A review by rieviolet
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

I can only add to all the praise this memoir has gotten. It was honest, brutal, heartbreaking, mesmerizing, just all-around wonderful. 

I loved the way food was a focal point throughout the narration, how its connection with one's cultural heritage was so strongly and beautifully illustrated. It really prompted me to reflect on the food I've grown up with and its significance for my own selfhood.
The linguist in me also really appreciated the lovely reflections on language and on a mother tongue. 

The writing style was just *chef's kiss*. There were so many passages that I kept re-reading thinking to myself "How could she manage to capture this feeling with such poignant words and turn of phrases?", I was just floored. 

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. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key. 
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