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“And that she was glad I had finally found a place where I belonged.” (Crying in H Mart Quotes)
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“As a teenager newly obsessed with my own search for a calling, I found it impossible to imagine a meaningful life without a career or at least a supplemental passion, a hobby.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“Cooking my mother’s food had come to represent an absolute role reversal, a role I was meant to fill. Food was an unspoken language between us, had come to symbolize our return to each other, our bonding, our common ground.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“Even as she was dying, my mother offered me solace, her instinct to nurture overwhelming any personal fear she might have felt but kept expertly hidden. She was the only person in the world who could tell me that things would all work out somehow. The eye of the storm, a calm witness to the wreckage spinning out into its end.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“Even when he’s here he doesn’t know how to take care of me at all.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“Food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she could seem—constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations—I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals prepared for me just the way I liked them.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“For the rest of my life there would be a splinter in my being, stinging from the moment my mother died until it was buried with me.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“Her art was the love that beat on in 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.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“Hers was tougher than tough love. 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. When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction. She was guilty only of caring too much. I realize this now, only in retrospect. No one in this would would ever love me as much as my mother, and she would never let me forget it.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“How cyclical and bittersweet for a child to retrace the image of their mother. For a subject to turn back to document their archivist.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“I came to realize that while I struggled to be good, I could excel at being courageous. I began to delight in surprising adults with my refined palate and disgusting my inexperienced peers with what I would discover to be some of nature’s greatest gifts.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“I came to realize that while I struggled to be good, I could excel at being courageous.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“I could almost feel in the embrace that my concerns had been her concerns, my pain had been her pain.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“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. Sugars are broken down to produce lactic acid, which protects it from spoiling. Carbon dioxide is released and the brine acidifies. It ages. 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.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“I hadn’t believed in a god since I was about ten and still envisioned Mr. Rogers when I prayed, but the years that followed my mother’s passing were suspiciously charmed.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“I let the lyrics fly from my mouth always just a little bit behind, hoping my mother tongue would guide me.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“I remember these things clearly because 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.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“I talked about how love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor. How I felt it most when he drove up to New York after work at three in the morning just to hold me in a warehouse in Brooklyn after I’d discovered my mother was sick. The many times he’d flown three thousand miles whenever I needed him.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“I want to tell him how much I miss my mother. How he should be kind to his mom, remember that life is fragile and she could be gone at any moment.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“I wished I could go back there then, back before I knew of a single bad thing.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“I would think of how my mother always used to tell me never to fall in love with someone who doesn’t like kimchi. They’ll always smell it on you, seeping through your pores. Her own way of saying, “You are what you eat.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“I’m searching for memories. I’m collecting the evidence that the Korean half of my identity didn’t die when they did.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“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.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“If I’m being honest, there’s a lot of anger. I’m angry at this old Korean woman I don’t know, that she gets to live and my mother does not.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“If it wasn’t for my mother, I might have wound up just like the pet alligator at the Chinese restaurant. Caged and gawked at in its luxurious confinement, unceremoniously disposed of as soon as it’s too old to fit in the tank.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“If there was a god, it seemed my mother must have had her foot on his neck, demanding good things come my way. That if we had to be ripped apart right at our turning point, just when things were really starting to get good, the least god could do was make a few of her daughter’s pipe dreams come true.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“In fact, she was both my first and second words: Umma, then Mom. I called to her in two languages. Even then I must have known that no one would ever love me as much as she would.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“In my household, there was nothing to do for food poisoning except throw it up. Food poisoning was a rite of passage. You couldn’t expect to eat well without taking a few risks, and we suffered the consequences twice a year.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“It felt wrong to talk to anyone, to smile or laugh or eat again knowing that she was dead.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“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, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“Love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“Maybe I was just terrified that I might be the closest thing she had to leaving a piece of herself behind.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“My family lauded my bravery, I radiated with pride, and something about that moment set me on a path. I came to realize that while I struggled to be good, I could excel at being courageous. I began to delight in surprising adults with my refined palate and disgusting my inexperienced peers with what I would discover to be some of nature’s greatest gifts.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“My grief comes in waves and is usually triggered by something arbitrary.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“My mom was the only one in her family who didn’t practice Christianity. She believed in some higher power but didn’t like the cultishness of organized religion, even when it was what knit most of the Korean community.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“My mother always used to tell me never to fall in love with someone who doesn’t like kimchi. They’ll always smell it on you, seeping through your pores. Her very own way of saying, “You are what you eat.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“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, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“Not quite my mother and not quite her sister, we existed in that moment as each other’s next best thing.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“Now that she was gone, I began to study her like a stranger, rooting around her belongings in an attempt to rediscover her, trying to bring her back to life in any way that I could. In my grief I was desperate to construe the slightest thing as a sign.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“She observed me with unparalleled interest, inexhaustible devotion.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“She was my champion, she was my archive. She had taken the utmost care to preserve the evidence of my existence and growth, capturing me in images, saving all my documents and possessions.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“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 of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. “Even from Daddy, I save,” she would add.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“Stop crying! Save your tears for when your mother dies.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“The memories I stored, I could not let festered. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared I 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 on in me, and in every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“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.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“There was no one in the world that was ever as critical or could make me feel as hideous as my mother, but there was no one, not even Peter, who ever made me feel as beautiful.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“To be a loving mother was to be known for a service, but to be a lovely mother was to possess a charm all your own.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“We had tried to choose living over dying and it had turned out to be a horrible mistake.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“We re-create the dish that couldn’t be made without our journey.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“We sit here in silence, eating our lunch. But I know we are all here for the same reason. We’re all searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“We’re all searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves. We look for a taste of it in the food we order and the ingredients we buy. Then we separate. We bring the haul back to our dorm rooms or our suburban kitchens, and we re-create the dish that couldn’t be made without our journey. What we’re looking for isn’t available at a Trader Joe’s. H Mart is where your people gather under one odorous roof, full of faith that they’ll find something they can’t find anywhere else.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“When I asked her what she’d want to come back as, she always told me she’d like to return as a tree. It was a strange and comforting answer, that rather than something grand and heroic, my mother preferred to return to life as something humble and still.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“When I got hurt, my mom was livid, as if I had maliciously damaged her property.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“When one person collapses, the other instinctively shoulders their weight.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“Without my mother as an anchor, I strayed even further from the responsibilities we’d been arguing about over the past year. The college supplements I needed to complete remained half-finished documents on my father’s desktop computer and I was pulled into a vicious cycle of truancy.”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
“Without my mother, did I have any real claim to Korea or her family?”
Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
