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.
Themes
Food’s Relationship to Cultural and Family Identity
The book’s title and opening chapter suggest a theme that’s borne out in nearly every chapter of the book: There is an intense emotional connection between Zauner’s love of Korean food and her sense of self, her heritage, and her relationships with others, particularly her mother Chongmi. The prose describes food in rich detail, noting the sensual details of eating to honor Chongmi’s memory, as she was a woman who paid attention to the foods that Zauner liked and disliked, and who used those experiences as conduit for love and care. Zauner adopts this attitude in her life and in her writing, so when she writes about food, there is a purpose to the writing that goes beyond a sumptuous, voyeuristic pleasure for the reader. Zauner was raised in a home where food was the message and the medium of love.
During Chongmi’s illness, Zauner is eager to step in as the primary cook in the household, but she finds her attempts stymied by her mother’s shift in appetite. This is a practical and symbolic moment of disconnection, especially when Chongmi’s friend Kye steps in and withholds both the responsibility and the knowledge of cooking dishes like jatjuk from Zauner. What Zauner wants most is to be the caretaker that she realizes her mother was for her, and with food taken away as an expression of care, she is left bereft and searching for another way into her mother’s sphere.
After Chongmi’s death, Zauner turns to Korean food to carry on her mother’s legacy; notably, she makes a Korean meal for her aunt and cousin after the funeral by donning her mother’s sandals to go to a Korean grocer. She uses the process of making kimchi as an act of self-care and healing, and she reacts strongly to her father’s attempts to undermine her relationship to food, particularly in a moment where he tries to return a dish in Vietnam for being too fishy. Zauner is offended because she has embraced the Korean side of her culinary heritage, and his complaint is construed with an American palate; for Zauner, that’s a rejection of her mother as well as her own sense of self.
Chongmi told Zauner “never to fall in love with someone who doesn’t love kimchi” (217), which Zauner treats as practical advice and as a symbol for her Korean identity. To Zauner, Korean food is more than tradition or culture; it’s a lifeline to the people she’s grieving and a testament to what she values in herself.
The Difficult Relationship Between an Immigrant Mother and Her Daughter
At first glance, Michelle and Chongmi Zauner could not be more different. Chongmi is a lifelong homemaker and mother who is a strict, unsentimental disciplinarian, a frequent and brutally honest critic of her daughter, and a perfectionist, particularly when it comes to cleanliness and physical beauty. Michelle Zauner, on the other hand, is an artist with ambitions toward a meaningful life that run counter to Chongmi’s ideas; Zauner struggles with her emotional well-being and rejects her mother’s image of success. This puts them into a natural conflict that is in some ways universal but also inflected with the particularities of their strong individual wills. Their different cultural identities also play a factor, as Zauner struggles to fit into her mother’s Korean culture at home and her American culture at school and with friends.
Their relationship throughout Zauner’s teenage and college years is complex, filled with open conflict as well as tender moments of love. Zauner points out that her mother warned her, “Save 10 percent [of yourself], always” (18), and Zauner realizes early on that her mother is following her own advice in their home. This is most evident in the scene when Chongmi tells Zauner that she had an abortion rather than risk another child like her, a cruel accusation that Zauner knows even then isn’t the whole story.
It’s only in her mother’s cancer diagnosis that Zauner begins to reckon with her role as a difficult child, but she finds some of the same barriers to understanding between them when she returns home to care for her mother. Chongmi is worried that Zauner will be difficult, leading to hesitation in telling Zauner about the illness; Chongmi retreats into her friendship with Kye and relies on her rather than her daughter, speaking in Korean and leaving Zauner out of her care; Chongmi’s reduced appetite leads Zauner to feel as though she’s failing in her attempts to cook food for her mother. Several factors are working to complicate their trust, most notably their personal history and their cultural difference.
It's only in connecting with Korean culture and Chongmi’s side of the family that Zauner begins to reconcile who her mother was in life. She grows to understand her mother and rues the fact that Chongmi was taken from her at the moment they were beginning to cross the threshold into their adult relationship. Zauner doesn’t shy away from the fraught nature of her relationship with her mother, but throughout the text she positions Chongmi at the center. The memoir is an act of empathy from a daughter searching for the 10% that her mother kept from her in life.
The Undignified Reality of Death by Cancer
One of the text’s strengths is Zauner’s refusal to back away from the grief she feels as a daughter. She approaches her mother’s cancer in a way that is atypical; she avoids 21st-century tropes that treat cancer as a fight to be won, and she does not depict illness as an adversary against which we must prioritize the continuation of life. Chongmi’s family was already ravaged by illness by the time she is diagnosed, having lost Halmoni, the family matriarch, and Eunmi, Chongmi’s sister. Eunmi’s death especially influences Chongmi, as she struggled through 24 rounds of chemotherapy and still passed away. Chongmi’s resolution to discontinue treatment is treated as a matter of course; the text does not make counter-arguments or advocate for a more hopeful approach, though Zauner recounts the shock and disbelief she feels in the moment.
The chapters that follow Chongmi’s diagnosis depict the devastating ugliness of cancer as Chongmi is robbed of her faculties. Zauner’s plans to reconnect with her mother and make meaningful amends are ruined by her inability to cook food her mother finds palatable and by her mother’s extreme condition. She lingers on the image of her mother sitting on the bathroom floor as her hair falls out, and she relays conversations with her father that cover the complex feelings of guilt and shame they feel about their inability to cope with their grief. After her mother’s death, Zauner recalls the poignant moment of her husband and father sitting with her while they stay with Chongmi’s body, which is followed by the horrific description of Zauner dressing her mother’s body and watching her be carried away by strangers. Her depiction of death by cancer takes a maximalist approach to the details of her mother’s suffering.
Through this, Zauner draws a sharp contrast between what cancer does to her mother, depicting the person she was before and during her illness. The sense of loss feels more keen as a result, and Zauner’s attempts to understand who her mother was, as well as her estrangement from her father, bear more significance in the text. The closing chapters document Zauner’s search to understand her mother and find moments of catharsis and joy; these moments are only possible because of Zauner’s grief, but the memoir’s painful, honest descriptions make it clear that catharsis should not erase her grief, which Zauner considers just as important to honoring her mother’s legacy as food and art.
