Notes On Michelle Zauner’s Crying In H Mart
Crying In H Mart is a memoir by Michelle Zauner, the frontwoman of the popular band Japanese Breakfast. She is not actually Japanese, but rather half Korean, and half white. The book deals with her experience with losing her mother to cancer, through a recollection of her relationship with her mother and her Korean identity over the years. In one chapter, she recounts how her mother would always get angry at her when she accidentally hurt herself as a child, and detailed her confusion over the same. A child will invariably get hurt, as a child is wont to do. Here is an excerpt of the same:
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Perhaps it is a unique Asian tendency, to treat your children as your property and to be angry with them when they damage it (in the words of Zauner). I shouldn’t generalize for all of Asia, but this parallel between a Korean mother and her child resonates with many of us Indian children. I recall how once when I was a child, playing with my cousins in the park next to my grandmother’s house, my cousin was on a swing, from which she fell down and hurt her knee. It was bleeding and through her tears she made us promise to not tell her mother, lest she get scolded. I was very young then, and I couldn’t understand why she would not want to tell her mother. Surely she would earn some sympathy and pity? In a household where there are so many children, and not enough adults, sympathy from the elders was hot currency. When I had fallen down the white marble stairs of my grandmother’s house, and my head was bleeding, I received a lot of attention and care. Half an inch more and it would’ve been your eye, my mother told me in shock. Perhaps true worry was only saved for serious injuries, and anything less could only warrant mild annoyance at best and full blown anger at worst. I remember that it hurt, but the attention I got from all the adults, their cooing and fussing over me, was much more pleasing than the bleeding could have pained. When I got my LASIK operation last year, and couldn’t bear light for the rest of the day after the surgery, my whole family came upstairs and drank chai with me in the dark. My father took a day off work, and that made me realize that it was a bigger deal than I had originally anticipated. It’s a fifteen minute procedure, but my agony for the rest of the day made my family gentle, with all of them offering to do little tasks for me, and my mother dutifully coming up to my room every half an hour to administer eye drops, even though I could have easily done it myself.
The reason I relate to what Zauner wrote is because of one incident that occured in 2020, when I had gone out drinking with a friend, P. I was in a mood, and I spent an obnoxious amount of money at Shikar Bagh on a bottle of wine, which I drank in its entirety. The way outside the bar to the parking space is cobblestoned, and my heels were too high for me, especially as inebriated as I was. I, predictably, fell down, and P helped me up and half carried me to my car. In the car, after I dropped P off, I discovered that my knee was scraped completely, covered in the dirt of the cobblestones. I immediately became happy– I couldn’t wait to reach home and show off my shiny new injury to my mother, and hope for some delicious fussing. My mother is not an affectionate woman, but she does love me. I only wish she loved me in the way I need to be loved. So I grab any opportunity available to bring out the maternal side of her.
When I reached home, it turns out that my mother was already angry with me, for having returned so late without prior notice. I tried to act coy, no doubts thanks to my impaired judgment that made me think that would somehow get me out of it.
I showed her my injury, and said,
“Mumma, it hurts. It’s bleeding!”
“Good. You deserve it.”
“That’s not fair. It really does hurt. Can you help me with it?”
“If it hurts so much, then go to bed.”
She stalked off to the office, where we keep a first aid kit. She ripped open a bandaid and slapped it on my knee– blood, dirt, grime, and band aid. She didn’t even clean the wound first. I headed upstairs, took the bandaid off, and cleaned the wound. I’d always relied on sickness or on injuries to arouse the pity of my mother, which to me was the most precious thing in the world. I already had her love, but her pity made that love so much more apparent and tangible. It was the first time that I realized that she thought of me as other, as not an extension of herself, but something separate from her entirely. It wasn’t a fair thought to have, because I had always viewed my mother as other than myself. I just wasn’t ready for her to feel the same way. My pain was her pain, or so I’d always thought. In Crying In H Mart, Zauner’s mother advises her to always keep 10% of herself away. Only later does Zauner realize that this meant her mother had been keeping 10% of her from Zauner too. My mother has always kept a lot from me, and I have always kept a lot from my mother. However, I always thought that in the end, I would be an extension of my mother (at least to her). As I get older and she increasingly begins to treat me like an adult, I am confronted by the harsh reality that my mother is not me, and I am not her, no matter how much I turn into her day by day. She is someone else entirely, and never to be known fully.