San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Musician’s memoir focuses on loss, kimchi
In times of grief, food can console us. When Michelle Zauner learned of her mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis, it spawned a desire to learn to cook the Korean dishes that crowded the family table.
Best known for the shoegaze indie pop she makes as Japanese Breakfast, “Crying at H Mart” finds Zauner trading in her synths and reverb to deliver a refreshingly candid memoir about the trauma of loss, the limits of language and the meals made along the way. Though aspects of her music career are lightly covered, Zauner’s book is set primarily in hospital rooms and family kitchens, eschewing the popular musicians’ crutch of writing solely about life on the road and in the studio.
“Crying in H Mart” is instead a profound, timely exploration of terminal illness, culture and shared experience. Following Zauner as she moves from the East Coast back to Oregon to care for her dying mother, readers are given an unfettered view into her daily life trying to support and comprehend the reality of a dying loved one. As is often the case, the relationship between mother and daughter was hardly perfect beforehand.
“Hers was tougher than tough love,” Zauner writes in the book’s titular essay. “It was brutal, industrial strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn’t care if it hurt like hell in the meantime.”
Later on, Zauner details how her mind became set on the idea that learning to cook her mother’s recipes would help her leapfrog some of the emotional chasms between
them — while also hopefully encouraging the rapidly thinning woman to eat.
Whether detailing the process behind jatjuk (a Korean pine nut porridge that plays an important role in the narrative) or her eventual efforts to master the art of kimchi, Zauner brings dish after dish to life on the page in a rich broth of delectable details, cultural context and the personal history often packed into every bite. But far from letting food substitute for substance, “H Mart” also offers some remarkably prescient observations about otherness from the perspective of the Korean American experience.
Through that lens, we follow Zauner on trips to South Korea that begin in childhood and end with a belated honeymoon and Japanese Breakfast playing its first show in Seoul. Family, as well, plays a vital role. In one of the book’s most moving passages, readers witness Zauner’s wedding day, which was planned a grand total of two weeks in advance to ensure her ailing mother could attend.
In the aftermath of her mother’s death, Zauner would go on to record the songs that would eventually become her first album, 2016’s “Psychopomp.” A photo of Zauner’s mother graces the cover, while the subject matter of the music also draws on the loss as well. With this book, Zauner proves that one medium is not always sufficient when it comes to grappling with loss. In this case, it’s a loss that would subsequently serve as an important catalyst for her work.
In writing a memoir that will ultimately thrill Japanese Breakfast fans and provide comfort to those in the throes of loss while brilliantly detailing the colorful panorama of Korean culture, traditions and — yes — food, Michelle Zauner has accomplished the unthinkable: a book that caters to all appetites and doesn’t skimp on the kimchi.