🍜Crying in H Mart🍜

• My rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This book is like a meticulous fabric that weaves even the littlest bits of Korean culture that cannot be observed unless you actually witnessed the strands of heritage yourself. I even laughed out loud while reading, audible shock on my face at how accurate everything is.. the phrases used by mom, the behaviors melted in daily lives, habits that are almost universal to Koreans that we can’t quite seem to separate from… reading all the things I thought were so normal and universal that I didn’t even acknowledge that they were culturally specific things that some people dearly cherished and reminisced… It was all very refreshing. Also I could not help gaping at how accurately “Korean” her mom is… Do korean mothers get some kind of engraving education to unify the way their minds work? And then I realized that this is the power of culture. This is what the author aimed for. To document the tender, yet unyieldingly strong marks of culture that crisscrossed the chapters of her life, and will continue to do so even after the connecting “source” of Korean culture, which was her mom, was gone. But also at the same time, I found myself comparing my household to hers and getting surprised at the drastic differences. The decisions she made as a teenager, her thoughts after her mother’s death, etc. were just so different from what I would have had. It made me curious if I would have behaved the same way if I had grown up in the States… Maybe it’s the depth of connection and relationship between your mom and you instead of some cultural differences.

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