Crying in H Mart

When I go to H Mart, I'm not just on the hunt for cuttlefish and three bunches of scallions for a buck; I'm searching for memories. I'm collecting the evidence that the Korean half of my identity didn't die when [my aunt and my mother] did. H Mart is the bridge that guides me away from the memories that haunt me, of chemo head and skeletal bodies and logging milligrams of hydrocodone. It reminds me of who they were before, beautiful and full of life, wiggling Chang Gu honey-cracker rings on all ten of their fingers, showing me how to suck a Korean grape from its skin and spit out the seeds.

That was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it. She remembered if you liked your stews with extra broth, if you were sensitive to spice, if you hated tomatoes, if you didn't eat seafood, if you had a large appetite. She remembered which banchan side dish you emptied first so the next time you were over it would be set with a heaping double portion, served alongside the various other preferences that made you, you.

“Stop crying! Save your tears for when your mother dies.”

This was a common proverb in my household. In place of the English idioms my mother never learned, she coined a few of her own. “Mommy is the only one who will tell you the truth, because Mommy is the only one who ever truly love you.” Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always “save ten percent of yourself.” What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all up yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. “Even from Daddy,” I save, she would add.

Standing at the counter, we'd open every Tupperware container full of homemade banchan, and snack together in the blue dark of the humid kitchen. Sweet braised black soybeans, crisp yellow sprouts with scallion and sesame oil, and tart, juicy cucumber kimchi were shoveled into our mouths behind spoonfuls of warm, lavender kong bap straight from the open rice cooker. We'd giggle and shush each other as we ate ganjang gejang with our fingers, sucking salty, rich, custardy raw crab from its shell, prodding the meat from its crevices with our tongues, licking our soy sauce-stained fingers. Between chews of a wilted perilla leaf, my mother would say, “This is how I know you're a true Korean.”

Every time I ate well or bowed correctly to my elders, my relatives would say, “Aigo yeppeu.” “Yeppeu,” or pretty, was frequently employed as a synonym for good or well-behaved, and this fusion of moral and aesthetic approval was an early introduction to the value of beauty and the rewards it had in store.

I didn't have the tools then to question the beginnings of my complicated desire for whiteness. In Eugene, I was one of just a few mixed-race kids at my school and most people thought of me as Asian. I felt awkward and undesirable, and no one ever complimented my appearance. In Seoul, most Koreans assumed I was Caucasian, until my mother stood beside me and they could see the half of her fused to me, and I made sense. Suddenly, my “exotic” look was something to be celebrated.

When my mom returned from the funeral, she was devastated. She let out this distinctly Korean wail and kept calling out, “Umma, Umma,” crumpled on the living room floor, her head heaving sobs into my father's lap as he sat on the couch and wept with her. […] I’d never seen my mother's emotion so unabashedly on display. Never seen her without control, like a child. I couldn't comprehend them the depth of her sorrow the way I do now. I was not yet on the other side, had not crossed over as she had into the realm of profound loss.

[…] I could only think of the last words my grandmother said to me before we returned home to America.

“You used to be such a little chickenshit,” she said. “You never let me wipe your asshole.”

[My mother] had spent my whole life trying to protect me from living this way, but now she just moved about the kitchen with a smile, chopping green onions, pouring 7UP and soy sauce into a mixing bowl, tasting it with her finger, seemingly unbothered by the cockroach traps that lined the counters and the smudged fingerprints on the fridge, intent only on leaving a taste of home behind.

My mother had either finally given up, conceding in her efforts to try to shape me into something I didn't want to be, or she had moved on to subtler tactics, realizing it was unlikely that I'd last another year in this mess before I discovered she'd been right all along. […] Or maybe she'd finally accepted that I'd forged my own path and found someone who loved me wholly, and believed at last that I would end up all right.

I envied and feared my mother's ability to keep matters private, as every secret I tried to hold close ate away at me. She possessed a rare talent for keeping secrets, even from us. She did not need anyone. She could surprise you with how little she needed you. All those years she instructed me to save 10 percent of myself like she did, I never knew it meant she had also been keeping a part of herself from me too.

I remembered how when I was a child I would slip my cold feet between my mother's thighs to warm them. How she’d shiver and whisper that she would always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you. I remember the boots she'd broken in so that by the time I got them I could go on unbothered, without harm. Now, more than ever, I wished desperately for a way to transfer pain […] It seemed only fair that life should present such an opportunity to prove one's filial piety. All the months my mother had been a vessel for me, her organs shifting and cramping together to make room for my existence, and the agony she'd endured upon my exit could be repaid by carrying this pain in her place. […] But I could do no more than lie nearby.

[My mother] sat on the floor and confronted [her] reflection. She ran a hand along her head and stared at the hair that broke off into it. In the same full-length mirror where I had watched her pose for more than half my life. The same mirror where I'd watched her apply cream after cream to preserve her taut, flawless skin. The same mirror where I'd find her trying on outfit after outfit, runway walking with perfect posture, examining herself with pride, posing with a new purse or leather jacket. The mirror where she lingered in all her vanity. In the mirror now there was someone unrecognizable and out of her control. Someone strange and undesirable. She started to cry.

Worst of all, I pretended not to have a middle name, which was in fact my mother's name, Chongmi. With a name like Michelle Zauner, I was neutral on paper. I thought the omission chic and modern, as if I had shirked a vestigial extremity and spared myself another bout of mortification when people accidentally pronounced it “Chow Mein.” But really I had just become embarrassed about being Korean.

“You don't know what it's like to be the only Korean girl at school,” I sounded off to my mother, who stared back at me blankly.

“But you're not Korean,” she said. “You're American.”

I had spent my adolescence trying to blend in with my peers in suburban America, and had come of age feeling like my belonging was something to prove. Something that was always in the hands of other people to be given and never my own to take, to decide which side I was on, whom I was allowed to align with. I could never be of both worlds, only half in and half out, waiting to be ejected at will by someone with greater claim than me. Someone full. Someone whole. […] In that moment all I wanted was to be accepted as a Korean by two people who refused to claim me. You are not one of us, Kye seemed to say. And you will never really understand what it is [Chongmi] needs, no matter how perfect you try to be.

I tucked my knees to my chest and blubbered loudly, hiccupping rapid, shallow breaths, my face red with agony. I rocked back and forth on the wooden floor of my bed, feeling as if my whole being would just give out. For the first time, [my mom] didn't scold me. Perhaps because she could no longer fall back on her staple phrase. Because here they were, the tears I'd been saving.

“What do I even have left to look forward to, Michelle?” [My mom] said, welling up as she eyed the wilted white cabbage. “I can't even eat kimchi.”

“Your hair is really growing back,” I said, trying to change the subject. I put my hand on her head and gently ran my palm over the sparse white fuzz. “For someone who's sick you still look very young and beautiful.”

“Do I?” she said, feigning modesty

“It's true,” I said. “It almost looks like…are you wearing makeup?” I had never realized that my mother had her eyebrows tattooed. They looked so natural it was hard to tell.

Six days later, my mother was finally released. As we wheeled her toward the elevator our doctor stopped us in the hall to give her a parting gift. “I saw this and thought of you,” she said, taking my mother's hand. It was a small hand-carved wooden statue of a family—a father, mother, and daughter holding one another. They were faceless, huddled close, connected as if whittled from the same piece of wood.

I screamed to [my mom] in her language, in my mother tongue. My first word. Hoping she'd hear her little girl calling, and like the quintessential mother who is suddenly filled with enough other worldly strength to lift the car and save her trapped child, she'd come back for me. […]

Umma! Umma!

The same words my mother repeated when her mother died. That Korean sob, guttural and deep and primal. The same sound I'd heard in Korean movies and soap operas, the sound my mother made crying for her mother and sister. A pained vibrato that breaks apart into staccato quarter notes, descending as if it were falling off a series of small ledges.

I wanted to uncover something special about [my mom] that only I could reveal. That she was so much more than a housewife, than a mother. That she was her own spectacular individual. Perhaps I was still sanctimoniously belittling the two roles she was ultimately most proud of, unable to accept that the same degree of fulfillment may await those who wish to nurture and love as those who seek to earn and create. Her art was the love that beat on and her loved ones, a contribution to the world that could be just as monumental as a song or a book. There could not be one without the other. Maybe I was just terrified that I might be the closest thing she had to leaving a piece of herself behind.

“You know what I realized? I've just never met someone like you.”

I've just never met someone like you, as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery.

That wasn’t so hard, I thought to myself, happy to have conquered the dish Kye had mystified.

This was all I wanted, I realized, after so many days of decadent filets and pricey crustaceans, potatoes slathered in the many glorious permutations that ratios of butter, cheese, and cream take. This plain porridge was the first dish to make me feel full.

I wondered if the 10 percent [my mom] kept from the three of us who knew her best—my father, Nami, and me—had all been different, a pattern of deception that together we could reconstruct. I wondered if I could ever know all of her, what other threads she’d left behind to pull.

I tried to explain to Nami how much it meant to share food with her, to hear these stories. How I’d been trying to reconnect with memories of my mother through food. How Kye had made me feel like I wasn’t a real Korean. What I was searching for when I cooked doenjang jjigae and jatjuk on my own, the psychological undoing of what I felt had been my failures as a caretaker, the preservation of a culture that once felt so ingrained in me but now felt threatened. But I couldn’t find the right words and the sentences were too long and complicated for any translation app, so I quit halfway through and just reached for her hand and the two of us went on slurping the cold noodles from the tart, icy beef broth.

I had thought fermentation was controlled death. Left alone, a head of cabbage molds and decomposes. It becomes rotten, inedible. But when brined and stored, the course of its decay is altered. […] Its color and texture transmute. Its flavor becomes tarter, more pungent. It exists in time and transforms. So it is not quite controlled death, because it enjoys a new life altogether.

The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived in on me, in my every move and deed.

“Yeppeuda,” she said. Pretty. Small face.

It was the same word I’d heard when I was young, but now it felt different. […] I no longer had someone whole to stand beside, to make sense of me. I feared whatever contour or color it was that signified that precious half was already beginning to wash away, as if without my mother, I no longer had a right to those parts of my face.

When we got onstage, I took a moment to take in the room. Even at the height of my ambitions I had never imagined I’d be able to play a concert in my mother’s country, in the city where I was born. I wished that my mother could see me, could be proud of the woman I’d become and the career I’d built, the realization of something she worried for so long would never happen. Conscious that the success we experienced revolved around her death, that the songs I sang memorialized her, I wished more than anything and against all contradiction that she could be there.

I swayed back and forth with [Nami], squinting to try to sound out the vowels and keep up with the melody, a melody I searched for deep within a memory that may or may not have existed, or a memory that belonged to my mother that I had somehow accessed. I could feel Nami searching for something in me that I had spent the last week searching for in her. Not quite my mother and not quite her sister, we existed in that moment as each other’s next best thing.

[…] I tried my best to sing along. I wanted to do all I could to help resuscitate her memory. I chased after the Korean characters that seemed highlighted at the breakneck speed of a pinball. I let the lyrics fly from my mouth always just a little bit behind, hoping my mother tongue would guide me.