Crying in H Mart

The H Mart Essay

Michelle Zauner originally published “Crying in H Mart” as an essay in The New Yorker in 2018, and it became one of that magazine’s most widely shared pieces of the decade — read by hundreds of thousands of people who recognized in its specific grief something universal. The opening is famous now: “Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.” H Mart, the Korean-American grocery chain, is where Zauner goes to be close to her mother — to the foods that constituted their relationship, the ones that passed between them in the direction of care.

The memoir expands the essay into a full account of Zauner’s mother Chongmi, her illness and death from pancreatic cancer, and the years before and after. Zauner is the daughter of a Korean mother and American father, raised in Eugene, Oregon, and she structures the memoir around her relationship to Korean identity — which was mediated almost entirely through her mother and which her mother’s death threatened to make inaccessible.

Food as Inheritance

The memoir’s organizing metaphor — food as the language of a relationship — is executed with unusual thoroughness. Zauner does not simply evoke the smell of kimchi jjigae; she reconstructs the specific dishes her mother made, the techniques she watched without quite learning, the tastes that are now irretrievably bound up with a presence that is gone. The food writing is specific enough to function almost as instruction while remaining entirely elegiac.

The insight underneath the food narrative is that recipes are inheritances of a particular kind — embodied knowledge that passes from person to person through practice rather than text, and that becomes at risk when the practitioner dies without fully transmitting it.

The Relationship Before

What distinguishes Crying in H Mart from simpler grief memoirs is Zauner’s willingness to document the complexity of the relationship before the cancer. Her mother was exacting and sometimes harsh; their relationship included real conflict. The memoir does not sentimentalize the loss by erasing the difficult parts of the woman who died — and this makes the love in the book more convincing, not less.

Grief Without Consolation

What sets Crying in H Mart apart from the crowded field of grief memoirs is its refusal to console. Zauner does not offer the reader the comforts of acceptance, lessons learned, or peace made; she reports grief as it actually is — disordered, physical, ambushing, and unresolved. The famous opening scene, in which she weeps in the aisles of a Korean grocery store, captures the way loss attaches itself to the specific and the sensory rather than the abstract: a smell, a dish, a brand of snack becomes an unbearable summons. She is unsparing about the ugliness of her mother’s illness, the indignities of caregiving, and her own failures of patience and grace during it. This honesty is the source of the book’s power; by declining to tidy the experience into a redemptive arc, Zauner produces something far truer and more useful to the bereaved than reassurance could be.

Food as Language

The memoir’s organizing metaphor — that food is the medium through which a particular love was expressed — is executed with unusual thoroughness and tact. Zauner reconstructs the dishes her mother made with such specificity that the writing nearly functions as instruction even as it remains pure elegy: the jjigae, the banchan, the careful preparation that was Chongmi’s untranslated language of care. Underneath lies a sharp insight about inheritance: that recipes are a form of embodied knowledge passed from body to body through practice rather than text, and therefore acutely vulnerable to a death that interrupts the transmission. After her mother dies, Zauner’s effort to cook Korean food — learning through online videos what she failed to absorb in person — becomes a literal attempt to keep a relationship, and a culture, from slipping out of reach.

Korean American Identity

Beneath the grief runs a quieter narrative about biracial identity and the fear of losing a culture along with a parent. As the daughter of a Korean mother and a white American father, raised in Oregon, Zauner’s connection to her Korean heritage ran almost entirely through her mother — the language, the food, the annual trips to Seoul, the very sense of belonging to a people. Her mother’s death therefore threatens a double loss: the person and the access to identity that the person provided. Zauner writes candidly about feeling like an outsider in both of her cultures, about the specific ache of being half of something, and about food and cooking as her remaining bridge to a Korean self she is terrified of forfeiting. This thread gives the memoir a resonance beyond personal grief, speaking to anyone who has felt their heritage thinning across a generation.

The Musician’s Voice

Zauner is also Japanese Breakfast, the indie musician, and the memoir is informed by that other career in ways that sharpen it. There is a musician’s instinct for emotional directness and rhythm in the prose, an unwillingness to hide behind ornament, and a structural sense of how to build toward a feeling and then let it land. The book also chronicles her development as an artist against the backdrop of her mother’s skepticism about that path, so that grief, ambition, and self-definition are braided together. Crying in H Mart became a major bestseller and one of the most acclaimed memoirs of its years precisely because Zauner brought a songwriter’s economy and an essayist’s precision to a subject that easily becomes sentimental, producing a book that is raw without being shapeless and tender without being soft.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — One of the decade’s finest memoirs, written with the musician’s ear for emotional directness and the food writer’s precision about sensory truth, making its particular grief feel as large as the universal.