Crying in H Mart: Summary & Key Insights

It begins in H Mart, a Korean-American grocery store chain that becomes both shrine and sanctuary. I find myself crying in the aisles among the aisles of dried anchovies and jars of kimchi because every item on those shelves reminds me of my mother. H Mart is the last place where she still feels alive to me. Each brand of seaweed or bag of tteok evokes a moment when she taught me how to recognize quality, how to be discerning, how to care. As I reach for these ingredients, I am reaching for her.

From that sensory starting point, the memoir unfolds into memory—grocery aisles transforming into gateways to childhood. My mother was exacting, elegant, and unapologetically Korean. She saw food as love and language, as proof that even far from Seoul, we could stay tethered to who we were. When I began slipping away into American adolescence, she noticed it before I did. In H Mart, I realize those lessons she taught while silently standing next to me at a stove were her way of preserving us both.

H Mart becomes the metaphor for everything I lost and everything I’m trying to rebuild. It’s where culture lives in packaged form, where one can reconstruct a sense of home, bite by bite. As grief reshapes my identity, I lean more into those rituals: shopping for ingredients, cooking, remembering. The taste of the food my mother loved allows me to talk to her again, to understand that mourning is not a rupture but a continuation through new expressions of care and creation.

The daughter of a Korean mother and a white American father, I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, feeling perpetually between cultural poles. My mother, Chongmi, was proud and perfectionistic, her standards extending from how I played piano to how I held my chopsticks. She wanted me to shine, to represent her sacrifices well, and her love often came dressed in criticism. My father, on the other hand, offered a quiet permissiveness that contrasted sharply with her intensity.

Growing up biracial meant never fully belonging. Among my white peers, I was often the only Asian face, teased for my lunches or my name. Yet, when I visited Seoul, I was the outsider—the girl whose Korean wasn’t fluent, whose mannerisms were a little off. The space between these worlds was lonely but fertile; it taught me to observe with precision. I began writing, performing music, searching for ways to define myself without apology.

My teenage years were marked by rebellion. I pushed back against my mother’s control, her constant insistence that I be better, neater, more Korean. I chased freedom through music, late nights, and a painful desire to be understood by a world that did not mirror me. But even in those moments of defiance, I knew her love was beneath it all, fierce and undiluted, even if I couldn’t recognize it then.

Only later—when I stood in a hospital room, watching her fade—did I begin to glimpse the full shape of her love: not just how she fed me, but how she molded me. The rebellion that once separated us would become the same strength that helped me endure her loss.