Stoicism, not crying, in H Mart
The astounding hollowness of Asian American "culture", the intellectual junk food that backs it, and what we should consume ourselves with instead
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In 2021, author and musician Michelle Zauner wrote her debut memoir Crying in H Mart. It was an incredible commercial success. The week it was published, it climbed to #2 on the New York Times’ best-seller list. It went up to #1 the following week, and stayed on the board for 67 consecutive weeks. Critics could not get enough of it. Obama called it one of his favorite books of the year. It has since become a defining work on Korean American identity.
For those that haven’t read it, this is the summary from Blinkist:
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner is a poignant memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother to cancer, and finding solace in food. It is a heartfelt exploration of grief, identity, and the power of cultural connection.
Here is my attempt at a slightly longer synopsis. The book begins with the titular scene of Zauner crying in H Mart, America’s premier Korean supermarket. She cries because her mother has passed away, and she feels an overwhelming cultural connection to her when she is surrounded by Korean food.
The nonlinear plot then explains what brought her there. Zauner is the child of a Korean mother and white father. She has a volatile relationship with her mother—one fraught by her desires to be a creative. Against her mother’s wishes, she attends Bryn Mawr, studies creative writing, and starts an indie band upon graduating. All the while, her mother is diagnosed with cancer. So she gets married to a guy named Peter Bradley while she’s alive, and then her mother passes away. This loss leads her down a journey to reconnect with her Koreanness, which she does through elaborate interactions with Korean food. Her band finally takes off, and the novel closes with her singing the song “Coffee Hanjan” in a karaoke bar while on tour—a symbol of her Korean American identity. The book is an expansion of her original New Yorker essay, which you can read here if you doubt my ability to summarize fairly.
I want to begin by giving Zauner her flowers. She is an amazing writer, and she makes awesome music. If you haven’t listened to Japanese Breakfast yet, it’s very good. And the subpoints of the memoir are all very good. She weaves a great tapestry of narratives on loss of a loved one and chasing your dreams.
But the central point of the novel, on connecting with one’s culture? Far less awesome, borderline shitty. I remember reading the book for the first time two years ago, and being baffled by how superficial her portrayal of Korean American identity was. I remain even more baffled by how easily critics let her get away with it. When I finished it, I felt quite irritated. Perhaps anger isn’t the right word, but I resented, and still resent Zauner’s portrayal of what it means to be a Korean American. She took something so incredibly delicate and confusing, and bastardized it down to delicious-but-hollow depictions of food and entertainment. She reduced it to little more than Shin Cup Noodles and crunchy radishes.
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I have since come to the conclusion that Zauner’s reductionism is a mere symptom of a much larger problem: the astounding hollowness of the Korean American and Asian American identities. Zauner’s views are probably the median, not the outlier. If you’ve ever been to a Korean or Asian affinity club meeting at a high school or college, you would know that virtually every event is structured solely around ‘cultural’ food and/or entertainment. Native Koreans have even coined a term to describe those emigrants, and descendants of emigrants, that have lost touch—gyopo. Admittedly, this term applies to me as well.
I think explaining why this hollowness came to be begins with asking ourselves what the words “identity” and “culture” mean. They are terms that are abused and overused frequently. For the purposes of what I’m describing, “identity” refers to one’s self-conception, often created by the various social categories one best views themselves as fitting under. “Culture” is an especially banal term, which I will go into more detail on in a future essay (i.e. people tend to use it as a catch-all to describe trends, c.f. “cancel” or “rape” culture). But for now, just assume that it refers to the more traditional definition. Customs/traditions, goods/hardware, and beliefs/values that are shared by a group.
Beyond so much being written about identity and culture, much less is written on how they form and interact with each other. I generally agree with the sentiment that they exist in a somewhat endogenous relationship. In other words, they shape each other. We largely receive our identities from our cultures, and as those identities grow and develop, we feed them back in to evolve culture.
This is why theorists have traditionally used these two terms in tandem. We care about who we are and where we come from because A) it is critical for self-understanding, and B) we want others to understand us in a world of deep-seated cultural relativism. The vocabulary of culture and identity has historically provided us a way of examining both of those things, and of rationing about our existences.
But the endogeneity of culture and identity does not exist in a vacuum, which is what I think most of its diehard proponents tend to miss out on. Assume said endogeneity is a natural function, and outside influences that have to do neither with culture nor identity are functions of nurture. There are many instances, then, which this symbiosis is thrown off. In other words—even if they are able to shape each other effectively—there can often be outside parameters which overpower any real interaction between the two. In turn, they have become increasingly less effective in telling us anything of value about ourselves.
This is very evident in many instances of the culture-identity interplay. For example, in previous essays, I’ve argued that a culture of LGBT positivity probably does not account for the increase in LGBT-identifying members of my generation. In that case, the environment’s effect on sexual identity is bound by the parameter of biological orientation (i.e. you are probably not going to stop being attracted to girls because of RuPaul’s Drag Race), at least in short-term time horizons. Culture is blocked off from influencing identity, in this sense. Of course, certain aspects are certainly more resilient to environmental distortions than others, and take much longer to change.
With relation to the culture-identity interplay, in the context of ethnic and national heritage, I am certain another limiting principle is at play. In this case, however, the parameter is one of hyper-rapid modernization. The cultural basis upon which national heritage is propped up is no longer being shaped by the members of that nation, which used to make it a serviceable heuristic. Rather, they are being artificially morphed by the dominance of global trends. And it is making national heritage an increasingly unstable means of reflecting on one’s identity—just like the reductive hollowness of Zauner’s neurosis.
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I understand that is a rather confusing bit to understand, and some simplification is in order. Thus far, we’ve established that culture (the tripartite of a group’s customs/traditions, goods/hardware, and beliefs/values) and identity (self-conception), left in its purest form, shape each other. This is an important natural equilibrium that allows for clarity when one wants to be introspective. After all, we have to look to our influences to understand ourselves. At least, we have historically done so—the practice of certain rituals, or use of certain materials, used to be a great reflection on what a given society cared about. In turn, you could discern certain principles about your national heritage, and the purpose of your own existence.
But there are new limits to this; limits that are largely driven by external pressures. And the reason that so many people in the world feel a lack of said clarity, in relation to their national/ethnic culture and personal identity? Because the world is changing at a rate far too fast, and in a way far too unpredictable for there to be a stable relationship between the two, like there has been in the past.
Expanding on the argument of rate: in the era of globalization, the conventional quips of shared ‘customs/traditions’ and ‘goods/hardware’ no longer really work. We no longer live in insulated villages that hold absolute determinism over your material reality. Social traditions are crossing borders too rapidly (smaller, more traditional cultures are being diluted by the appeal of larger, progressive ones) and imitated too easily (we mass-produce and market cultural artifacts). Under that paradigm, two-thirds of culture is reduced to little more than a superficial commodity that can be churned out by excessively young hands in a Chinese factory, and shipped overnight by DHL. Simply put: much of national heritage is rapidly transforming into a meaningless, amorphous blob.
This is not to say that national heritage has ever been a stagnant factor. But in the past, the pace at which heritage changed was significantly slower, and its form far more localized. Members of any given heritage understood why things were changing, even if they disagreed. They also felt empowered to advocate for pressing the brakes—if a group of your countrymen were arguing for a radical shift, you could seek them out and target their narratives.
This is no longer the case. How can one target, for example, the proponents of mass production? Or, how can one target hyper-progressive customs which advocate for a rewiring of a nation’s rituals, that have captured the hearts of young activists? It is untenable to picket the Vietnamese factory that churns out the substitute for the cultural artifact. It is equally unrealistic to picket the Oxbridge academic that penned the radical cancellation of a holiday from oceans away.
This is not a normative claim, nor am I a cultural Luddite. I am not prescribing some kind of value to these changes, nor am I against many of the effects of global progressivism. The only takeaway from this is that the instability and indistinguishability of national identity has made it an increasingly worse tool for self-understanding. But with that instability has come a great deal of convenience—after all, it is quite easy to consume the mass-produced derivative of a cultural artifact, feel good about it, and call it a day.
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Let’s talk about this in less abstract terms. Take the case of Korean Americans, or Asian Americans more broadly in the United States. I cannot remember the last time “Asian culture” in this country manifested in any form beyond food and entertainment. K-Pop is catchy, and soju is fun to drink, sure. But if culture can be compacted into a three-minute music video, or distilled into a bottle you can buy for five dollars, it is functionally meaningless.
In no uncertain terms: these are not useful tools in understanding oneself. While Zauner is implicitly right in that black bean noodles and karaoke can serve as useful emotional crutches—after all, comfort food has the word comfort in it for a reason—they reflect nothing on one’s existence. They tell you nothing about the robust history that brought you to where you are. They explain very little about what matters to you, and why it matters to you.
Especially not Korean food culture, which is extremely primitive. Development of cuisine requires resources, which Korea did not have until recently. Seventy years ago, eating dog over rice was commonplace. That is not a source of pride, that is a source of desperation and pain that we have moved on from. Most of the most common Korean foods consumed today are recent developments, definitionally stripping it of illustrious lineage and history.
Pair this with the explicit short-sightedness of the mechanisms of identity Zauner references. Shin Ramen was invented in 1986. That could not possibly explain any meaningful aspect of Korean national heritage, other than a desire for greater calorie consumption. K-Pop is an initiative spearheaded by the Korean government to raise revenue for defense and mirror Western forms of entertainment. Clearly, these both fail the litmus test of helping someone understand who they are, or anyone else in understanding their background, for that matter.
But they are the most accessible, by far. It is significantly easier to find refuge in the palatable—foods that your white friends will find tasty, and music that will bump on the radio. Such is an inevitable hollowness, one that resides in modern conceptions of ethnic culture and national heritage.
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It would probably be fine if it went no further than that. After all, in isolation, there isn’t much harm in boosting BTS and eating Buldak noodles.
But it does go much further than that. Because as established in the priors, culture consists of three categories: customs/traditions, goods/hardware, and beliefs/values. If the first two are unstable predictors, no longer fit to serve as explanatory variables of one’s self-understanding, we are left with the third. And at face, this is a great thing! Because while customs, traditions, goods, and hardware might be porous, beliefs and values are significantly less so. They aren’t impervious to trends of globalization, of course, but it is substantially harder to mass-produce values. If your parents were reared in a specific way, and as a result rear you in a certain way, you’ll inherit a moral compass rooted in your national heritage. You might wear Nikes, and celebrate altered (perhaps more secular) versions of rituals or holidays, but you’re unlikely to buy a completely new belief system. In this manner, there is a unique resiliency in values.
Yet, the novel gratification of the first two has created a substitution effect in the third. Once one feels sufficiently satisfied, full of the consumption of Zauner’s favorite sweet and sour pork, one feels a reduced psychological need to do more. One may even post it on social media as proof of identity! The controverse here is simple: by forming one’s perception of culture around the tangible, one focuses far less on the intangible.
These are the very roots of “boba liberalism”—the trend that has defined calls for Asian American ‘visibility’ and ‘activism’. As others have pointed out—they are the shallow policy agendas, born out of nothing more than liberal dickriding, practiced no further than calls for consumption at the Key Club and AAPI affinity group level. They do not deal seriously in the realm of introspection, retreating instead to the refuge of machine-assembled goods and chain-produced delicacies; away from a serious reckoning with the types of values that brought us to where we are.
So what is that system of values? If you’re Korean American or Asian American, and you are wondering that to yourself, that is proof of the argument I’m making. To be clear, I don’t blame you for not knowing. Again, social incentives have led us astray, and I myself only started grappling with this a few years ago. But any study of East Asian history, or any substantial engagement with its literature and poetry, reflects upon its Confucian influences.
To the untrained ear, this probably sounds ridiculous. It sounds like one of those things that you learn about in seventh grade world history and never deal with again. The word “Confucius” itself invokes thoughts of some random Chinese oldhead with a funny beard. But if anyone of East Asian descent takes any real time to learn about what that actually entails, they start to have a much clearer theory of self. Why, for example, do you think you were raised with such a large emphasis on discipline? Why do you reckon that education and clear metrics of competence were so important in your childhood? Why is there high conformity to standards of appearance? What drives the importance of filial piety, and why do you speak in tongues of honorifics?
I don’t have the time, nor knowledge, to outline Confucianism in full here. But I know the values I was socialized under are all rooted in it. All I can do is encourage you to give it some serious engagement. Nothing has been more critical to my self-understanding than that.
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This is the basis of my final critique on Zauner. Dealing specifically in the terms of the book, she memorializes her mom, and by extension, her ancestry, in terribly superficial terms. She attributes her connection to her mom in terms of the foods she was fed, barely paying lip service to the very real values she tried to imprint on her. She acknowledges her mom not in relation to the sacrifices she made (rooted in the aforementioned values), but rather in the jjajangmyeon they ate together. One may call it metaphoric, but that gives it far too much credit. It is a peripheral, one-dimensional reduction. She not once acknowledges the acute stress that her mother felt in encouraging her to pursue a stable career. It is not an easy thing to tell your child to be realistic about their dreams, but it is rooted in our collective philosophy.
Do I blame her for it? No. It is not her fault that our culture was captured by the appeal of consumption, nor did she cause the instability I outlined. But does that mean we cannot do better? Also no. Surely, it may sound ridiculous to try to rally young Asian Americans around Confucianism, but I am talking about a proverbial Confucianism—coming to terms with our beliefs before anything else, even if you call it by any other name. It may also sound ridiculous to try to transform affinity groups from eating clubs to book clubs. But to the extent that culture and identity matter—in self-understanding and others’ understanding—the only way to avoid misunderstanding is that. And I think this is fairly reasonable—posting less about Din Tai Fung, and taking more classes that teach us about our values, probably helps in our self-reflection.
I have been to H Mart hundreds of times in my life. Not once have I thought that its cultural significance lay in the selection of the chip aisle, nor have I ever seen anyone cry there. What I have seen are tens of thousands of Korean American parents, bodies aching after sixteen hours of work, suffering in silence—all under the philosophy that they owe their kids better lives. Perhaps it is not aesthetic, but that is the reality and beauty of our culture. That is what we have to contribute to the marketplace of identity, and it is far more robust than the flavor profile of kimchi. We should start acting like it.
— SJY, 06.22.24
Enjoyed this piece. I should finish Crying In H-Mart at some point in the near future. But its very premise (and from what I've already read) is such a perfect recipe of what mainstream liberal America wants Asian Americans to contribute to the figurative diversity potluck: food (obviously), mixed-race Asians (with preferably an Asian mother), a damsel-in-distress sentimentality that is the preferred voice of well-educated American-born straight Asian American women aspiring for inclusion into the elite culture class, and so forth.
I wrote about this a couple of years ago for Current Affairs, which I re-published to my Substack last year. Would be interested to get your thoughts on it: https://salieriredemption.substack.com/p/asian-american-psycho
Superb piece. I think you'd like the work of Mark Tseng-Putterman who situates Asian-American cultural discourse in the context of American imperialism more broadly: https://roarmag.org/essays/anti-asian-racism-american-imperialism/