90 pages • 3 hours read
Michelle ZaunerCrying in H Mart
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 17-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 17 Summary: “Little Axe”
After the holidays, Zauner gets a job at a pizza shop to stay busy before she and Peter move to New York. She expects it will be a pleasant experience, but she ends up working the late shift, serving college students after the bars let out. Peter wants her to quit, but she wants to be too busy to grieve. She also begins writing music, which culminates in her asking her friends Nick and Colin to join her and Peter in recording Psychopomp, her first album under the moniker Japanese Breakfast.
Before moving to New York, Zauner and Peter plan a belated honeymoon to Korea. Nami Emo insists they stay with her, but Zauner is hesitant because they won’t have a translator. Zauner sees an old photo of her mother’s family; only Nami is alive now, and Zauner remembers a story of the time Nami saw a fortune-teller who told her “she was like a giving tree […] but at her bases, there would always be a little axe, slowly striking at her trunk, slowly wearing her away” (196). Zauner worries that she’s the little axe from the story.
They fly to Korea in March, and upon hearing Korean again, Zauner thinks of her first words: umma, then mom. She “called to [her] mother in two languages” (198). Nami is thrilled to see them, and Emo Boo comes home and does cupping and acupuncture to help them recover from their flight. Zauner’s worries are unfounded. They spend several days with Nami, including Zauner’s birthday, for which Nami makes miyeokguk, a traditional birthday dish meant to honor the mother.
One day, Zauner grows frustrated trying to translate her ideas for Nami and begins to cry. The two of them bond over one of Chongmi’s sayings: “save your tears for when your mother dies” (201). Nami reveals that Halmoni said that, too, and Zauner reflects on the way these sayings are passed down. Her visit with Nami helps her see how much it means to share the food of her culture with her loved ones. Zauner and Peter go on to Busan and Jeju Island, visiting all the places Chongmi wanted to share with Zauner before she died.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Maangchi and Me”
Zauner relates that her mother always believed dreaming about feces to be lucky; she would buy scratch-off lottery tickets whenever she had such a dream, a habit Zauner practices. After her honeymoon, Zauner has recurring dreams about her mother; they all revolve around seeing her mother again, still ill, and learning that she’s been alive, just missing. Zauner wonders if this is her mother’s way of visiting her.
Zauner and Peter stay at his parents’ house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Zauner applies for office jobs and gets one in Williamsburg. She feels well adjusted but has flashbacks, and therapy is little help. Instead, Zauner returns to Maangchi’s Youtube videos, learning to cook many of the meals from her childhood. She shops at the H Mart in Flushing regularly, and she begins making kimchi.
She first tries two batches, chonggak and tongbaechu (white radish and cabbage kimchi, respectively). She provides a detailed description of the process of making kimchi in her small kitchen: prepping the vegetables, making the spice paste, massaging it into the leaves of cabbage, and using her chin to stop and start the Youtube video thanks to her stained hands. After two weeks of fermenting, the batches are a success. The process becomes a monthly ritual, and Zauner’s kitchen and fridge are crowded with mason jars holding kimchi in various stages of fermentation.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Kimchi Fridge”
In October, roughly a year after Chongmi’s death, Zauner’s father puts their house up for sale. Zauner looks over the listing photos of the restaged house and remembers the things they found from the previous owners when she moved in at 10 years old. She wonders what will be left behind of her own life for the new owners.
Her father is moving to Thailand, and he sends some items to Zauner, including her mother’s kimchi fridge. There’s no room for it, so Peter’s parents agree to hold on to it, so Zauner doesn’t see it until Thanksgiving, when she makes tempura sweet potatoes for Peter’s family that are poorly received. After dinner, Zauner goes to the kimchi fridge and finds hundreds of family photos inside.
She shows Peter and his family, and later that night goes through them by herself. She loves the candid photos of her mother best. She realizes that her mother was constantly documenting their life together, and so much knowledge about who Zauner is died with her mother. She becomes determined to honor her mother’s memory: “If I could not be with my mother, I would be her” (224).
Before she goes back to New York, Zauner spends the day at a Korean spa getting a full body scrub from a Korean woman. The woman asks where she’s from, and Zauner explains her heritage, keenly feeling the desire to be connected to her Koreanness. The woman tells her she has a small face, mirroring the compliments she received in Korea, but now Zauner feels disconnected from the idea since she no longer has a mother to stand next to her and make visual sense of her heritage.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Coffee Hanjan”
After being in Brooklyn for about a year, Psychopomp begins to connect with an audience, and Zauner finds herself going on tour with Mitski. An essay she wrote about her mother and making kimchi is also selected as Glamour’s essay of the year, and suddenly Zauner is a successful artist. She puts together a band and goes on tour, and Peter joins when the success continues. Soon, she is booked on a tour of Asia that ends in Seoul. She tells Nami and plans to rent an apartment with Peter for a few weeks afterward. Her relatives are confused about how she can do this, as they don’t understand how successful her music career is.
In Asia, Zauner is happy about the food they have on tour, which is vastly different from the gas station and fast-food diet they eat on tour in America. When they arrive in Seoul, they are met by the owner of their tour venue, Jon, and his friend Koki. The next day they set up for the show, and Zauner cannot believe she’s playing to a crowd of 400 in her mother’s hometown. Despite her mother’s lack of faith in her career, she wishes Chongmi could share this. Though Zauner doesn’t believe in god, she still envisions her mother with “her foot on his neck, demanding good things come my way” (233). She closes the recollection of the concert with a description of the Psychopomp album cover, which is a candid polaroid of her mother.
After the show, the band goes with Jon and Koki to a vinyl bar. They talk about the Korean pop scene of the 1960s, and Jon shows Zauner a song by Shin Junghyeon, whom Zauner describes as a “Korean Phil Spector-type” (235). She finds the song moving and brings it up to Nami a few days later while shopping. Nami tells her he and a group he collaborated with called The Pearl Sisters were some of her mother’s favorites. She pulls up the song “Coffee Banjan” on her phone, saying she and Chongmi performed it as children at their father’s parties.
On their last night in Korea, Zauner and Peter go to an extravagant seaside restaurant with Nami and Emo Boo. Emo Boo and Peter buy fireworks and set them off on the beach. They end up at karaoke, where Nami and Zauner sing “Coffee Banjan” together, both looking for what’s left of Chongmi in each other.
Chapters 17-20 Analysis
In the absence of strong ties to her father and his experience with grief, Zauner turns to Nami Emo, the last remaining sibling in Chongmi’s family. Her worry about the language barrier proves to be unfounded, though the inability to clearly communicate without a translator does cause occasional frustration. Zauner worries that she’s the “little axe” from the story, but she instead finds that her and Nami’s relationship is a source of strength and comfort for them both. In many ways, Nami becomes a surrogate mother for Zauner, which is reflected in the way Zauner shares her successes and struggles with her aunt.
Another poignant reflection comes from Zauner and Nami’s shared experience of having a mother who said, “Save your tears for when your mother dies.” Both of them thought it was a dismissal of their emotions at the time, but now they see that the saying is a warning of sorts for the grief to come. Grief is a universal experience, and the cliches surrounding grief gain power and new meaning when it moves out of the abstract and into felt emotion.
Zauner finds another surrogate mother in Maangchi, the woman she finds on Youtube making traditional Korean foods, whom Zauner turns to in order to realize her desires of honoring her mother through food. In Maangchi, Zauner sees what many people see in the parasocial relationships they form with celebrities (particularly podcasters, Youtubers, and other internet-era figures): These connections are a way to process difficult emotions from a comfortable position. As a patient figure who provides thorough explanations, Maangchi is very unlike Chongmi, who cooked by eyeballing measurements and was a comparatively poor teacher of kitchen skills. The differences between them are outweighed by the power Zauner gains from merging her sense of Korean heritage with the craft of their cuisine.
Making kimchi, then, is a powerful symbol for Zauner, an idea that is underscored by the arrival of the kimchi fridge which is full of family photographs. Making kimchi is an act of preservation that uses the practice of fermentation (which is, essentially, a controlled decomposition of organic matter), and Zauner draws a parallel between what she does in her kitchen and what she does making music about her mother. Seeing the photographs, Zauner realizes what an act of preservation and creation her upbringing was, and she sees that her mother’s legacy is carried within her: “If I could not be with my mother, I would be her” (225).
The final chapter honors this claim by showing how the tensions within Zauner resolve as Psychopomp finds success. The effects of Chongmi’s lack of faith in Zauner as a musician still linger, but Zauner knows how her mother valued art in her own life, and she has made an album that honors her mother’s life. One of the book’s closing scenes is a powerful recollection of the band’s first show in Seoul, the album cover featuring her mother’s face, and Zauner’s night out on the streets of Chongmi’s hometown. For Zauner, this act has immense power, as she views it as putting her mother’s love for her back into the world.
This visit to Seoul is also where Zauner sees her mother’s love of music more clearly. Earlier in the book she recounts how she and her mother would sing in the car, and at the book’s end, Zauner sings one of Chongmi’s favorite Korean pop songs with Nami Emo at karaoke. This connects to Zauner’s search to discover the 10% of herself that Chongmi held back. Zauner and her aunt are singing a song that Zauner didn’t know before this trip, a song that factored into Chongmi’s childhood. She and Nami are both connected to the song in ways that are tangential, and they look to each other to find a surrogate Chongmi through their duet. It’s a powerful image that suggests, though her grief will continue, Zauner is beginning to find peace between her mother, her Korean heritage, and her artistic ambition.
