come back as, she always told me she’d like to return as a tree. It was a strange and comforting answer, that rather than something grand and heroic, my mother preferred to return to life as something humble and still.

My mother had been private about her illness, and so the wedding doubled as a celebration of her life without the added pressure of saying it outright. It worked just as planned, all these people from different stages of her life, all together in one place.

I talked about how love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor. How I felt it most when he drove up to New York after work at three in the morning just to hold me in a warehouse in Brooklyn after I’d discovered my mother was sick.

It was difficult to write about someone I felt I knew so well.

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

didn’t realize just how bizarre religious practice can appear to an atheist.

She’d always been good at making things beautiful.

“Isn’t it nice how we actually enjoy talking to each other now?” I said to her once on a trip home from college, after the bulk of the damage done in my teenage years had been allayed. “It is,” she said. “You know what I realized? I’ve just never met someone like you.”

They reminded us of the stories that had flooded in while she was alive—of cancer patients who had survived against all odds. How someone’s neighbor had conquered her own death sentence by way of meditation and positive thinking. How so-and-so’s cancer had spread to multiple lymph nodes, but through envisioning a new, unblemished bladder, a miracle occurred, and he was now in remission. Anything seemed possible if you just had an optimistic attitude.

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

reliquary

I deleted the photographs from the hospital of my mother and me in her bed wearing matching pajamas. I deleted the photo she sent me the day she got her hair cut like Mia Farrow, shyly posing as if the hardest part was over.

But before consigning ourselves to limited vacation days in exchange for corporate insurance,

Dreams about pigs, the president, or shaking hands with a celebrity were all good-luck dreams—but it was shit in particular, especially if you touched it, that was license to gamble.

It was hardly therapeutic and seemed just to exhaust me even more.

The whole process made me appreciate kimchi so much more.

The smell of vegetables fermenting in a fragrant bouquet of fish sauce, garlic, ginger, and gochugaru radiated through my small Greenpoint kitchen, and I would think of how my mother always used to tell me never to fall in love with someone who doesn’t like kimchi. They’ll always smell it on you, seeping through your pores. Her very own way of saying, “You are what you eat.”