Love, grief and a complex bond of mother, daughter
“Crying in the H Mart: A Memoir,” by Michelle Zauner (Knopf)
It seems as though many books are published these days about people either dying with cancer or living/caring for someone who has cancer. Perhaps authors hope readers can be soothed by the ideas and experiences that come to writers as to what they could have done and are doing or might be thinking differently.
“Crying in the H Mart” is about a young Korean American girl who struggles with her mother. It was a love-hate relationship much of the time. Mother-daughter relationships are often brimming with pain and disappointment and nothing was more so for Zauner and her mother.
The two were often seen together at the H Mart, a supermarket chain carrying Asian specialty foods. In summertime, they traveled to Korea for many weeks. Six relatives would stay in a three-bedroom apartment in Seoul. It gave the young author a chance to immerse herself in the Korean culture and especially the recipes she loved and evokes in great detail.
When she was 25, she discovered her mother had stage IV pancreatic cancer and was in extreme pain much of the time.
“The onslaught of her symptoms was like something out of a disaster movie.”
She tended to her mother even though her career as a musician was growing, and soon decided to give up her career. They returned to their home in Oregon, and lived together while her mother endured constant pain. Zauner learned how to cook Korean food and when her mother died, she struggled to continue to teach it to herself, in order to feel close to her mother. The daughter evokes many memories through cooking. The book includes dozens of recipes that Zauner and her mother prepared together.
Stories about sickness and dying are understandably painful. This one certainly is. It is commonly read that mothers who insist on perfection in themselves also insist on flawlessness in their female children.
Zauner used to watch her mother pose endlessly. “The same mirror where I’d watch her apply cream after cream to preserve her taut, flawless skin. The same mirror where I’d find her trying on outfit after outfit … The mirror where she lingered in all her vanity. In the mirror now was someone unrecognizable and out of her control. Someone strange and undesirable.”