Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

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

Observing Colette made me question my mother’s dreams. 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

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.