the times | Monday April 4 2022 9arts
T
he smartly dressed
33-year-old woman
sitting opposite me in
the rooftop restaurant
of Soho House in
Austin, Texas, does
not look like the type
of person to cause
consternation in her mother. With her
YSL handbag and sleek bobbed hair,
Michelle Zauner is a picture of stylish
respectability. Were it not for the
tattoos poking out from the sleeves
of her black poloneck she could even
be mistaken for one of the tech
entrepreneurs who have flooded
the city during the South by
Southwest (SXSW) festival.
In fact, Zauner is the lead singer of
the indie band Japanese Breakfast,
and Crying in H Mart, her remarkable
memoir on growing up Korean-
American in Eugene, Oregon,
documents how her mother,
Chongmi, who died of cancer when
Zauner was 25, was driven to the
edge of despair by her daughter’s
less than perfect appearance.
When Zauner was a toddler her
mother pinched her nose repeatedly,
fearing it was too flat. A few years
later, thinking she was too short, she
pulled her daughter’s legs each
morning while instructing her to hold
the headboard of the bed in the hope
of stretching out an extra inch or two.
Cleansing conditioners, whitening
toothpastes and anti-ageing creams
were treated like holy relics. And
when Zauner hit adolescence,
discovered alternative rock and started
dressing in Dr Martens and cut-off
vests, all hell broke loose. A passage in
Crying in H Mart depicts Zauner’s
mother attacking her for the crime of
wearing one particularly scruffy outfit.
After failing to do much damage on
account of being smaller than her
daughter, she enlisted her husband to
finish the job.
“ ‘Hit her!’ my mother instructed. He
stood still, watching dumbly. ‘Hit her!’
she screamed again.”
When her father failed to react, her
mother attacked again. Zauner lay
motionless on the carpet as she was
assailed by the scent of various beauty
products emanating from her mother’s
writhing body. Finally Chongmi’s grip
went slack and she announced: “I had
an abortion because you were such a
terrible child.” This is tough love taken
to extremes.
“I felt oppressively confined by my
environment, particularly with whatmy mother’s vision was for me,” says
Zauner, whose book also reveals the
way her mother did display her love,
chiefly through Korean cooking. “Now
I can see that she was trying to protect
me because I would have had more
terrible tattoos and piercings if she
hadn’t put her foot down. I regret not
taking her skincare advice. I also
regret not ever being able to buy my
mum a designer handbag. The tragedy
is that, had she lived, we could have
enjoyed those things together.”
Crying in H Mart — the title refers
to a chain of Korean supermarkets in
the US — is about the mother-
daughter relationship and the ways it
manifests itself. It is also about coming
to terms with grief, which is made less
easy when the person you are grieving
for had a tendency to attack you and
blame you for her abortion.
After years of driving her mother
crazy by hanging around in squats,
playing in punk bands and drifting
through one dead-end job after
another, Zauner finally began to get
her life together. She had met her
future husband and moved to New
York to do an office job while sowing
the seeds for what would become
Japanese Breakfast when suddenly,
in 2014, her mother became ill. She
writes with affecting detail about the
realities of cancer, right down toMichelle Zauner, 33,
the singer in Japanese
Breakfast. Her book
Crying in H Mart,
about growing up in
a Korean-American
family in Oregon, is
a New York Times
bestsellerI thought I’d get cancelled for
pushing the tiger mother myth
Pop star Michelle
Zauner talks to
Will Hodgkinson
about the strict
parenting featured
in her hit memoir
Chongmi’s tongue resembling “a sack
of ageing meat, as though a spider
had cast it in a thick grey web”. The
documentation of this proud woman’s
physical deterioration makes for
painful reading.
“I wasn’t prepared for what
happened,” Zauner says of her
mother’s illness. “Nobody my age
could relate to it or understand the
depth of my trauma, horror and grief.
I was worried about exposing someone
who could no longer consent to being
represented, but I had to go there in
the memoir for people to realise how
tragic it was to see this composed
person, this meticulous woman,
fall apart.”
Then there is Zauner’s father, a
former teenage drug addict from
Philadelphia who in 1983 answered
an advert to sell used cars to the US
military in Seoul and met his wife
there. He didn’t handle the death well
and a few days after the funeral got
drunk and almost died in a car crash.
“It’s so wild to think about that period
now,” Zauner says when I bring this
up. “My dad is an extremely emotional
person, so emotional that he couldn’t
be the stoic father figure I felt I
needed. He kept telling me that he lost
his best friend. But I lost my mother.”
How did he react to Crying in H
Mart? “We’re no longer in contact.”‘Hit her!’
my mother
instructed.
‘Hit her!’
she
screamed
again
Their relationship fell apart in 2019
after Zauner’s father got together with
an Indonesian woman seven years
younger than her. “But I’m pretty sure
he’s read it.”
He wouldn’t be the only one. Crying
in H Mart debuted at No 2 in the New
York Times bestseller list in April 2021
and went on to spend more than
30 weeks there, which has surprised
its author more than anyone. While
making the 2016 album Psychopomp,
her first as Japanese Breakfast, Zauner
wrote an essay called Love, Loss, and
Kimchi about how learning to cook
Korean food helped to get her through
the death of her mother. After nine
months of sending it out only to
receive a barrage of rejections, it won
a competition in Glamour magazine,
just as Japanese Breakfast were
invited to play SXSW for the first time.
That led to the memoir.
“My main worry,” Zauner says of
the response to Crying in H Mart,
“was that I would get cancelled. I was
worried about the Asian-American
reaction to the book, that I would be
accused of perpetuating a stereotype
of the tiger mother. Or that I was
claiming things were a part of a
cultural upbringing when in fact they
were just part of my upbringing.”
In the event none of those things
happened. Instead, what might have
been a niche-interest book about the
Asian-American experience resonated
as a wider story about mothers,
parents, kids and food. Zauner is
working on the screenplay for a film
adaptation of the book, touring her
new, Kate Bush-inspired, Grammy-
nominated Japanese Breakfast album
Jubilee, and planning to move to Seoul
for a year with her husband, Peter
Bradley (who plays guitar in the band),
and write about the experience. “My
Korean is like that of a one-year-old,”
she confesses. “I can just about put
together a three-word sentence. There
is a part of me that will never feel
Korean until I learn the language, so
it very naturally feels like material for
the next book.”
Crying in H Mart is an insightful,
beautifully written encapsulation of
the realities of grief. There’s a touching
scene early on when Zauner’s mother,
who on the surface seems like
someone who should have loved this
kind of thing, prevents her 12-year-old
daughter from becoming a K-pop star
after a producer in Seoul thinks her
petite prettiness will make her a
perfect fit for a manufactured pop act.
“I had an independent spirit that
would never do well with that level of
coercion and pressure, and my mother
knew it,” Zauner says. “Now I’m an
indie artist. The label doesn’t pressure
me to do anything. For all her
frustrations with me, Mum must have
had some admiration.”
That night, Zauner plays a show at
Mohawk, a scuzzy Austin dive, in front
of a less than sleek audience. Her
mother would not have approved.
You cannot help but suspect, however,
that she would have been proud.TONJE THILESENCrying in H Mart by
Michelle Zauner is
published by Picador