Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

I wonder how many people at H Mart miss their families.

The city sits near the source of the Willamette River, which stretches 150 miles north, from the Calapooya Mountains outside of town to its mouth on the Columbia. Carving its way between mountains, the Cascade Range to the east and the Oregon Coast Range to the west, the river defines a fertile valley where tens of thousands of years ago a series of ice age floods surged southwest from Lake Missoula, traveling over eastern Washington and bringing with their floodwaters rich soil and volcanic rock that now shore up the layers of its earth, alluvial plains fit for a vast variety of agriculture.

I developed this compulsion to clean as a sort of protection ritual performed when I felt even the slightest bit abandoned, an eventuality that tormented my young imagination.

I came to realize that while I struggled to be good, I could excel at being courageous.

this fusion of moral and aesthetic approval was an early introduction to the value of beauty and the rewards it had in store.

Lvl Up and lived in a warehouse known as David Blaine’s The Steakhouse that hosted DIY shows. He had five roommates who all slept in tiny lofted bedrooms they’d built themselves out of drywall. They reminded me of the tree forts where the Lost Boys slept in Peter Pan.

he squeezed next to me on the couch and lay still as I cried into his gray college T-shirt, finally able to release the billow of emotions I’d suppressed all day, grateful he hadn’t listened when I told him not to bother.

The WOW Hall was where I saw most local shows growing up. Menomena, Joanna Newsom, Bill Callahan, Mount Eerie, and the Rock n Roll Soldiers, who were the closest band Eugene could claim as hometown heroes. They wore headbands and leather vests with tassels that hung over their bare chests, and we admired them because they were the only people we knew who had left and accomplished something—a coveted major-label deal and a slot in a Verizon Wireless commercial. We never stopped to question if what they’d accomplished had really been so great, why they were back in town to play so often. Bigger bands played the McDonald Theatre, where I saw Modest Mouse and crowd surfed for the first time, spending a good thirty seconds on the edge of the stage beforehand to ensure someone in the front row would in fact catch me when I jumped. Isaac Brock was like a god to us. There was a rumor that his cousin lived in the next town over, in the trailer park that the song “Trailer Trash” is about, and this potential proximity made him all the more relatable—someone we could claim as our own.

nothing impacted me so profoundly as the first time I got my hands on a DVD of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs live at the Fillmore. The front woman, Karen O, was the first icon of the music world I worshipped who looked like me. She was half Korean and half white, with an unrivaled showmanship that obliterated the docile Asian stereotype. She was famous for wild onstage antics, spitting water into the air, bounding across to the far edges of the stage, and deep throating a microphone before lassoing it above her head by its cable. Agape at the image, I found myself in a strange state of ambivalence.

My first thought being how do I get to do that, and my second, if there’s already one Asian girl doing this, then there’s no longer space for me.

I took press pictures of myself in my bathroom with a self-timer, scanned them onto my dad’s computer, and used MS Paint to design promotional flyers. I bought a staple gun and hung them on telephone poles around town and asked local businesses if I could tape them up in their windows. I made a Myspace and uploaded the songs I recorded on GarageBand.

I tried to see myself through my mother’s shrewd eye, pinpoint the parts of me she’d pick apart. I wanted to impress her, to demonstrate how much I’d grown and how I could thrive without her. I wanted to return an adult.

always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you. I remembered the boots she’d broken in so that by the time I got them I could go on unbothered, without harm. Now, more than ever, I wished desperately for a way to transfer pain, wished I could prove to my mother just how much I loved her, that I could just crawl into her hospital cot and press my body close enough to absorb her burden.

“Actually, I bought this one for Eunmi for her birthday,” my mother said. “How about I keep it and once I get home, I’ll buy a new one for you, so we can match. When we wear them, we can think of her together.”