90 pages • 3 hours read
Michelle ZaunerCrying in H Mart
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Crying in H Mart”
The memoir opens with Zauner confessing that she has been crying in H Mart ever since her mother died. She describes the images that are common to the Asian grocery store, which evoke memories of her mother at the kitchen table or shopping for traditional Korean foods. Zauner wonders if she is still Korean if she no longer has access to her mother’s wealth of knowledge. Her mother’s love was expressed to her through food, and now Zauner feels grief and anger when she sees families or older women enjoying their lives at a store that caters to her Asian culture.
Zauner goes on to describe the typicalities and cultural signposts of an H Mart. They are most often situated on the outskirts of town in neighborhoods that have signs in Korean or Chinese, in a shopping complex that caters specifically to Asian customers. Zauner’s H Mart is in Elkins Park near Philadelphia, and she visits weekly, stocking up for the week and picking out something fresh for that evening. The food court has stalls for many specialty dishes from across Asia, including sushi, ramen, and tteokbokki. Zauner loves to people-watch in the food court, and she wonders how many people there miss their families.
She describes some of the people she sees: young Chinese students; a white family being shown food by their father, whom Zauner speculates may have been stationed overseas; an Asian man showing his girlfriend the food his mother used to make him at home. To Zauner, it is a “beautiful, holy place” (9). She sees a young boy with his mother and wishes she could relay to him how much he will miss her one day. Zauner lost both her mother and her aunt to cancer within five years, and H Mart is the place where she can remember who they were before their illness.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Save Your Tears”
Chongmi Zauner died on October 18, 2014, at 56 years old. Her daughter was 25. Zauner has trouble remembering the exact date but thinks of that year as the time when everything was supposed to fall into place. Zauner reveals that her father retired to Phuket the year after his wife died, hinting at unresolved conflict between them.
Zauner has no trouble remembering what her mother ate, however, and lists many dishes and the particularities of the way her mother liked them. Chongmi showed love by taking notice of what her family liked to eat, and Zauner repays the favor in recording her mother’s love of food.
She then recounts how her parents met: Her father took an opportunity in South Korea, and Chongmi was the front-desk worker at the hotel he was staying at. They dated for three months before getting engaged; they spent the next years living in several countries before returning to Seoul and having Zauner. The family immigrated to Eugene, Oregon, when Zauner was a year old; by age 10, Zauner and her family were living in a house in the woods outside the city.
There, Zauner was largely left with her mother, as there weren’t other children to play with. Chongmi wasn’t an overly affectionate mother, and Zauner recalls that her protective instinct was peculiar: “when I got hurt, my mom was livid, as if I had maliciously damaged her property” (17). When Zauner sprained her ankle falling out of a tree, her mother yelled at her until Zauner apologized. Her mother was the epitome of tough love.
Chongmi was also a perfectionist, particularly about beauty. She bought many QVC beauty products and picked at Zauner’s appearance. She took excellent care of her clothing and the household, and she collected delicate objects that were easily broken. Zauner found all this exhausting, but she needed her mother’s companionship just the same, and she learned to use the acts of cleaning and organizing to elicit her mother’s praise.
Zauner’s efforts to earn her mother’s affection led her to food, which was a rare place where young Zauner had freedom to pursue her own tastes. She would try to impress her mother and aunts by eating the foods most foreign to her Americanized palate. Zauner learned that “while [she] struggled to be good, [she] could excel at being courageous” (23). Her household prized food as a cultural touchstone, and Zauner was raised in that tradition.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Double Lid”
Chapter 3 concerns Zauner’s visits to Seoul. As a child, she and her mother would spend six weeks over the summer to visit Chongmi’s family. They stayed at Halmoni’s apartment (halmoni is Korean for grandmother). Zauner describes the cramped apartment as a warm but full place; in addition to Halmoni, her Nami Emo (emo is the Korean word for a maternal aunt) lived there with her teenage son Seong Young and eventually her husband Mr. Kim. Eunmi Emo also lived in the apartment; she was a college graduate and the unofficial translator and playmate for Zauner during her visits.
Zauner and her mother slept on a futon in the apartment’s living room, and Zauner recalls how her mother always wanted to raid the refrigerator at night, which never happened at home. She also spent a great deal of time with Halmoni, whom Zauner found frightening due to her teasing nature and brash attitude, especially thanks to ddongchim, which was a way Halmoni teased Zauner by trying to stick a finger in her anus (which Zauner stresses is a common form of teasing in Korea, akin to a wedgie in America). Every night, Halmoni led the women in a game of hwatu, a card game common in Korea, while Zauner played waitress, getting them fresh drinks while they gambled all night.
They would also see Zauner’s grandfather once a visit. He left the family when Chongmi was younger, and when they met him at a Chinese restaurant, he would often ask for money.
Zauner learned an interesting thing about herself in Korea: She’s considered pretty there. In particular, the fact that she has a double eyelid is seen as a beautiful feature, and her mother revealed that her aunts had cosmetic surgery to imitate her natural feature. One day, she was approached by a director and asked about her talents. Her mother shot it down, saying that Zauner couldn’t tolerate being “someone’s doll” (34).
The visits continued until Zauner was 14, when her Halmoni passed away. When her mother returned from the funeral, Zauner witnessed her devastation, which she could not comprehend at her young age. She closes the chapter with the last words her Halmoni said to her: “You used to be such a little chickenshit […] You never let me wipe your asshole” (35).
Chapter 4 Summary: “New York Style”
Chongmi’s cancer diagnosis comes when Zauner is four years out of college, living in Philadelphia and drifting about with a sputtering music career. Her teenage years in Eugene left her feeling stifled and created tension between her and her mother; college on the East Coast presented an opportunity to escape. Zauner ended up at Bryn Mawr despite having a nervous breakdown in high school and nearly not having the grades; staying in Philadelphia afterward was a natural step.
During this time, she loses her job at the Mexican restaurant where she met Peter, her boyfriend, and she is living in a ratty apartment with her drummer Ian. She feels as though she is “floundering in reality” (39), just as her mother tried to keep her from doing. She takes a bus to New York to see a friend about starting a career writing about music, but she remembers her mother’s complaints of stomach problems and a doctor’s visit, and her silence over the last few days has Zauner worried.
While she waits for her friend at the bar, Zauner texts her mother and gets a call in response. Her mother wanted to wait until Zauner was back in Philadelphia with Peter to tell her, but she reveals that the doctor found a cancerous tumor. Zauner ignores her feelings through her meeting with her friend and calls Peter immediately afterward.
The chapter pivots to discuss Peter, the first boyfriend Chongmi ever approved of. On their 30th anniversary trip, Zauner’s parents stopped in Philadelphia first. Peter took them all to a restaurant that specialized in soondubu jjigae (a Korean tofu stew), which impressed Zauner’s parents. At dinner, Peter agreed to go to the Korean spa with them, and Zauner didn’t know if he was aware of the nudity involved, which he handled with aplomb. Throughout the trip, Peter impressed with his confidence and familiarity with Korean culture; Chongmi remarked that he’s “New York style,” which to her means he is a good man.
Proving this out, Peter agrees to come to New York immediately after hearing Zauner’s news, though he won’t get off work until two in the morning. Later, while staying at her friend’s apartment and waiting on Peter, Zauner remembers how happy her mother was to bring food back from H Mart after the spa day, and how she didn’t seem to notice the ratty, terrible apartment Zauner lived in. Peter arrives, and he reveals that Zauner’s parents told him first to ensure that he would be there for her.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Despite the title, H Mart does not figure significantly in this memoir; rather, it serves as a shorthand for the broad depth of emotions Zauner experiences as a Korean American trying to connect with her mother’s heritage through food and family. In this way her use of the store mirrors the role H Mart plays in the lives of millions of Asian immigrants: It is a point of familiar contact and a concrete symbol that is a microcosm of the larger relationship between immigrants and their homeland. In her descriptions of H Mart, Zauner notably makes space for the cultural exchange that occurs between white Americans and Asian Americans, hinting at her complicated relationship with her identity and her father’s experience as an American living abroad.
Throughout the book Zauner uses lush descriptions of food as a touchstone for the emotional through line of her mother’s death, which is fitting since her relationship with her mother is rooted in their shared love of and attention to food. Zauner reflects, “I remember these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, […] in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it” (14). When Zauner writes at great length about the food she experiences, she deliberately invokes the interest her mother showed in food as a way of honoring her mother’s legacy. The memoir discusses Zauner’s complicated relationship with her mother’s legacy as a homemaker—until her mother’s illness, she saw it as a waste. However, the choices Zauner makes while writing, including her decision to center the memoir around the cultural significance of food, show that much of the tension depicted in the early chapters is resolved by the time Zauner writes the memoir.
Food is a place where Zauner can be herself and stay in her mother’s good graces. Chongmi’s perfectionism and criticism stifles Zauner; the idea that food allows her to find acceptance by being “courageous” instead of “good” defines a great deal of Zauner’s self-concept in the memoir and ties into how she reconciles her mother’s lack of belief in her as a musician by using her music to honor and remember her mother (23). For Zauner, being an artist is also an act of courage, so she’s following the same impulse that she followed in fearlessly trying sannakji as a child.
Another important through line established in these opening chapters is Zauner’s desire (and struggle) to deepen her connection to her Korean heritage despite being raised in Oregon. Zauner cherishes her childhood trips to Seoul, but it’s clear that she often felt like an outsider, scared of Halmoni’s teasing (and its cultural difference from what she was used to) and aware of the fact that her mother’s behavior was different in Halmoni’s apartment than it was at home. Throughout the memoir Zauner struggles with belonging to Korean culture, and there’s a double consciousness at work in her biracial, bicultural identity: She sees herself as not Korean enough to fit in with her mother’s family yet not American enough to fit in at school in Oregon.
It’s only later in life that she starts to interrogate and reconcile the liminal space she occupies, but the seeds are planted in her youth, particularly in her discovery that she’s seen as beautiful in Korea. That her mother prevents her from capitalizing on her beauty resonates with other moments when Chongmi controls Zauner’s access to the Korean side of her identity.
Of course, Chongmi believes that a person should hold 10% of themselves back, which Zauner sees as one of the keys to understanding her mother after her death and throughout her illness. It’s also a source of frustration and pain for Zauner, which first manifests in the way Chongmi hides her diagnosis, choosing instead to protect Zauner from the news. A recurring theme in the book is the way Chongmi and Zauner’s instincts and desires for each other are at cross purposes even though they’re rooted in love. What Zauner views as her mother holding back that 10% is, in Chongmi’s view, an act of protection and love, an attempt to spare Zauner from the worst. Zauner struggles against that, and her memoir constantly grapples with what that missing 10% of her mother was, especially after her death.
