Recipes - An Archived Review of Crying In H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Originally posted on GoodReads 27 May 2021
This review was originally posted on GoodReads in 27 May 2021.
This past year into the shutdown, I ended up learning a new Chinese recipe each season; I didn't purposely set out to do this, but I simply would get hungry for another new recipe to try every couple of months.
In the spring, I focused on mastering my yangchow fried rice 揚州炒飯, taking each attempt as a learning experience on how I can make a childhood favorite, a dish that was fluffy and light that I'd savor bowl by bowl. The summer, my mom's unique pan-fried chow mein recipe, a dish in which the noodles delicately balanced gelatinous chewiness with carcinogenic crunch, a contrast which was further embodied by the pan-fried salted celery and BBQ pork (chasiu 叉燒) I would add into it. In the fall, I took on the challenge of making jeen mein 煎麵, a Hong Kong favorite of extra crunchy fried noodles topped with a thick, savory gravy, filled with crunchy bean sprouts and soft slow-cooked chicken. As the cold winter months approached, I craved preserved duck egg-lean pork congee (juk 粥) with Chinese donuts, and learned how easy it was to prepare rice for this hot, savory porridge; I cheated and would air fry the frozen Chinese donut. Still delicious. As spring came again, I welcomed the Year of the Ox with pork dumplings made from scratch and Cantonese-style steamed striped bass, topped with a sweet mixture of soy sauce, brown sugar, green onion, and a little bit of oyster sauce.
Every time I made a new dish, I proudly snapped a picture of my wok, or my pot, or my baking dish, and sent it to my family group text thread. I'd urge one of my uncles to "Show this to pawpaw (婆婆)". I wanted the greatest cook in the world to see what her grandson was able to make. I'd get a text back from my uncle: "She says it looks great." I'd get giddy, and would briefly imagine tossing my rice in my grandma's wide, shallow wok in her kitchen, scooping up a generous mound with her curved spatula, and setting it into a bowl before her. I knew I couldn't do this anytime soon with coronavirus looming around world, but I simply couldn't wait until that day I could give back to her, after an entire lifetime of being fed her ox tail stew, her fried rice, her Hong Kong macaroni soup, her tangyuan 湯圓, and even her glutinous brown sugar balls. Apart from my attempts to improve my Cantonese/Toisan through Discord channels and Hong Kong rap videos, learning food was my way of connecting with my culture and family, during a time when I was furthest apart from them.
I am a big fan of Michelle Zauner's music under the Japanese Breakfast project, and, likewise, almost cried my eyes out when I read her "Crying in H Mart" article on The New Yorker. The article embodied her isolated frustration and internal despair as she reflected on the loss of her mother and how much she relied on her to know all of the right Korean brands of food in H Mart. Late into the memoir, Michelle visits a Korean spa that she used to go to with her mother, and finds herself lost in translation with the women scrubbing her down and asking whether she's Korean or not. When her mother died, a little part of Michelle's Korean side died. Michelle's alienation with her own culture was a feeling I sometimes knew too well; my attempts to speak Cantonese with my grandparents, or even the old Chinese couple who ran the nearby Chinese restaurant in Long Beach, often felt futile. Like Michelle, I struggled with catching up with each character, each inflection, each tone; as each word passed, I felt less and less Chinese.
Michelle's Crying in H Mart memoir expands on her original article, providing a more intimate, more whole portrait of her and her mother, their relationship, and, of course, all of the food they ate. It's as straightforward as it is intimate; Michelle recounts her mother's cancer diagnosis in tragic detail all in the order of events, even recalling life events like her early music career and her wedding, marred by the memory of her mother's diagnosis. Amidst all of the anger and grief, however, there is one detail that remains consistent throughout: Korean food. Food becomes a healing for Michelle, a way to connect with her mother after death. She allows herself to get lost in scrumptious and sensory detail, intimately portraying the crunch of bean sprouts, the sourness of kimchi, and the boiling bubbly healing of tofu soups. These foods, and her subsequent effort to learning the recipes for these foods, are what prevent Michelle's Korean side from ever dying with her mother. She describes in deft detail the meditative but effortful process of creating kimchi, watching and listening to Maangchi's YouTube videos and likening her mannerisms to a whimsical and oddly poignant Korean aunt.
There are times were Michelle becomes absorbed and aimless in her detail; it's almost like she wrote this memoir for herself, and she's simply allowing us to experience all of the details as she documents her mid-20s. Her music career seems to just barely intersect with her mother's death, and yet, in a sense, it only starts as a product of her mother's death. As a Japanese Breakfast fan, I found myself enjoying these sections in Michelle's early struggles and subsequent success with her breakout album Psychopomp, but they did feel like a deviation from the main emotional breadth of Crying in H Mart, at least until the end when things feel connected to her coping. Without much styling or flourish to her writing, the memoir reads straightforward and doesn't wager too much investment or patience into certain sections that do not immediately seem relevant to crying in H Mart.
I don't think I could have picked up Crying In H Mart at a more perfect time. When the coronavirus shutdown was well into its first months, I was confronted with this question: when something takes away the family gatherings, the Chinese restaurants, the visits to Chinatown, the vacations to the motherland, even temporarily, what's left? What still makes me Chinese without those things? The dishes I learned were my attempts to answer those burning questions. Michelle's memoir captures the desperate first-gen Asian American spirit to grasp what's left of what little culture we can remember, and offers an optimistic hope and rebirth when we think all we can savor is lost. Her healing becomes our healing, as we slowly rediscover our cultures through Michelle's recollection of her own deep culinary memory. In a sense, her mother is immortal, a spirit embodied in her descript banchan, forever a bridge.