Japanese Breakfast lead singer and guitarist Michelle Zauner wrote an autobiography about growing up in American with a Caucasian father and Korean mother. She wrote in awe of how her mom introduced her to different Korean dishes and how they bonded over them, yet she also wrote about how they fought when she was a teenager and how, as a child, it was hard to please her mother.
Michelle wrote with raw openness about when her mother faced and lost her life to cancer. Their rebellious love towards each other disappeared when her mother's health deteriorated. They just decided to be there for each other, to fight the illness and build more lasting memories for whatever time they had left together.
Weeks after her mother's passing, Michelle realized how her mother loved and adored her as she looked through the mementos her mother had collected since she was a baby and through pictures where her mother was looking at her in the background. The more she looked into her mother's belonging's, the more she clung to her mother's memories. She likened her mom's death to a Korean preserved cabbage (kimchi), as a "controlled death."
Kimchi is a Korean side dish (banchan) in which the fermentation process prevents the cabbage from spoiling. The head of cabbage does not rot and die but is preserved and transformed. Like the dish, the life of Michelle's mom continues to exist, as her mom's memories were something that she could save and pass on someday, like planting hope that has a life of its own.
This book makes me want to revisit H MART with a different set of eyes. I would probably try some kimchi and not just stare on the humungous jars of the preserved cabbage. I may not cry, but I would understand why the author cried at H MART, as her mom's memories are all over the store.
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