Introduction
Michelle Zauner is a Korean-American author and musician, best known as the lead vocalist of alternative pop band Japanese Breakfast. Zauner shares her Brief But Spectacular take on making the ordinary beautiful.
Script
TV Journalist: Michelle Zauner is a Korean-American author and musician, best known as the lead vocalist of the alternative pop band Japanese Breakfast. Tonight Zauner shares her Brief But SPECTACULAR, take on making the ordinary beautiful.
Zauner: My mother was a homemaker and I was an only child and so we were really bonded very early on. I think it was 2014 and she told me that she had stage IV cancer. Being an only daughter, I knew I had to, kind of, take everything on my desk, completely clear it, go home and be with her from beginning to end. In six months, I suddenly found myself unemployed, married, without a mother and estranged from my father. And I don’t think I could quite wrap my head around everything that had happened until I started putting it down on paper.
The first line of Crying in H-Mart is: Ever since my mom died, I cry in H-Mart. And I think, in a way, the book is very much about answering that question of, like, why you are crying in a grocery store? H-Mart is a Korean, grocery chain. I drove to H-Mart to be surrounded by her language and the foods that she loved and that we shared together. I don’t think I thought much about her impending death as a part of losing my culture until after it happened. I think I probably realized that, you know, once I, like, went to a Korean grocery store and I realized, like, I couldn’t just call my mom anymore to ask her, like, what brand of seaweed we used to buy, or, like, what kind of Tin-Jung, soybean paste we had at home.
I would say food was a big part of the way that my mother expressed her love. The way that she expressed her affection was really rooted in actions; was remembering the kinds of food that you liked and the kinds of foods that you didn’t like, and what you would want after a long day. And I don’t think I realized that until I was a little bit older.
It’s been really fun to see people from all different types of cultures comparing different grocery stores or different types of food or different food memories to the book. I think one of my favorite things that has come back to me about the book is children who have told me: “I read your book and I called my mom, I hugged my mom, I took her out to lunch.”
My name is Michelle Zauner and this is my Brief But SPECTACULAR take on making the ordinary beautiful.
Quiz
1. My mother was a ________ and I was an only child.
Discussion
- What were some of your favorite foods when you were a child?
- Do you associate family meals with some of your happiest childhood memories?
- Why is it that sharing meals plays such an important role in bonding with our families as children and raising our own in turn?