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Hello, we're here for more Happier, a podcast where we get happier.
Today, we are revisiting one of our Happier podcast book club episodes.
This one is a conversation with writer and musician Michelle Zauner, who wrote the fabulous memoir Crying in H Mart.
Yeah, we spoke to Michelle years ago back in 2021.
And the power of this memoir has still stayed with us, Gretch, over the years.
I remember talking to Michelle.
I was in Puerto Rico shooting Fantasy Island at the time.
So I remember sitting in my hotel room and talking to her and hearing her talk about her relationship with her parents was just fascinating.
Yes.
The book spent 60 weeks that is, 6-0 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and it's on its 17th reprinting in Korea.
It's a coming-of-age story of Michelle, the daughter to a Korean mother and Jewish-American father, who returns to her small Oregonian town to care for her mom amid her cancer diagnosis.
The book delves deeply into the tumultuous relationship between her strict mother and a free-spirited daughter.
And remember, this is a revisited, so it was recorded in 2021.
We hope you enjoy our conversation with Michelle Zauner as much as we did.
Welcome, Michelle.
Hi, Michelle.
Hello.
We're so excited to talk to you about crying in H Mart.
Now, most of the people listening will have read it because this is our book club episode.
But in case anyone hasn't, can you explain what crying in H Mart means?
H Mart is a Korean grocery chain and where I found myself often after my mother passed away from cancer in 2014.
And I'm mixed race.
I'm half Korean, half Caucasian.
My mother was Korean.
And I found myself.
That cooking Korean dishes and learning how to make Korean food helped me grieve her loss and kind of remember her the way that I wanted to.
And so in order to do that, I was going to H Mart often and crying as I bought those ingredients.
Well, I think the cover is so brilliant.
I have to say I had looked at it many times and just appreciated it just the way it looked until I saw that it made an H.
So I got a particular sense of satisfaction from that once I actually noticed it.
Yes, there's chopsticks holding noodles that form an H for H Mart.
Yes, for H Mart.
It's really beautiful.
So Michelle, we got a lot of questions and observations from listeners about things that they wanted to ask you about.
And this came from Samantha.
She wrote I just finished this book and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it or talking about it.
I'm half Korean and half white and have never felt seen until this book.
It made me cherish my mom so much but also reflect on the complicated relationship I've had with her, something that has been hard to accept as my own, because of feeling never quite Korean enough and never being quite American enough either.
I'm sure she's already heard from others how important her words and her story have been to people like me, but I wanted to reiterate it and shout it from the rooftops.
Questions I had when reading were and I have to say this is one easy question and one more kind of transcendent question
One is, what is your favorite Korean dish your mom made for you?
I think that the most memorable dish is her galbi, which is a Korean barbecue short rib.
But every time I came home from college, twice a year, she would always prepare galbi, fresh rice, red leaf lettuce, samjang and dongchimi, which is this white radish kimchi in brine.
It's like kind of like a Korean gazpacho and you mix in sesame oil, sesame seeds and red pepper flakes.
And that sort of set was always what I came home to when I'd been, you know, eating college cafeteria food for weeks and weeks.
And that's always the sort of main dish that I associate with her food.
Michelle, you said that you realize now that food is how she expressed her love, like knowing what you wanted and having it ready for you.
Did you realize that when you were growing up, or was that not until she was sick that you clued into that?
I think that was something I was slowly beginning to realize.
I think a lot of people go through this experience where you sort of begin to return to your parents and understand them in a deeper way in your early 20s.
And I think that that was what was so heartbreaking about my experience was that she died in just when things were starting to be really great between us.
And we were beginning to return to each other as peers in a way.
We could confide in each other in this sort of new way.
And I think I was in the process of beginning to realize, You know I have, I'm first generation and my mom is an immigrant parent.
And the way that she loves me is very different from the way that I see my peers, my white peers, being loved by their families.
And that was something that I came to realize much deeper in the process of writing this book.
Samantha's second question was what do you think your mother would say if she listened to your music today?
Would she be harsh or more accepting because of your success?
I mean, I think she would definitely be more accepting because of my success.
I would so love to see her reaction to the response to what's happening, because you know it didn't.
Things didn't look good for me for a long time.
And I think that she was always just kind of trying to protect me from failure and financial reality.
And for her to see what has happened, I think would be amazing, really astounding for her um, but i think that you know she is also the most brutally honest person and i think she would say the same kind of thing that she used to say about my music, which was such a mom response.
She would always say what are you saying?
I can't understand what you're saying.
Yeah, When you touch on this, on this issue of imagining what your mother's response would be, right near the end of the book and it's a very beautiful passage
So would you read it?
It's at the bottom of 232 to 233 about a show that you did.
When we got on stage, I took a moment to take in the room.
Even at the height of my ambitions, I had never imagined I'd be able to play a concert in my mother's native country, in the city where I was born.
I wished that my mother could see me, could be proud of the woman I'd become and the career I'd built.
The realization of something she worried for so long would never happen.
Conscious that the success we experienced revolved around her death, that the songs I sang memorialized her, I wished more than anything and through all contradiction, that she could be there.
I took a breath.
I shouted into the mic, and we launched into our set.
I hadn't believed in a God since I was about 10 and still envisioned Mr Rogers when I prayed, but the years that followed my mother's passing were suspiciously charmed.
I had been playing in bands since I was 16, dreamt of succeeding as an artist practically my whole life and as an American, I felt entitled to it, in spite of my mother's aggrieved forewarnings.
I had fought for that dream thanklessly for eight long years, and only after she died did things, as if magically begin to happen.
If there was a God, it seemed, my mother must have had her foot on his neck, demanding good things, come my way.
That if we had to be ripped apart right at our turning point, just when things were really starting to get good, the least God could do was make a few of her daughter's pipe dreams come true.
That's such a beautiful passage.
And it must you write many times about how hard it was that she missed out on this stage.
But it's wonderful to think that somehow she played a role in it.
Yes.
Yeah, it's hard not to feel that way.
Well, and I loved him, Michelle, in the book.
You quote your mom saying, you know what I realized?
I just never met someone like you.
And it almost seemed like once she realized oh, you're just different from anyone.
I know you were able to sort of communicate better.
Yeah, I think so.
I think that so much of this book is about not understanding that things that I identified as being idiosyncratically cruel parts of my mom's personality, were actually so rooted in a difference in culture and a generational difference.
And yeah, I mean I think that that was a big part of it is as we got to the point where we finally were able to accept that we were just very different from one another but ultimately loved each other very deeply, section where you thought it was sort of your mother saying wait, save your tears until your mother dies.
She was sort of a refrain she had, but you didn't realize that this was something that others said, that she had heard this herself, right?
You thought this was just her sentiment, but it turns out it was sort of more of a saying, or at least a family saying.
Yeah, I mean it's really funny because I've learned a lot from my aunt, my last remaining aunt, who's her older sister, that you know.
She was really surprised with the way that she raised me because we were so similar.
I had heard from a young age that my mom was kind of a rebel and a real tomboy.
And I think that you just, you know, that's just part of life.
The circle of life is that you learn how to love someone the way that you were loved by your parents.
I think.
And that was how her mother loved her.
And the same thing that she said to her growing up that I'm sure she hated.
And in turn, I'm sure that's something that I will say to my kid eventually, you know, because I've gone through this experience.
And I and, you know, a lot of what my mom said was right, you know.
Well, and you write in the book that she used to say to you, save 10% of yourself.
And she would say, even from daddy, I save.
And I thought that was so interesting.
And the fact that later you realized she saved 10 different, 10 from different people from you, from your father, from her siblings.
Yeah, I mean, I think to a certain extent that we all keep things from other people and different people know different parts of ourselves.
But it was certainly really great advice to get from a young age because it really prepared me for life to protect yourself and not trust anyone completely and always have something to sort of fall back on.
Well, it's interesting because I was just rereading Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and she wrote this passage from the perspective of Clarissa Dalloway, and it so reminded me of what you had written in your memoir.
She writes and there is a dignity in people, a solitude even between husband and wife, a gulf, and that one must respect, thought Clarissa watching him open the door, for one would not part with it oneself, or take it against his will from one's husband, without losing one's independence, one's self-respect something, after all, priceless.
So it's this idea that we need to hold something back to have that independence.
Absolutely.
I think that my mom always really promoted independence in a way.
I mean, even when I was growing up, like she had such an interest in self-care and the way that she presented herself to the world, but it was never rooted in, It was always for herself.
She always taught me from a very early age that beauty and self-care should be things that you do for yourself and not for anyone else.
Interesting.
Coming up, we'll have more of our book club conversation with Michelle Zauner.
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We're back with more of our conversation with Michelle Zauner about crying in H Mart.
Do you think you know her better now Michelle, that you've written the book, than you did when she was alive?
Yeah, that's a really great question.
And I really think that I was able to get a better understanding of all the major players in this book of myself, of my mother, my father, this woman Kay, who came to live with us.
I think that that's a really beautiful thing.
That writing a memoir can do is that you have to be fair as much as possible to everyone.
And if you're going to throw anyone under the bus, you have to make sure to do it to yourself just as much as you do to anyone else.
And in order to get full perspective and multidimensional characters, you have to explore all parts of a person's backstory and what makes them make the decisions and actions that they make.
And I think that that's a really wonderful thing about writing this book was I was able to understand where people were coming from in such a deeper way and forgive myself and other people for things that I had been upset about for a really long time.
Our listener, Megan, asked a question.
She wrote.
I'm so curious about what her father thought of the memoir, as I've read a few interviews, that they've since lost touch.
And I think there she's referring to an essay that you wrote in Harper's Bazaar and I'll post a link to that.
And before you answer, to say in the memoir you kind of make a prediction or you're already thinking about this in the memoir itself.
You write there was a dangerous and unspoken prospect looming that without my mother to bond us, my father and I would drift apart.
I was not essential to him in the way I knew I was to my mother and I could see that in the aftermath there would be a struggle to coexist, that there was a good chance we would come unmoored, that our family would dissolve entirely.
Yeah, I mean, my father is a really interesting character.
He's lived a really difficult life, and... was always, he was always a provider for our family.
I wasn't as close to him growing up as I was to my mother, who was a homemaker and had all this time to spend with me.
Yeah, I mean, he took my mother's death and her illness very hard.
And I think that that's pretty common when you're going through the caretaking process is that one person feels this need to really take a lot of the responsibility and the other person is a bit more able to fall apart or just can't quite handle it.
And I think that here was a man whose life was falling apart for the second or third time in his life and he had no idea how to cope with it.
Yeah, I was really angry at him for that as a father and that he wasn't able to give me the support that I felt like I offered him during that time.
But in writing this book, it made me really understand his perspective a bit more.
We don't speak, we haven't spoken really or seen each other in the last couple of years.
And part of that is because he lives abroad and the pandemic has made it even more difficult to try to find some common ground.
But I'm not sure if it will be a forever thing.
I actually didn't find out that he had read the book.
I had sent it to him, but he had never messaged me about reading it until the New York Times article came out.
And I found out that he had read it there.
And I recently did ask him what he thought of the book.
And his major issue was that I had grown up thinking that he sold used cars.
He was very upset and wanted me to know that he sold new cars in Germany.
And I was like, of all the things that you could have maybe been – taken issue with – that I have revealed in the book, that was what really bothered him.
That was the only thing that he brought up.
So yeah, my father sold new cars in Germany.
He wants to be made clear.
But you know he's a real open book and he'd be the first to tell you all of the things that I included in the book.
You know, he knows that he kind of fell off during her illness and he accepts that.
And the sort of darker parts of the book are things that he knows already.
And I think he didn't really take issue.
It was more of this kind of like.
You know that was a really crucial part of his life, was like he really turned around.
He's an ex-felon.
He's an abused child.
And that was where he found his footing.
That's where he turned his life around.
And so I think that to have that not being take, feel like that wasn't taken seriously, I think was really upsetting for him.
But it seemed to me that you did take it seriously.
It felt like it was very fair to him or, within the memoir, you really were providing his perspective and where he was coming from with all this.
I mean, if it has to do with you, maybe it doesn't feel fair, but as a reader it felt like you, as the writer, were trying to paint a portrait of him that was respectful of everything that he'd gone through and kind of his perspective on what everyone was struggling with.
So it didn't feel like it was like vengeful or you know, kind of taking advantage of the fact that you're the one who's writing the record.
Which sometimes in memoirs, you definitely get the sense that You're hearing one person's point of view.
This felt like a very serious attempt to grapple with the complexity of the situation from all the different actors.
Well, thank you.
That means a lot to me because it was something that was really important to me and happened very much in the revision process.
I think that when I turned in my first draft it definitely read that way, where it was very, you know, slanted in my favor, of course, because it's my perspective, it's my memoir.
But it's certainly uninteresting and not really a mature or fair thing to be biased in that way or not present.
You know, if you're going to throw someone under the bus, you have to throw yourself under the bus too.
So it's very difficult to find things that are not flattering that you do as a protagonist.
Yeah, yeah.
Coming up.
We will continue our revisited conversation with Michelle Zauner about her terrific memoir.
But first, this break.
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And now we're back with our conversation with Michelle Zauner about crying in H Mart.
One of the things I love about the book, Michelle, is how it's really kind of in medias res.
It's like the story is still unfolding.
It is still raw for you.
You know, if you write another memoir in 10 years, it could... again, evolve and change.
And I found that immediacy of it just so compelling.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, I mean a lot, especially the later chapters.
A lot of it was still kind of happening in real time.
You know, I was going to Korea and writing a lot of this book.
And the last chapter was a later edition that a lot of those sort of moments kind of happens in real time.
Because initially I didn't know if I was going to include anything about music or my aunt and I's relationship.
Our bond really deepened over the last few years.
And so it really found its place in the book kind of in real time.
And here is another question from a listener.
Kelly writes how did writing the book and the previous essays support her creativity as a singer songwriter, performer.
And how did her music enable her voice in nonfiction writing?
Interesting.
I think that having the experience of writing albums definitely made me feel more confident about taking on a larger creative project and knowing that that was something that I had done before and could potentially do again.
I maybe was a little too confident at first, thinking that those things were so similar because, you know, writing an album is maybe 1500 words and writing a book is closer to 80000.
But yeah, I think that it was really gratifying in this way that I never anticipated.
You know, fans of Japanese Breakfast, my band will notice that there are some borrowed lines in the book and there's a lot of borrowed content.
And I think you know, with music you're really painting a very impressionistic picture that can be taken in many different ways.
Whereas With a book you have to really guide the reader to feel and understand and have this kind of knowledge that you need them to know.
You have to guide them a bit more.
Whereas I think a listener can have more sort of varying interpretations of your work.
But yeah, it was just great to have the room to explore a scene.
You know there's a Japanese breakfast song called Rugged Country where I sing.
It's a heavy hand where I wear your death as a wedding ring.
And if you don't know the context of that story, that could mean quite a few things.
But in the book I was able to actually explain, there is a line about having a heavy hand and writing out that this heavy hand was not only a physical feeling of just wearing a ring for the first time, but also it represented so much in that moment of Oh, let's listen to a little bit of Rugged Country.
Rugged Country Beautiful.
I love listening to that connection.
Yeah, it's cool to see the echo in the book.
Yeah, there's a lot of instances in this book where I was able to just really show a scene.
And, like I said before, I think the biggest difference is that you get to really enter into different characters' perspectives and walk away with a deeper understanding of different people in this way that you don't get to do in music quite as often.
Now, Michelle, you took the Four Tendencies quiz.
So please tell us, what is your tendency?
I was an upholder.
I am an upholder.
Mm, that's what Gretchen is.
That's what I am.
And did that ring true for you, that you can meet inner expectations and you're also interested in meeting outer expectations?
It did, yes.
I'm very much that type of person.
I don't know if I've always been that.
I guess in some ways, like it is really important for me, especially in the last seven years or six or seven years, that I keep commitments to myself.
I think it's what keeps me grounded.
Mm-hmm.
And we always like to ask our guests for a try.
This at home suggestion, something manageable and practical that people can do starting tomorrow to make themselves happier.
Do you have anything that you would suggest for listeners?
This isn't really something that I do regularly.
But my husband does a lot of things that make my life really enjoyable that I would recommend other people trying.
But it's very boring and I don't know if it actually suits the podcast.
But it's a very small thing.
We love boring.
Okay, when we get a carton of eggs...
He'll rip the top off so you can always see how many eggs that you have and you can grab them very easily.
It's just one of those things that like I love that he does and makes my life really enjoyable.
And it's definitely the simplest thing that you can try on in your life.
And why don't we all do that?
I never thought of doing that.
And it is such a hassle to open egg cartons.
Well, then if you run out, you need three eggs and you assume, oh, we have a whole carton of eggs.
But then there's only one little lonely egg in there.
I eat so many eggs.
That's a really good tip for me.
And I literally never occurred to me.
Yes.
Well, thank you, Peter, for that.
Thank you, Peter.
Peter gets a gold star.
Michelle, it's been so great to talk to you.
Yes, Michelle, we loved the book and it was such a pleasure to get to talk to you about it.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thanks, Michelle.
Well, we hope you're feeling happier after this episode.
We really appreciated the opportunity to revisit this conversation with Michelle Zauner.
And if you haven't read Crying in H Mart, check it out for yourself for your next hashtag.
Read 25 and 25.
It's so good.
Yes, you will love it.
Remember, the best time to start a happiness project is 20 years ago.
The second best time is now.
Gretch, I'm back in Puerto Rico and, would you believe, I'm in the same hotel room where I spent eight weeks.
Oh, my goodness.
Is that kind of nice to come home, or do you feel like it's the Groundhog Day from which you cannot awake?
Sort of both, but it does have a great view, so I'm not complaining.
But my question is, did you get the mini fridge this time?
I have one mini fridge.
I do not have two.
And I'm back to the internal debate is I'm only going to be here 17 days.
Do I really need a second fridge?
Probably so.
From the Onward Project.
Hi, Gretchen, Craig Robinson, and my little sister Michelle here.
We host a new podcast called IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson.
We know you're the queen of giving advice, so we wanted to get a few tips from you.
You know, Gretchen, a lot of our listeners are going through some major life changes.
What advice do you have for folks who are trying to stay grounded in the midst of major life transitions?
Craig and Michelle, I am so happy to be talking to you.
Here are a few questions that might help us gain perspective.
So consider questions like this.
What activities take up my time but are not particularly useful or stimulating for me?
Do I spend a lot of time on something that's important to someone else but is not very important to me?
If I could magically change one habit in my life, what would I choose?
And here's a question.
Would I like to have more time in solitude restorative solitude or would I like to have more time with friends?
You know, just thinking about questions like this can help us start to figure out how we might make our lives happier.
With greater self-knowledge, we're better able to make hard decisions that reflect ourselves, our own nature, our own interests, our own values.
In my own case, I have found that the more my life reflects my nature, the happier I get and the more grounded I feel when I'm going through a period of major change or transition.
For more great advice, search for IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson wherever you get podcasts.
You can listen to Issa Rae on letting go of certain friendships, Kiki Palmer on why disappointment is actually the key to career success, Seth and Lauren Rogan on caring for aging parents, and so many more.
