Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.
This is the opening line of the book and it works as a brief summary of the book's different themes. Zauner goes on to say that she cries in H Mart because it immediately reminds her of the foods she used to have with her mother. This powerful sense-memory is brought on by being surrounded by the many different ingredients and dishes at the store. This sentence neatly captures the way that Zauner seeks out the memory of her mother in cuisine, never discouraged by the feelings that come with this revisiting.
"Stop crying! Save your tears for when your mother dies."
This is a quote from Zauner's mother, and is something Zauner says was a commonly used phrase. In context, her mother was referring to the idea that the greatest pain she, and daughters like her, would experience would come from the loss of their mother. It also means that tears are not worth shedding over smaller things like bruised knees and minor heartbreaks. This line, repeated elsewhere in the book, takes on a more painful emotional weight, as Zauner describes the way in which her mother's death truly did cause this degree of all-consuming grief. In particular, she writes that she did end up breaking down in uncontrollable sobs when it became clear that her mother was about to die.
"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.
This line about a particular Korean expression reveals how Zauner grew up surrounded by the idea that beauty and good behavior were somehow linked. She discusses the harmful undertones of this phrase—how it created a false correlation between the two things and often left her with mixed feelings. While she was sometimes praised as a young girl for being pretty, she often ended up having a sense of dissatisfaction about her appearance, as she still felt that the way she looked did not exactly align with the cultural standards of beauty in Korea. Later in the book, she critiques this idea, noticing the pressure placed on women to look a certain way and manage their appearance constantly.
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.
In this description of how kimchi is made, Zauner uses fermentation as a mini-allegory for dealing with grief. This excerpt follows a scene in which she has just discovered some old photographs, in their kimchi fridge, that her mother had taken. In the same way that cabbage, left on its own, will simply decay into rotten leaves, memories, she suggests, can simply be sources of grief and pain. However, with the proper care, both cabbage and her memories of the past can be preserved and made into something new which, while never the same again, can have something special. This moment represents a kind of breakthrough for Zauner, as she has found a way to relive her past and accept the complexities that come with it. She can look at these old photographs and appreciate the care her mother put into them.
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.
Alluded to earlier in the book, these details further explain the tumultuous years of Zauner's life as adolescent. She moved out of her parents' home after a particularly bad fight and began bouncing around different people's houses. At the same time, as described, she began to slip behind in her academic life, marring her chances at college acceptance and doing severe damage to her grade point average. This brief summary creates a portrait of how her life appeared to be slipping away from her, as she drifted further and further away from the successes her mother envisioned for her.
I let the lyrics fly from my mouth always just a little bit behind, hoping my mother tongue would guide me.
This line occurs at the end of the book and has an emotional double meaning. It occurs when Zauner is singing along to a pop song, "Coffee Hanjan," with her relatives in Korea. The song is one her mother was very fond of and used to enjoy singing. She is a little uncertain about the lyrics but hopes that she will be guided along by her "mother tongue." What she means is that she hopes that both her memory of her mother and her ties to her Korean culture will help her along. It is a strong sentiment in that it represents some closure for her, as she is able to access the connection she was describing in the beginning of the book, a shared link between herself, her mother, and her Korean heritage.
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.
Like the first line, this quote underscores how important food was in Zauner's relationship with her mother. While her mother could be very stern in other areas of her life, food was a place in which she made her affection clear through the care she put into its preparation. This passage is important to the book as a whole as it shows the nuances (and difficulties) of their relationship but also emphasizes how Zauner always knew the love her mother had for her. Food is where her mother was most able to indicate her feelings. It gives a sense of why this loss is felt so heavily when Zauner returns to 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."
This passage also deals with the linkage between food and affection. Zauner remarks that her mother often told her not to love someone who didn't like kimchi, as they will always smell it when they are with you. While this warning appears to be meant with some degree of light-heartedness, Zauner comes to understand that it touches on something deeper. She takes it to mean that people quite literally are what they eat, meaning their sense of self is inextricable from what foods they like. This revisits the theme of food in the relationship between Zauner and her mother, as it gives such a strong sense of herself and the bond between them.
"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."
This moving passage occurs in the chapter about Zauner's wedding to her boyfriend Peter. In her wedding vows, she talks about how she believes love revealed itself in various gestures of care. She describes how she knew Peter was right for her in the way that he was always willing to put things aside when she was struggling. It is an affecting depiction of their relationship in that it places importance on daily actions and not big romantic gestures. This is particularly striking in that the reliability she finds in Peter is something she realizes she never had in her father.
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.
This intense description occurs when Zauner weeps over her mother. She is inconsolable and devastated by the realization that she has come to the end and that her mother is about to die. She notes the generational aspect of this crying, as she weeps in the same way her mother did for both her own mother and sister. She has been told all her life to save her tears for this moment, and when it arrives she experiences all the pain she knew it would entail.
