Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

FOOD WAS HOW my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she could seem—constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations—I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.

Making a home had been her livelihood since I was born, and while she was vigilant and protective, she wasn’t what you would call coddling. She was not what I’d refer to as a “Mommy-Mom,” which was what I envied most of my friends for having. 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.

But every time I got hurt, my mom would start screaming. Not for me, but at me.

White people were always going to the doctor. But when I got hurt, my mom was livid, as if I had maliciously damaged her property.

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.

“Stop crying! Save your tears for when your mother dies.”

Her rules and expectations were exhausting,

I’d never seen my mother’s emotions so unabashedly on display. Never seen her without control, like a child.

ONCE A WEEK I was allowed to sleep over at my friend Nicole’s apartment, my sole respite from my mother’s overbearing supervision. Nicole’s relationship with her mom was the complete opposite of mine. Colette gave Nicole freedom to make her own decisions, and they actually seemed to enjoy spending time together.

I admired the way they seemed more like friends than mother and daughter, envied their thrifting trips to Portland.

There was no one in the world that was ever as critical or could make me feel as hideous as my mother, but there was no one, not even Peter, who ever made me feel as beautiful.

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.

My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities.