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A review by emergencily
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
5.0
Truthfully, I put off reading this for a long time - since it came out in 2021 - because I was scared of how much the book would devastate me. I've been a fan of her music for a few years and discovered her through "Psychopomp," the album she wrote after her mother's death. So it made me really emotional to realize that the album cover I'd always seen lit up on my phone screen as I listened to the album on the way to school had been a picture of her mother. Back when I was a uni student with a very limited data plan, the only thing I had to occupy my long commutes to school was listening to pre-downloaded music, and looking at the album art. I remember that I used to look at that picture and wonder about the story behind it and who those women were. How strange to think her mother's memory, forever eternalized in her music, had, in a sense, accompanied me on all those long, dreary winter bus rides. I went back and listened to the album again with a new understanding of the emotional layers to this album and really appreciated it in a new light.
This book is so quietly devastating in its grief. She might have been crying in the aisles of H Mart, but I was literally crying in my work's breakroom, on the TTC, on the Go Train, while waiting for an appointment...There's so many small, every day moments in her memories of her mother that she recounts that just hit me like a punch to the gut, because I see echoes of my mother in hers, and echoes of my relationship or my sister's relationship to our mother in hers.
I don't really have the words to analyze this book in any put-together way, but I know that she showed a vulnerability and honest humility in this book that reached into a deep and tender part of me and scooped out my heart. It tapped into my own fears and anxieties about my mother and the future as I watch her age, the knot of my own cultural insecurities and tenuous grasp on my self-identity in relation to vague concepts of "heritage," my own memories of the conflicts and little hurts I've collected over the years with my mother - but it also made me recall so many beautiful memories I have of my own mother, and that I am unfathomably lucky to be able to keep making anew everyday with her. I thought a lot about the role she gravitated towards as an "archivist" keeping and carrying her mother's memory, because I think that's a role I've often played in my family with my mother as well. I'm grateful to have read this book. How beautiful to see anew the ways in which love endures.
This book is so quietly devastating in its grief. She might have been crying in the aisles of H Mart, but I was literally crying in my work's breakroom, on the TTC, on the Go Train, while waiting for an appointment...There's so many small, every day moments in her memories of her mother that she recounts that just hit me like a punch to the gut, because I see echoes of my mother in hers, and echoes of my relationship or my sister's relationship to our mother in hers.
I don't really have the words to analyze this book in any put-together way, but I know that she showed a vulnerability and honest humility in this book that reached into a deep and tender part of me and scooped out my heart. It tapped into my own fears and anxieties about my mother and the future as I watch her age, the knot of my own cultural insecurities and tenuous grasp on my self-identity in relation to vague concepts of "heritage," my own memories of the conflicts and little hurts I've collected over the years with my mother - but it also made me recall so many beautiful memories I have of my own mother, and that I am unfathomably lucky to be able to keep making anew everyday with her. I thought a lot about the role she gravitated towards as an "archivist" keeping and carrying her mother's memory, because I think that's a role I've often played in my family with my mother as well. I'm grateful to have read this book. How beautiful to see anew the ways in which love endures.