crying in h mart bot

quotes from michelle zauner's crying in h mart

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

I didn’t have the tools then to question the beginnings of my complicated desire for whiteness.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

But every time I got hurt, my mom would start screaming. Not for me, but at me. I couldn’t understand it.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

Worst of all, I pretended not to have a middle name, which was in fact my mother’s name, Chongmi.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

Maybe I was just terrified that I might be the closest thing she had to leaving a piece of herself behind.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

Umma! Umma! The same words my mother repeated when her mother died.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

“We’re not going to get a divorce,” Peter said. “I know but if we did, don’t you think ‘my first husband’ would make me sound so full of maturity and mystique?”

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

Some days, the constant nagging would annoy me. Woman, let me eat in peace! But, most days, I knew it was the ultimate display of a Korean woman’s tenderness, and I cherished that love. A love I’d do anything to have back.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

“I know you wish it was me. I wish it was me too.” I put my hand on his back. “No,” I said softly, though in my ugliest heart I did. It was supposed to be him.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

Maybe we hadn’t tried hard enough, hadn’t believed enough, hadn’t force-fed her enough blue-green algae. Maybe god hated us.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

I returned to my mother’s room and told her she had to get better. She had to get home to Eugene and watch her only daughter get married.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

I thought of the foresight a mother must have to preserve this kind of thing, the shoes of her baby, for her baby’s baby someday. A baby she’d never get to meet.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

The world moved on without pause on a pleasant, warm day in May while I stood silent and dumbfounded on the pavement and learned that my mother was now in grave danger of dying from an illness that had already killed someone I loved.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

I wondered if the 10 percent she kept from the three of us who knew her best—my father, Nami, and me—had all been different, a pattern of deception that together we could reconstruct.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

Maybe I was just terrified that I might be the closest thing she had to leaving a piece of herself behind.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

My mother rarely saw doctors, committed to the idea that ailments passed of their own accord. She felt Americans were overly cautious and overly medicated and had instilled this belief in me from a young age,

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

We had tried to choose living over dying and it had turned out to be a horrible mistake.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

H Mart is the bridge that guides me away from the memories that haunt me, of chemo head and skeletal bodies and logging milligrams of hydrocodone.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

Within five years, I lost both my aunt and my mother to cancer. So, when I go to H Mart, I’m not just on the hunt for cuttlefish and three bunches of scallions for a buck; I’m searching for memories.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.

[crying in h mart bot @hmartbot]

I tried to imagine her at my age. I wanted to like all the things she did, to embody her completely.