90 pages • 3 hours read
Michelle ZaunerCrying in H Mart
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Key Figures
Michelle Zauner
Michelle Zauner is a writer and musical artist best known for her work as the lead singer and songwriter of the band Japanese Breakfast. She was born in Seoul to a Korean mother, Chongmi, and an American father, whose name is withheld in this work (and from whom Zauner is estranged at the time of its writing). She was raised outside of Eugene, Oregon, and got her start as a musician as a teenager playing shows at the WOW Hall and McDonald Theatre in Eugene, often opening for acts that she looked up to.
The memoir details Zauner’s relationship with her mother and her mother’s death due to cancer, and concludes with the recording, release, and successful reception of Psychopomp, Japanese Breakfast’s first album. She had a difficult relationship with her mother, who was a perfectionist and vocal critic of Zauner; during her teenage years, the difficulties worsened and even came to violence as her mother disapproved of her music career. After finishing college and living in Philadelphia, Zauner reconnects with her mother, particularly through their shared love of Korean food.
Dealing with her mother’s illness and death has a profound effect on Zauner; she sees it as an ironic loss in which she was just getting to know and understand her mother before losing her. Growing up, Zauner derided her mother’s homemaker lifestyle, but she comes to understand how important and meaningful her mother’s life was. She also reckons with the fact that the Korean side of her heritage is gone, and she turns to making and eating Korean food to keep her mother’s legacy and memory alive, and to ground herself in her mother’s heritage and culture. She is fiercely devoted to this idea and to the idea of her mother’s impact on her career as an artist. She has a much more difficult relationship with her father, which only worsens after her mother’s death.
Chongmi Zauner
Chongmi Zauner is Michelle’s mother. She was raised in Seoul and was close to her mother and two sisters before meeting Zauner’s father and immigrating with him to America. She spent her adult life as a homemaker and mother to Zauner, though she returned to Korea to visit her family every summer, often bringing Zauner along. She was diagnosed with cancer in 2014 and passed away not long after at age 56; she refused to continue chemotherapy after watching her sister endure 24 rounds and still succumb to illness.
She was a strict, perfectionist mother who had a difficult time with Zauner. At the same time, her love shone through in the way she paid attention to Zauner’s interest in food and the care she put into preparing and cultivating Zauner’s interest in Korean dishes. She believed a person should always hold back 10% of themselves from the world, which Zauner comes to see is true about her mother: She hid an abortion from Zauner for many years, and she was not always forthcoming about her feelings with Zauner or her husband. She was also fiercely stubborn, which faded as her illness worsened; for example, a lifetime of avoiding Christianity (even though it’s a key factor in many Korean American communities) ended in her letting her friend Kye arrange her conversion so Kye felt better.
In her later life, Chongmi turned to art, and her work, though amateur, showed skill and improvement. She remained deeply connected to Korean culture, and her wish before dying was for her and Zauner to go see the places they hadn’t had a chance to visit in her homeland (a dream that is stymied by her illness). After her mother’s death, Zauner discovers her art as well as hundreds of photos of Zauner’s childhood that her mother saved, which helps her see how important motherhood was as a driving force in Chongmi’s life and how Zauner is a manifestation of her mother’s legacy.
Zauner’s Father
Michelle Zauner’s father goes unnamed throughout the book, which is likely due to their difficult relationship. Zauner has written elsewhere about their estrangement and his remarriage to a young Asian woman, which she mentions in this memoir as something she sees as a potential erasure of her mother’s individuality. He had a difficult upbringing with an abusive father and siblings, which led to a youth of drug abuse and trouble with the law. It was only when he moved to Korea and began a career as a used-car salesman attached to a US military base that he matured; this was also where he met Chongmi.
Zauner’s father was not a good caretaker, and he saw his responsibility to Zauner as primarily financial. He managed a restaurant in Eugene, which often led to late nights and coming home from work drunk. He also had several affairs during Zauner’s childhood, which was known to Zauner (though it is unclear if her mother knew). During his wife’s illness, he struggled to take care of her or cope with the coming loss, and his relationship with Zauner grew strained because of this. In the aftermath of Chongmi’s death, Zauner could see that he was as lost as she, but she was ultimately unable to connect with him in their shared grief. Throughout the memoir Zauner has an awareness that she is seeing her father through a daughter’s eyes, but that does not necessarily translate to sympathy for him, as she is deeply hurt by his behavior.
