A review by hongjoongie
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad

I've just never met someone like you, as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me.
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 expecta-tions, 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 com-monalities. 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.

She was my champion, she was my archive. She had taken the utmost care to preserve the evidence of my existence and growth, capturing me in images, saving all my documents and possessions.
She had all knowledge of my being memorized. The time I was born, my unborn cravings, the first book I read. The formation of every characteristic. Every ailment and little victory. She observed me with unparalleled interest, inexhaustible devotion.

Now that she was gone, there was no one left to ask about these things. The knowledge left unrecorded died with her. What remained were documents and my memories, and now it was up to me to make sense of myself, aided by the signs she left behind How cyclical and bittersweet for a child to retrace the image of their mother. For a subject to turn back to document their archivist.

I don’t rate nonfiction but this is a 5 star.