Crying in H Mart

 I have always loved shopping in H Mart and eating from the little kiosks that sell Korean and Japanese food there.  People watching and trying different ethnic foods is always delicious and fun.

I will never visit an H Mart again without think of Michelle Zauner's book, Crying in H Mart.

This is a wonderful trip through the market picking out the produce and ingredients she needed to fill her memories of her mother through food.  When Zauner loses her mother at a young age to cancer, she tries to reconnect with the Korean side of her family through the shared foods she grew up eating.  

She takes her new husband to Korea and they visit her mother's family the way she did as a child.  Michelle tells the story of her childhood and the feeling of wanting to fit in in America and now when her mother is gone, the feeling of wanting to make sure people know she is also Korean.  She gave her parents a hard time as a teenager and feels bad for the time lost having good relations with her mother.  SO when her mother is sick and dying she tries hard to be the perfect daughter and make up for the unhappy years.

This story was so wonderful because in some ways I could relate to her sadness, I also lost my mother way too soon,  and because the food descriptions were so fascinating.  I am not sure I would eat many of the dishes that she describes but it was very interesting reading about this other culture.

I guess in a way there are similarities between different cultures, because there were points in the book where I thought something similar happens in the Jewish culture also.