Crying in H Mart
by Michelle Zauner
ISBN 9780525657750
“Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness.”
In her memoir, musician Michelle Zauner explores how losing her mother to cancer impacted her Korean American identity, and the relationship food plays in maintaining a connection to her heritage. The daughter of an American father and a Korean mother, Zauner grew up in the United States, visiting Korea in the summer with her mother. Over a period of a few years during her twenties, Zauner loses her aunt and grandmother in Korea, and then her mother dies of cancer. With each death she feels her connection to Korea slipping away, as if it is embodied in the people rather than the place. One aunt remains, and they struggle to connect across the language barrier of Zauner’s rudimentary Korean, often turning to food as a place to connect. Because her mother never taught her to cook, Zauner makes that exploration herself, both in trying to recreate Korean comfort foods for her mother while she is dying, and then as a way to claim that space for herself after her mother is gone. Their sometimes tumultuous relationship is recontextualized by the fact that Zauner will never see her mother again, never get another good day with her. Crying in H Mart is a visceral account of the slow destruction of cancer, about what death takes from us, and what it gives back. Love, family, grief, and food twine together in this exploration of identity and loss.
Tags: Non-Fiction, Memoir
Minor Feelings
by Cathy Park Hong
ISBN 9781984820365
“Minor feelings are not often featured in contemporary American literature because these emotions do not conform to the archetypal narrative that highlights survival and self-determination.”
Minor Feelings is a series of essays about the intersection of art and Asian American identity that encompasses both history lessons and art theory and analysis, as well as stories from the author’s life. Cathy Hong Park is a Korean American poet who studied at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the early 2000s, where writing about her heritage was dismissed as “identitarian” or “ethnicky.” The titular concept and the one that gained so much traction for this collection is “minor feelings,” which she defines as “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality questioned or dismissed.” For readers, this concept is a valuable lens through which to examine which types of stories about minorities we tend to laud, and which are dismissed because the emotions they contain are unpleasant or uncomfortable, or do not result in triumph and overcoming affliction. “Rather than using racial trauma as a dramatic stage for individual growth, the literature of minor feelings explores the trauma of a racist capitalist system that keeps the individual in place,” she explains. Cathy Hong Park also explores what it means to speak or write with “bad” English, and what impact the tacit decision not to speak or write about her rape and murder has had on the legacy of artist and novelist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Minor Feelings is a broad and sprawling collection that covers vast ground while exploring the question of what it means for Asian Americans to create art in a system that is designed to cater to the white experience.
Tags: Non-Fiction, Essays
All You Can Ever Know
by Nicole Chung
“I never had a name for what was happening. I had never heard of or read about any racism other than the kind that outright destroys your life and blots out your physical existence.”
Nicole Chung was prematurely born in 1980s Seattle to struggling Korean immigrant parents who already had two other daughters at home. Told that her biological parents were unable to afford the medical care she needed, or provide for a child who might be sick all her life, they placed her for adoption. She was raised in small town southern Oregon by white parents who touted a colour-blind philosophy, and were ill-equipped to help a lone Asian child navigate what her race meant in a town where almost no one else looked like her. Writing clearly and eloquently about her own experiences, adoptee Nicole Chung describes the mythologizing of the adoption narrative, and how this comforting, pre-packaged story ultimately backfired as she struggled to find her identity. But if the adoption narrative proved to be oversimplified, so too was the stereotypical reunion story of a biological family lost and then joyfully found. Reaching out to her biological relations proved to be just as complex as navigating the intricacies of interracial adoption. In this exploration, Chung excels at taking the adoption narrative beyond “good” or “bad,” instead seeking to portray the institution that created her family in all the complexity that neat narratives seek to oversimplify. Her story refuses to be so constrained.
Read my full review from 2018
Tags: Non-Fiction, Memoir
Required Reading 