When Michelle Zauner dies her Korean mother, her mourning extends to all of Asia. "Wepting in H Mart" (c. Michael Kramarz, FILIA Publishing) is simply a wonderful culinary love letter, as well as a moving (but not sensitive) failure log and a communicative of hard puberty.
H Mart is an American supermarket network with Asian products. “No 1 here puts Goya beans cans next to sriracha sauce bottles. Instead, you can meet me crying at the refrigerators with banchan appetizers, mentioning the taste of eggs marinated in soy sauce and my mom's radish soup. Alternatively, in the freezer department, holding a pile of boxes of dumpling pies in hand, returning my thoughts to all those hours that I spent with my mom at the kitchen table, wrapping ground pork and chives into thin slabs. Crying at the dry food shelves, asking myself if I am inactive Korean, since there is no 1 left to call and ask what seaweed company we always buy," writes Michelle Zauner, vocalist of the nipponese Breakfast band.
Zauner, a half-American (after her father), a half-Koreanka raised in the United States, began writing her memoura after her parent died. Eating mourning became a form of association with spirits (including grandmothers and aunts), filling the absence, absence and emptiness. A way to get physical. The ritual of eating myyeok-guk is peculiarly crucial – seaweed soup, which the Koreans eat on their birthday to honor their mothers. "I drank broth with gratitude, chewing on pieces of soft, slippery seaweed, the taste of which conjured up a image of an ancient sea deity cast on the seashore, feasting bare among the foamed waves. It filled me with peace, as if I were returning to my mother's womb and swimming freely in it," Zauner writes.
I am passionate about how the subject “eating and death” is developed in this memorial. Food preparation gains a meditation dimension, becomes an anthropological reflection laboratory. For example, about kimchi Zauner:
“I thought fermentation was nothing but controlled death. The cabbage’s head, left on its own, becomes molded and begins to decompose. He's rotten. He's no longer fit to eat. But if you put it in the brine, the decomposition process changes. Sugars are breaking down and lactic acid is formed, so that cabbage does not break down. Carbon dioxide is released and brine is acidified. She's mature. Its colour and consistency change. Its taste becomes more sour. It exists and transforms. So it is not entirely death, even controlled, due to the fact that something fresh is born at the same time.
I couldn't let my memories fall apart. [...] Our culture, in which we were both rooted, bubbling in my bowels, and recorded in my genes, could not break.”
Cooking and food is simply a way for Zauner to keep the “Koreanity” that fades erstwhile there is no standing, sharpening scratches of his mother. “What if without my parent I had no right to those qualities of my appearance which I received with her genes?” Zauner wonders.
Crying in H Mart is simply a large communicative about maturing, negotiating identity and seeing the value in its liquidity. increasing into adulthood is hard not only in a universal sense – "girlhood" as a origin of suffering and, for the extra part, experience of surviving in 2 cultures (very interesting are the passages where the author confides from the key moments of realizing cultural differences between herself and her mother) – but besides very individual. Rebellious Michelle Zauner vigorously fought for independence. After reading "Crying in H Mart" I got acquainted with the nipponese Breakfast discography and I can compose that I am glad that she succeeded.
Attention, this is not a book to read on an empty stomach. It is best to scope for it with a number for a Korean restaurant at hand.
