A review by aliciae08
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Apparently I am on a memoir kick where grief is a massive theme.  I read Crying in H Mart after seeing and hearing so many positive reviews, and I’m glad I did.

It’s about Michelle’s relationship to her mother and what happens when her mother gets sick, but it’s also about her relationship to herself/her cultural identity through food. She asks herself whether she can claim being Korean without her mother validating her existence, and making sense of her existence as a mixed child.  She explores this relationship with her food, conjuring up memories of her mother within those recipes and snacks. 

This memoir very much read as though someone was writing it for themselves. There are times when the characters aren’t at all likable. As some of the other reviews mentioned, the relationship comes across as sometimes abusive—but saying that, I think the relationship Michelle paints with her mother is very much her own, and she never describes it as being such (she might in the future, but right now she doesn’t).  The book was good in that it felt very real. Michelle is not a gracious caregiver—she put so much on wanting her mother to see all the ways she she could adult. Very rarely are caregivers full of the grace the general society demands of them—they’re human and have a range of emotions from resentment to love to adoration to scorn, often in the same moments. Michelle captures this well. 

Her relationship with her father is touched upon, and I can see her disappointment. Where she wanted someone to lean on, he was taking up all the space and grief, making decisions that would impact a child in a negative way, no matter the amount of financial support he may have given her in the end. 

There were parts that felt mundane, as life sometimes is, but it still struck a cord with me.
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