Reviews with content warning for Medical content - Crying in H Mart

This story is so emotional and beautiful. It made me think about all the memories linked to foods and drinks and meals together with the loved ones.

The book reads as fiction even when it is non-fiction (and that makes everything way more emotional).
StoryGraph said this is out of my comfort zone but I felt very comfortable reading this.

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crieraylas's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

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_annika__'s review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

3.75

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.

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seregelda's review

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

3.0

CW: cancer, child abuse, assault, r*pe mention

I'm not familiar with the author's music, so that didn't influence me at all. It was sad and makes me want to cherish my mom, a cancer survivor, all the more! Wish I could relate to all the food stories, but I still have yet to try kimchi (my sister thinks it will be too spicy for me).

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daniofthewood's review

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hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

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