# Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner Source: https://thegisthub.com/books/crying-in-h-mart-by-michelle-zauner Last updated: 2026-11-06 Published 2021 · 256 pages · ISBN 9780525657743 · Categories: Health and the body, Memoir and biography, Relationships Michelle Zauner's memoir of losing her Korean mother to cancer at 25 and finding her way back through Korean food. For readers facing grief, caregiving, or questions about a mixed heritage. ## The gist Michelle Zauner, the musician behind Japanese Breakfast, grows up in Eugene, Oregon as the only child of a Korean mother and an American father. Her mother, Chongmi, shows love through food and strict standards rather than words. Their bond frays in Michelle's teenage years and starts to mend just as Chongmi is diagnosed with stage four cancer in 2014. Michelle moves home to care for her, marries her boyfriend Peter in the backyard so her mother can be there, and loses her within months. In the Korean supermarket H Mart, and in her kitchen with Maangchi's YouTube recipes, she rebuilds the connection to her mother and to the half of herself she fears losing. ## Key ideas ### 1. Food is the language of a love that does not use words Zauner's mother rarely said she loved her. Instead she remembered every dish Michelle liked, packed it, cooked it, and judged her daughter's well-being by how she ate. Zauner argues that in her family, knowing someone's food is knowing them. When her mother dies, the recipes are what remain of that knowledge. The H Mart aisles, full of ingredients her mother used, become the place where the love is still legible. ### 2. Grief work can be hands-on After her mother's death, Zauner cooks Korean food for the first time, following Maangchi's YouTube videos step by step. Fermenting kimchi and grinding pine nuts for jatjuk demand patience and attention. Each dish returns a memory. Zauner argues that the work of cooking gave her grief somewhere to go. The kimchi fridge she inherits and fills with her own jars is the symbol: not a replacement for her mother, but her mother's knowledge kept alive in her hands. ### 3. A mixed heritage can feel like something you must hold on to Zauner is half Korean, speaks limited Korean, and grew up in Oregon. Her connection to Korea ran through her mother and the summers in Seoul. When her mother dies, she fears the Korean half of her will fade. H Mart is where she tests that fear. Her answer is to claim the culture actively: cook its food, visit its people, sing its songs. The book argues that heritage is something you do, not only something you are given. ### 4. Tough love and total love can be the same love Chongmi told her daughter to save her tears for when her mother died. She did not comfort scraped knees, and she criticized Michelle's choices for years. Zauner does not soften this. She also shows the other side: a mother who moved across the world, learned a new language, and kept a mental list of everything her child enjoyed. Zauner concludes that the strictness and the devotion were one thing, and that she only saw the whole shape of it near the end. ### 5. Caregiving reverses the roles, and food cannot fix cancer When her mother was diagnosed, Zauner believed she could cook her back to strength. Chemotherapy made every dish come back up. She learned instead to wash her mother, manage her medication, and sit with her. Zauner's example is the clash with Kye, the family friend who knew how to care for a sick Korean woman better than she did. The idea is that caregiving means giving up the fantasy of control and doing the small, unglamorous tasks. ### 6. Conflict in the teenage years is often two cultures colliding Zauner and her mother fought for years over music, school, and appearance. She reads those fights now as more than teenage rebellion. Her mother had no model for a daughter who wanted to play in bars, and Michelle had no way to earn approval on Korean terms. The example is the weeks of silence after Michelle said she hated her. Zauner argues that mixed families fight across a cultural gap, and that both sides are speaking a language the other cannot fully hear. ### 7. Death breaks families in more than one place After Chongmi's death, Michelle and her father Joel could not grieve together. He drank, and a trip they took to Vietnam ended in a fight. She wanted him to be the parent he had never fully been. Their relationship thinned. Zauner's point is that losing one person changes every other bond in the family, and that a death can expose weaknesses that the dead person was holding together. The aunt Nami, by contrast, becomes closer, a second mother found inside the loss. ### 8. Art can be where the mourning goes Zauner was about to quit music when her mother got sick. Instead she wrote songs about her and recorded the album Psychopomp with her mother's photo on the cover. The band Japanese Breakfast became her career, and the H Mart essay became this book. Zauner argues that making something out of the loss was not a way around grief but a way through it. The work gave the pain a form that other people could hold. ## Questions this book answers ### What is Crying in H Mart about? Crying in H Mart is Michelle Zauner's memoir of her Korean mother, Chongmi, who died of cancer in 2014 when Zauner was 25. It covers her childhood in Eugene, Oregon, summers in Seoul, years of conflict as a teenager, the months of caregiving, and the years after, when she learned to cook Korean food from Maangchi's videos as a way to hold on to her mother and her heritage. ### Why is the book called Crying in H Mart? H Mart is a Korean American supermarket chain. After her mother's death, Zauner cries in its aisles because the food, the language and the mothers shopping with daughters remind her of what she lost. The title comes from her 2018 New Yorker essay, which opened with the line that ever since her mom died, she cries in H Mart. ### Is Michelle Zauner Japanese Breakfast? Yes. Zauner is the singer and songwriter behind the indie band Japanese Breakfast. Her 2016 album Psychopomp, written after her mother's death, has her mother's photo on the cover. The book describes how she was about to give up music when her mother got sick, and how the songs about her loss became her career. ### How does Michelle Zauner cope with her mother's death? She cooks. With no one left to teach her, she learns kimchi, jatjuk and her mother's other dishes from Maangchi's YouTube videos and fills her mother's kimchi fridge with her own jars. She also writes songs about her mother, grows closer to her aunt Nami, and ends the book singing karaoke with Nami in Seoul. Zauner presents these as ways to keep her mother's knowledge alive rather than replace her. ### What is the relationship between Zauner and her mother in the book? Chongmi showed love through food and high standards rather than words. She told Michelle to save her tears for when her mother died, and she criticized her choices for years. They fought through Michelle's teens over music and school. The relationship was mending when the cancer came. Zauner concludes that the strictness and the devotion were the same love. ## Quotes > Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart. (The opening line) > Save your tears for when your mother dies. (Chongmi's rule for her daughter) ## Full summary ### Crying in H Mart **Crying in H Mart** is Michelle Zauner's memoir of her mother's death and the food that ties them together. Zauner is the singer and songwriter behind the band **Japanese Breakfast**. The book grew from an essay of the same name that The New Yorker published in 2018. It is organized as a series of chapters that move from her childhood to her mother's illness in 2014 and the years after. **H Mart** is a chain of Korean American supermarkets. The opening chapter puts Zauner in its aisles, crying over rice cakes and seaweed. She explains why. Her mother, **Chongmi**, died when Zauner was 25. In H Mart she sees Korean grandmothers and mothers with daughters, hears the language she only half speaks, and finds the ingredients her mother cooked with. The store is where she goes to feel close to her mother and to the Korean half of herself. She is afraid that without her mother, that half will disappear. Food is the book's language. Zauner argues that her mother never said much about love but expressed it in the dishes she cooked and the dishes she remembered Michelle loving. The memoir names them throughout: kimchi, **jjigae** (stew), **gimbap** (rice rolls), **jatjuk** (pine nut porridge), **tteokbokki** (rice cakes in sauce). To know which banchan someone likes, in this family, is to know them. ### Growing up in Eugene Zauner's father, **Joel**, is an American who met Chongmi while working in Seoul. The family moved to **Eugene, Oregon** when Michelle was a baby and lived in a house in the woods outside town. She was one of the few mixed-race kids around. Each summer she and her mother flew to Seoul and stayed with her grandmother, whom she calls **Halmoni**, in a small apartment. Those visits are where she learned to eat: raw crab, blood sausage, fish eggs, and food her American friends found strange. Chongmi was a particular kind of mother. She was exacting about appearance and manners, and she had a rule about pain: she told Michelle to save her tears for when her mother died. She did not comfort a scraped knee. But she remembered every food her daughter had ever liked and packed it for her. Zauner calls this a love that was tough and total at once. Zauner also describes belonging to neither place fully. In Eugene she was the Korean kid with the mother who spoke accented English and packed strange lunches. In Seoul she was the American niece who needed her aunt to translate. Her Korean was good enough for the dinner table and not much more. The book treats this in-between position as the normal condition of a mixed child, and as the reason her mother's food mattered so much: it was the one part of Korea she could take in without translation. Her mother's sisters matter in the story. **Nami**, the eldest, is elegant and warm and becomes a second mother later in the book. **Eunmi**, the youngest, lived in Seoul, translated between Michelle and the family, and died of cancer a few years before Chongmi's diagnosis. Her death is the first sign of what is coming. ### The teenage years As a teenager Zauner wanted to be a musician. Her mother wanted her to be stable and presentable. They fought constantly. Michelle was depressed, skipped school, and played guitar in her room. Chongmi read her as lazy and ungrateful. At one point Michelle told her mother she hated her, and her mother did not speak to her for weeks. Zauner is honest about her own part in this. She wanted her mother's approval and could not get it on her own terms. Chongmi, for her part, had moved across the world and raised a child in a language not her own. She had no model for a daughter who wanted to play in bars. The gap between them was cultural as well as personal. Michelle left for **Bryn Mawr College** in Pennsylvania and then stayed in Philadelphia, working restaurant jobs and playing in a band. She met **Peter**, a coworker who became her boyfriend. Her mother and she slowly found a way to talk again, mostly about food and about Peter. By 2014 Zauner was in her mid-twenties, ready to give up music, and starting to enjoy her mother's company as an adult. ### The diagnosis In 2014 Chongmi called with stomach pain that had not gone away. The diagnosis was **stage four cancer**. Zauner quit her job and moved back to Eugene to help care for her mother. She believed she could fix things with food. She would cook the Korean dishes her mother loved, and her mother would eat and get stronger. It did not work that way. Chemotherapy left Chongmi unable to keep anything down. The foods Zauner cooked made her sick. Zauner describes the helplessness of watching a person who had fed her for 25 years refuse everything. A family friend from Korea, **Kye**, came to help. Kye knew how to cook for a sick Korean woman, and Michelle resented how easily her mother accepted Kye's care. The two women clashed over who was really looking after Chongmi. Zauner also describes the practical side of caregiving: the hospital trips, the sores, the sponge baths, the wigs, the slow loss of her mother's body. She had never seen her mother weak. Now she was washing her. She writes this part plainly, without softening it. ### A wedding and a death After the second round of chemotherapy nearly killed her, Chongmi chose to stop treatment. Michelle and Peter decided to marry right away so her mother could be there. They planned a wedding in the backyard of the Eugene house in about three weeks. Chongmi wore a wig and sat through the ceremony. Zauner writes that her mother had always wanted to see her married, and that the wedding gave them a last project together. Chongmi died in October 2014, at home, with her family beside her. Zauner describes the final days in detail: the hospice bed, the morphine, the strange sounds of a body shutting down, and the silence after. She writes about the small cruelties of the aftermath too, such as choosing an urn and clearing out her mother's closet. The weeks after broke the family further. Joel and Michelle grieved in different ways and could not help each other. He drank. A trip they took together to Vietnam after the funeral ended in a fight. She felt that he had not been as present as she needed. Their relationship, already thin, got thinner. She was left in a house that had belonged to her mother, with a father who was becoming a stranger. ### Maangchi and the kimchi fridge The last third of the book is about rebuilding. Zauner starts cooking Korean food seriously for the first time. She has no one to ask, so she turns to **Maangchi**, a Korean cooking teacher whose YouTube videos show each dish step by step. Zauner watches her make kimchi, jatjuk, and the dishes her mother made, and follows along in her own kitchen. Maangchi's voice becomes a stand-in for the mother who can no longer teach her. Cooking is her grief work. Fermenting kimchi takes time and attention. Making jatjuk means grinding pine nuts and rice by hand. Each dish brings back a memory of her mother cooking or eating it. Zauner keeps her mother's **kimchi fridge**, a small refrigerator built for fermentation, and fills it with her own jars. She argues that the food is not a substitute for her mother. It is a way to keep her mother's knowledge in her hands. Zauner admits that she never asked her mother for the recipes while she was alive. She assumed there would be time, and that cooking was her mother's job. The videos repair that gap only in part. Maangchi can show her the steps, but not the small adjustments her mother made by taste. Zauner learns to make those herself, by trial, and treats each success as a conversation with her mother that is still going on. At the same time, her music changes. She writes songs about her mother and records them as Japanese Breakfast. The album **Psychopomp** (2016) carries a photo of her mother on the cover. The project she was about to abandon becomes her career. She tours, records more, and in 2018 the New Yorker essay about H Mart reaches readers far beyond her band. The book ends in Seoul, where Japanese Breakfast plays a show and Nami and her husband come to see it. Afterward, in a karaoke room, Nami asks Michelle to sing a Korean song, and she does. Zauner closes on the idea that her mother is in the food, the language, and the people who remain, and that she can keep her by keeping them. ### What the critics say Some reviewers say the chapters about Zauner's music career are thinner than the chapters about food and caregiving. Others note that her father appears mostly as an absence, and that the book tells only her side of that break. These are minor points in reviews that were largely positive. ### Who should read it Read it if you have lost a parent or are caring for one, especially if the relationship was complicated. It also suits readers from immigrant or mixed-heritage families who feel they hold their culture through someone else, and anyone who understands people through what they cook. ## Do this week - Cook one dish a parent or grandparent used to make, from memory or from a video, and write down what it brings back. - Ask an older relative to name three foods you loved as a child and what they remember about feeding you. - Shop once this week at a grocery store from your family's culture and buy one ingredient you do not know how to use. - If someone you love is ill, take over one physical task of their care this week instead of only offering food. - Write a page about a fight you had with a parent as a teenager, told from their side. Summary by The Gist Hub (https://thegisthub.com). In our own words, not the book's text.