Reviews with content warning for Drug use - Crying in H Mart

Overall this is a good book, the writing is good, her story is emotional, evocative, and entirely relatable for anyone who has experienced familial grief and terminal illness.

The issue I have with this book is personal, but perhaps relatable to anyone from a small town - I almost had to put the book down because I couldn’t stand the author continuously calling Eugene, Oregon (second biggest city in the state, a major PAC12 college town, an hour away from Portland) small, boring, and dull. Almost every single person I’ve met that’s lived in a <10,000 person town (and bigger, honestly) would KILL to be in Eugene. If the author would have said “I hated growing up in Eugene” I could’ve moved on, but she seemed to hate it specifically because it’s “small” and because there was “nothing to do.”

Every kid that’s suffered growing up in a 3,000 person town in the middle of a corn field somewhere in the Midwest - where 99.99% of the population is white and so strictly religious they unironically call Halloween “the devil’s holiday” and avoid you like the plague if you don’t go to their same church (imagine if you don’t go to church at all, and they repeatedly egg your house for it) - would have likely cut off a finger or two to grow up in Eugene or anywhere near it. I’m hoping the author bemoaned her adolescence in such a “small town” for dramatic effect and that she didn’t actually feel that strongly about it.

I understand teenage angst and depression and would have been more understanding if that was the main reason for feeling the way she did growing up, since most teens experience those feelings and at least at the time, likely no matter where you live, we feel like we don’t belong and we hate it there. But the amount of those feelings that she blamed specifically on the “small dull Pacific Northwest town” she lived in personally made my eye twitch. Growing up in a larger, modern, and progressive college town (often rated one of the most progressive cities in the entire U.S.) would be a privilege to sooo many.

Since the reader knows she’s writing this post-adolescence I was waiting for her to correct how she felt about this small town with “nothing to do” (aside from going to record stores, go vintage clothes shopping, get specialty Korean ingredients from a local market, and see Modest Mouse - just to name a few). Again, I acknowledge this as a personal issue taken with the book, but I assume most people that grew up in rural or small towns would struggle and also feel that a large part of the author’s adolescence and story is unreachable and I relatable because of this as well.

Content Warnings

daniofthewood's review

Go to review page

hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Content Warnings

annareads97's review

Go to review page

challenging emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

4.5

I was looking forward to reading this book for quite some time, and while it was not entirely what I expected, I very much enjoyed it. Michelle beautifully describes her complex relationship with her mother, with her Korean heritage, with grief, with love, and all of it is intricately woven into her relationship with the Asian comfort foods she grew up eating. I would call this a must read for anyone who grew up feeling caught between two identities, who is grieving the loss of a parent with whom they had a complicated relationship, or who simply wants to learn more about Asian American culture.

Content Warnings

kaylaswhitmore's review

Go to review page

challenging emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

I may just be biased, since I am also a Korean-American woman who grew up in Eugene, Oregon…but this memoir is certainly a gift to all who read it, and especially children of Asian immigrants. Words can’t quite describe the bizarre, surreal experience I had reading Michelle’s recollections. In between reeling emotionally from the similarities between her mother and my own, I would find myself blinking as familiar staples of my Eugene hometown popped up on every other page. Though my childhood and relationship to my mother is still quite different from Michelle’s, there were still so many things that struck me as familiar—like a funhouse mirror. Her use of emotion to paint such vivid pictures of the intangible truly drew me in and held me from the very first chapter. Someday, when the ache of her loss and the fear of losing my own mother fades, I will return to this book and reread it anew. For now, I’ll sit here in silence for a bit and cry lol.

Content Warnings

More...