Crying in H Mart: a bowl of memories
I listened to Japanese Breakfast thumbing through the pages on my laptop, then put on “Rainy Days and Mondays” by the Carpenters, which is a song that swirled in my memories since I was in grade school, a song my mom loves. I played it on our upstairs speaker, and my mom started humming out loud half-heartedly in the kitchen without realizing it, and for a moment, I felt like Michelle knew me. I assume that a lot of the times there are truths that I think everyone must be used to, on how families function, but how lucky am I to be so, so loved by mine. Sometimes I assume the expression of love is universal, from sharing to receiving, forgetting I take so much for granted. Sometimes I don’t realize that having such secure love is just like hitting the jackpot. Because some things you don’t know you have, until you truly lose those things. Michelle tells us the beautiful story of her mother and everything wonderful and flawed her mother embodied, and she only realized that she was trying to hold onto water with her bare hands, as the water slipped through her fingers, when she was losing her mother.
My family expresses love through food. Sharing food is the most intimate concept of wishing someone to have a brief moment of joy, within your giving power, and to supply as many moments of joy as you can. My dad would be frying lotus roots slices that sandwich savoury pork stuffing, coated in batter, just so that the golden, crispy ones can be served at the right temperature, and for a satisfying crispy crunch in my sister’s and my mouth. He’d give us the slightly bigger ones, the slightly warmer ones, the slightly more perfect in colour (not charred or too dark), with the oil soaked off. He would do this all in goggles and apron with the loud sizzling oil under the kitchen hood, just knowing that it was going to be a heavenly few bites for us, not even needing to glance at our expressions.
There is so much love to be expressed as to the exhausting preparation steps that make a minute difference perhaps not even picked up by the person receiving the food. There’s an art to which dishes are situated within arms’ reach of whom. Michelle’s mother also expressed love through food, with her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for Michelle. She noticed if you can’t eat seafood, if you had a large appetite, or which side dish you’d empty first so it would set with a heaping double portion next time. The lobster claw will always be passed to me or my sister from my dad, and this kind of stuff becomes so commonplace and makes me feel so secure, that I forget to question it. There’s never a concept of getting something to eat just for yourself.
Every time I come home, even just for the long weekend, it is exactly how Michelle feels when she goes back to Korea. My parents make sure that we have so many delectable dishes to choose from, and then fruits (this past weekend a combination of kiwi berries, pineapple chunks perfectly sliced and cut, fuji apples, sweet seedless grapes, and perfectly ripened tomatoes plucked from a local farm, then dusted in sugar. Literally the most flavourful tomato slices, tender but firm, with just the right amount of sweetness to bring out the full flavour, and even the water that drips into the dish through osmosis tastes like elixir.)
I think loving food and sharing food, and being thought of by someone through the proxy of food (and generosity and actions and things), as silly as it is, is what I grew up with and is one of the most foundational ways that I feel loved. I think something I’m realizing too is that everyone expresses love differently. Maybe deep inside, people can love each other so incredibly much, but it might not be fully transferred or understood. But in a sense, I think Michelle’s mother loved her in a very tangible way.
It’s like how even though with mother-daughter disagreements in college, Michelle would still get huge, once-a-month boxes with everything from “sweet honey puffed rice, twenty-four packs of individually wrapped seasoned seaweed, microwavable rice, shrimp crackers, boxes of Pepero… clothing steamers, lint rollers, BB creams, packages of socks… cowboy boots … after my parents had vacationed in Mexico”, which were already broken in by her mother wearing them around the house for a week with two pairs of socks for an hour a day, to spare Michelle from the discomfort. A lot of the love that I know of and Michelle knows of shies away from words of affirmation, speaking of pride, or validation. Most of this love is nonverbal. My parents would do the same for me without blinking, not in a lavish, obtrusive, or obnoxious way, but in a quiet way.
That night, lying beside her, I remembered how when I was a child I would slip my cold feet between my mother’s thighs to warm them. How she’d shiver and whisper that she would always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you. I remembered the boots she’d broken in so that by the time I got them I could go on unbothered, without harm.
When Michelle’s mom was sick, Michelle wished she could prove to her mother that she loved her so much, by climbing next to her and absorbing all of her pain in her place. That’s what my dad felt every single day when I was sick in PICU so many years ago. And I know that my mom and my dad would take my place in a heartbeat, if it meant that I could live obliviously, without the knowledge of them putting in anything for me at all. As many parents would for their kids.
The other topic this book centres on, drenched in its pages like a thick marinade, is grief. This grief to me feels close and far at the same time. I am so moved by Michelle’s strength to portray her mother, and to help her mother live on, immortalized in such a beautiful book. And I am so, so grateful that I cannot relate to Michelle’s grief on an acute level. But I also know what it’s like to lose. To have these debilitating flashbacks, have the mat pulled from under your feet, and to try to hold onto memories, not let them fester, infiltrate or spread, into something they are not. It’s also an ongoing process, knowing that you are continuing to learn more about people who are gone, even after they are gone, and to see the process of grieving as maybe even selfish, or at times perhaps the only meaningful thing you can do. Michelle coped messily (rationally, irrationally) as her mother slipped away, tracking all her mother’s medications and caloric intake, running on a treadmill non-stop convincing herself that every extra mile increases her mother’s chances of remission.
I know Michelle and I are so different, but we give the same love. This book is everything about love. But this book is not new, because this is the love that I grew up with, so familiar, right here within arms’ reach.
After reading this I walk into T&T feeling like I should learn (& am excited to learn) my mom and dad’s most mundane dishes, and I find myself smiling more at older people and being a liittle more patient.
