It's been a few weeks since that New Yorker article written by Michelle Zauner went viral among the Asian American community and made me cry when I read it. "Crying in H Mart" is a beautifully written article about the importance of grocery stores like H Mart, which sell mainly Asian food, for Asian Americans and about a heartfelt and very real story about Zauner's Korean mother, who had passed.
If some of you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. It's a little peek at an Asian American's life and how we keep our culture alive and thriving from one generation to the next.
Asian American or not, the article will have you thinking about your mother's cooking.
I was so surprised when I read this particular article because I thought I was the only one who stared at things like the banchan (Korean side dishes) at the H Mart in Chicago and missed the authentic side dishes that would come out at almost every restaurant in Korean Town (K-Town) in Los Angeles. Or feel nostalgia while passing by Japanese candies that I used to never stop eating. Or think of the several tubs worth of kimchi and oshinko (pickled vegetables) that my grandma and my mom would make as I walk through the aisles of large Asian vegetables. But from the words that were written in that article and how viral it became, it's obvious I wasn't the only one reminiscing about home, family, and food when in H Mart.
I recently reflected greatly on how important places like H Mart are for me and how it's almost like a second home when I came back to Chicago for the Fall quarter. Just this past week, I was moving into an apartment for the first time and my family came to see the the city that is technically my second home. But within this second home, there is the real second home, which is H Mart.
It's a cliché, but the "you don't know what you got until it's gone" phrase becomes so true when you experience change yourself. I come from a city with more than 1 million Asian Americans (data from a census in 2010) and came to a city with a little over 150,000. I'm not complaining, but that's a drastic shift of landscape and demographic. It gets me missing the familiarity of home, yet when I walk into H Mart, I see people who look like me and people who aren't bothered by the things I eat. I hear and see languages that I'm familiar with and of course, every person that I pass by is a stranger, yet I feel a strange connection with the people who gather, eat and work at this place.
When I went to go eat at the H Mart food court and shop there with my family, I saw a flood of Asian students buying carts full of Asian snacks and food to prepare for the upcoming quarter. I smiled to myself, because that was exactly what I was going there to do as well. And it's weird because I used to be surrounded by H Mart's, S Mart's, Han Nam Chain's, Mitsuwa's, Marukai's, Tokyo Central's, and other small Asian stores with countless other Asian Americans, yet I never ever felt this way, until I left home. To everyone else these names are jiberish and mean nothing. But they mean the world to me.
It's my connection back home, back to my ancestors countries and back to what it used to be. And I am so happy and blessed that I am able to feel this way by simply being in a super market.
