Crying in H Mart | Hacker News Reader

Crying in H Mart

newyorker.com

162 pointswallflower46 comments

> Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left in my life to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?

Sorry for the author's loss, but crying alone in an H Mart out of bitter anguish and deep longing is probably the most Korean thing ever.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_(cultural)

That start-class wiki article explains a lot of Korean dramas right there.

Joking aside, today I learned what a "culture-bound syndrome" is. That right there is quite substantial evidence that culture is a very real thing, and just because it might be socially constructed doesn't make it any less real (in fact, it might make it more real because it is so widely experienced).

If there's no clear and abiding biological cause (like in general paresis or something), nearly all psychological disease is culture-bound.

America in 1950 had orders of magnitudes less diagnosed depression than America in 2018, although people had some things that we would label depression today - and that Americans of 2050 will doubtless label something interesting and different.

> America in 1950 had orders of magnitudes less diagnosed depression than America in 2018

America in 1950 also had orders of magnitude less access to medical professionals for proper diagnosis.

And,

- The theory was still fairly nascent. "Major depressive disorder" wasn't termed until the 70s.

- Depression and anxiety were much more stigmatized back then. Men were told to "man up".

- Husbands could medicate/institutionalize their wives just because they were "hysterical".

I'd say we had a long way to go back then, and we still have a long way to go.

One theory was nascent in the 70's, but the Freudian bullshit was the age of an old man by then, and the demon possession idiocy was millenia old. We still have remarkably bad effectiveness on the drugs and therapies, so there will come new theories and they will, hopefully, be better in turn.

Touching article I can relate to. I lost my mother to leukemia two and a half years ago and I still am reminded of her everyday. This kind of grief is one that will never leave me. Every memory of her has the potential to bring tears to my eyes, but there are memories that give me a smile and there are many that inspire me to be better person.

My son just turned one year old a month ago. He is going through his cutest phase yet. He wants to play, walk, talk and say hi to everyone. I think often of what she would say to him, what she would cook for him, or the advice she would give me on raising him. So many things to wonder but then I see my son smile. He has my mom's smile and he loves to smile and laugh.

Life can be funny like that. Besides the teachings and memories I have of my mom, I am lucky enough to be also reminded of her smile every day through my son.

Sorry for you loss, this was really touching to read. Thanks for sharing.

This article makes a very salient and poignant reminder of the struggle for immigrants (especially second-generation and beyond) to retain and remember one's cultural heritage. I am Cantonese by ancestry but I grew up in Canada; I recently moved to Outer Sunset, a neighborhood vibrant with businesses and products that remind me of home, and it's surprisingly helpful for staving off the gradual dwindling of my knowledge of my parental/ancestral culture and language.

Also, I just noticed that this article is by Michelle Zauner, also known as Japanese Breakfast [1]. She's one of my favorite musicians. A lot of the grief expressed in this article is also the central theme of her first album, Psychopomp.

[1] https://michellezauner.bandcamp.com/

I love her music! And that she went to Bryn Mawr. Go Tri Co!

Mixed tradition households do spawn so very odd, and hard to understand[1] angers when caught in one world or excluded from another. Some of them will even seem silly to friend and colleagues.

The grief she is experiencing is also shared by many of the Native Americans that were relocated off the reservation. The similarities are pretty amazing. Loss of familiar touch points are really hard for that pattern matching machine between our ears to reconcile. It is no wonder that the suicide rate in these situations is so high. A lot of people like to think they are free spirits and really don't need a grounding, but I've met very few who actually are. This is why historical preservation is so important to certain groups. Its not really about the past as much as it is patching holes in those still here.

1) although the writing in this article is excellent and captures the feelings well

I feel very sorry for her loss. This article and the NYT one by the Chinese daughter posted a few days back are really hitting me hard. As someone not really raised in the culture of my parents, it saddens me to think that I probably won't give my kids the same "immigrant parent obsessiveness" experience I had growing up (pros and cons of course, but a part of my upbringing I wouldn't change for anything)

I'm lucky enough to still have both my parents - but this has turned out to be one of my favourite articles - coming from a generation so different to my parents (and as a third culture kid to boot, albeit in a crap culture) it resonates very much.

We used to frequent the H Mart near us. It always has a great variety of vegetables at good prices, but for some reason they tend to go bad within a couple of days of purchase. Also, the produce is really only stocked on Saturday and Sunday. The produce mostly seems to be from "Rhee Brothers," which sounds like another Korean business. We now get our vegetables from the new Sprouts.

Their seafood selection is pretty good, though.

It's great to see the mostly Latino produce workers speaking some Korean to the management.

We go to H Mart mainly for their vegetables too, especially leafy green veggies (so many different kinds of choy!). I think leafy greens tend to go bad faster in general, and that's not any indication of H Mart's quality.

Their seafood is so cheap they are the entire reason why I get to eat salmon at all ($3 per pound!).

> Their seafood is so cheap they are the entire reason why I get to eat salmon at all ($3 per pound!).

You can get salmon heads for two or three dollars at most fish markets, you might just have to ask. A large head can easily have a pound of meat. The only trick is figuring out which ones are from the wild salmon, because they often don't separate them out.

You can also usually get belly for a dollar or two a pound. It's kind of a pain to clean, but it makes a great salmon bacon that's pretty good just mixed with a little sauce and thrown over rice. Unfortunately I've never seen these separated out into wild vs farmed, so unless you manage to find a fish market that only sells wild salmon it's probably not safe to eat more than occasionally just due to PCBs.

Salmon head soup is probably my favourite soup. Just simmer a couple of salmon heads, some diced potatoes, some leeks, and onions up, add dill (fresh is best) and optionally some sour cream. When the potatoes have cooked through, remove the heads and pull the meat off them and add it back to the soup.

It's so tasty, but if you told people it was from salmon heads they'd turn their nose up at it. I've never understood (western) people's dislike for offal, I guess it's a poverty thing. At the end of the day, it all came from the same animal. Every time I tell people that pâté is made from livers, they get angry at me for ruining pâté, yet they were happy to eat it a moment ago.

Is it really fair to say western cultures don't like offal? I mean, there's chitlins, tripe, scrapple, head cheese, natural sausage casing, beef shin, pig's trotters, aspic jelly, oxtail, black puddings, the list goes on.

Most of those things aren't actually that common, and are only eaten by a subset of westerners.

Obviously it's a bit different here in Australia to the American South, but if I was to offer up some chitlins/tripe to a group of Anglo-Australians, the vast majority of them wouldn't touch it.

Black pudding and pâté are probably the only two types of offal that people will generally eat here. Black pudding is pretty uncommon though, and people seem to have wilfully forgotten that pâté is made from liver, I've had people stop eating pâté after I've told them it's made from pig/chicken livers.

It’s really a wash: I have to be much more careful with H mart produce but it isn’t always lower quality than the standard grocery stores (when they have the same things at all). I basically have to hit all the grocery stores in my area (H mart, QFC, Safeway) to see who has what at what price, then I wind up buying at H mart 25% of the time. Their produce section isn’t that different from 99 Ranch or uwajimaya in the Seattle area.

Salmon at 3 dollars a pound isn’t that weird at Safeway when they run a sale, I’m a bit worried about the quality though (fresh but farmed vs frozen but wild). I miss the days they used to just toss them off the boats in season when they caught too much.

That was spectacular.

I visit the Burlington, Mass H Mart about once per month with my family. The experience walking the aisles and picking out dried seaweed, dried rice, frozen dumplings, kimchi, instant ramen, and various snacks is part of our kids' bicultural experience. I didn't think about how it may be an important part of their memories of their parents once we are gone.

Thank you for sharing, @wallflower.

You're welcome. It was previously submitted by @starpilot and @laurex a few days prior, and it did not receive the attention that it deserved. Third time was the charm.

There's something very genuine and uplifting about the quiet thankfulness and contemplation here.

Thank you for this post.

There's no crying in H Mart!

H Mart is a gift given by heavenly messengers to bring the concept of flavor to the Upper West Side. There are so many people there who would love to help you, OP. In NYC, everybody's ersatz and everybody's frum. In NYC you are absolutely Korean. It's the city where you can be anything and you can tell anyone who says no, to get the fuck out.

I'm married to a first generation Korean immigrant, and the experiences and descriptions here really resonate strongly as deeply authentic. There's a really special relationship Koreans seem to have with food and the way that Korean parents show love through food seems to be something subtly different than what I've found in other parts of the world. I'm not really sure what else to say but this was awesome. Her band's music is also fantastic [1].

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFKH42R8wak

This was an interesting piece to read as a third generation immigrant who has only the most casual awareness of the culture (Albanian) and a few stories. I’ve occasionally wondered what it would have been like to know more but never really appreciated the downsides.

On a more pleasant note, her music is quite good if you like the style. Search for Japanese Breakfast on the usual streaming services.

My sympathies to the author. Clearly the article comes from a place of grief.

That said, if she wanted to get closer to her culture it shouldn't be that difficult. What about her grandparents? Does she have any Korean friends? What if she dated/married a Korean guy?

Second and third generation immigrants have an interesting relationship with that side of their culture. They predominantly identify as the nationality of the culture they were born into, and sometimes have no direct link to the country their parents or grandparents were born in. I'm very British, but am quite proud of the polish components of my name. My link to the country is tenuous though, beyond the yearly wigila. I was talking to a first generation immigrant recently, who described the piroshki that are traditionally eaten, and I realised my family had been doing it wrong all along. My grandmother is very much alive, yet our tradition had already been warped. That made me a little sad for how far away my heritage really was.

This article isn't about concrete actions or remediations for that feeling. I'm not going to marry a polish person to make sure my piroshki are perfect. It's about the way later generation immigrants naturally drift away from their heritage without noticing, and how that can be upsetting. I didn't notice it happening to me for a long time, and when I did, I didn't feel great.

You don't have to marry a Polish person. What if you participated in more Polish cultural events? Meet some local Poles, take some Polish language classes. It feels like there are plenty of low-barrier things that you could do to help you reconnect with that part of your heritage if it bothers you enough.

As for the article, I'm willing to believe that her fear of missing her connection to her culture is merely a manifestation of her grief at losing her mother. Otherwise, it would sound more like she's a little sad, but not enough to do anything about it. Certainly her call either way, but the latter would make me sad that it made its way into the New Yorker.

I also interpret the article as the author grieving her mother, whose Koreaness is the most distinguishing feature. Had her mother been unique in her love for a particular music genre, for example, the author would have written about walking into a coffee shop playing that kind of music.

If that music were only played in a handful of coffee shops across the nation, and was the defining aspect of those coffee shops, and you could watch people purposefully connect to each other over that music in the same way you used to with your loved one

It's a rough sell, especially because Koreans can be antagonistic to even other Koreans who have lived abroad (as every Korean friend of mine has told me) but if one wants to reconnect, one could always travel back. Especially for Asian cultures, extended families will acknowledge your connection and at least be open to communicating and letting you visit.

Culinary and holiday traditions of Poland do differ from region to region and sometimes even between families due to their pre-ww2 history (which area they were migrated from). So keep that in mind! In many cases there is more than just one way of doing things right.

Korean supermarkets, like H Mart & Lotte, all give me tears of joy. For many people of Asian heritage, these supermarkets offer rare but familiar tastes in the United States. This story reminds me that the meaning of it may be different for Koreans themselves.

I wonder if the author has considered returning to Korea.

Would that be a return, or a visit? I imagine that it could be quite difficult without the language skills.

Poignant article. I'm glad to find it on HN and happy to see an absence of complaints of being irrelevant to tech.

> We’re all searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves.

It is just a feeling of alienation.

TLDR: nostalgia hurt when thinking about a dead parent, or a culture we can no longer fully relate to.

Nostalgia hurt... It's called grief. Grieve for things we can not change, can not fix. Calling it 'just a feeling of alienation'...

This deeply oversimplifies the complexities of life, the deepest tragedies, emotional pain. To lose something so beautiful, and to know it is gone, forever. That is grief that lasts a lifetime. It is a burden oneself must make appear to lighten over time, but, some types of sadness go into one's own core, every fiber and every root of one's own being.

A broken spirit, heart, soul. Through a reminder in the present, the slightest twinge of it trickles through, in the form of a memory, a connection leading to every interwoven emotion. It can be a kind of sadness that feels as though it never mends.

This is not the sort of thing to cover up with pleasantries for the benefit of others. The memory of being completely and totally disconnected from a most defining connections in one's own life - that is a type of suffering everyone can experience, and a kind of suffering everyone should have a deep respect for. It's not just nostalgia, because nostalgia comes back in waves, the attempt to bring back what is lost. Sometimes this works. But the death of a loving, shaping parent, or loss of connection to one's essential culture - that is something that, nothing fills that void entirely. There has to be respect for this. Everyone should have respect for this type of loss.

First, I fully agree with everything you say. It can not be replaced, and it is horrible. I did not write to make a pleasantry. I have empathy for the loss and the sadness.

However, the hurt is mediated by attachment to the past. It is not possible to alter the past, but its interpretation is more vulnerable.

I am only trying to share a way: recognizing it is due to attachment. Then it only becomes nostalgia which can only really hurt by the sense of alienation. It becomes "easier" to handle.

I remind of the taste of the cooking by my mother and grandmother - a taste that I am unable to replicate - or even even name the dishes. My mother lamented than I prefer english to her native tongue. It is all true.

I just chose to lessen the hurt by detaching myself from the past.

I'm sorry for your losses.

My grandfather was an artist. Art is always sadness to me. Even my photography. The flavor of sadness, I've experienced a variety of these.

I don't know if this comes through in all of my art, but, that's me. Art, sadness. I suppose I detach from it by making art.

Thanks. We have talked a few time here. Always a pleasure to exchange words with you.

I hope that you will eventually be able to feel your art in a new way- not as sadness, but as the hope it inspires for those who do benefit from it.

Maybe some Metta Bhavana will help you feel and connect to the persons you positively inspire? like me here on hn, or the others who replied to you.

> Thanks. We have talked a few time here. Always a pleasure to exchange words with you.

Thank you, I feel the same.

> I hope that you will eventually be able to feel your art in a new way- not as sadness, but as the hope it inspires for those who do benefit from it.

Me too.

> Maybe some Metta Bhavana will help you feel and connect to the persons you positively inspire? like me here on hn, or the others who replied to you.

Thank you, Theravāda is something I've only studied briefly, but it is oriented similarly to my study of Mayahana Buddhism and Zen Buddhism.

Losing someone you love to the finality of death is the most intense experience I have ever had.

I related to many parts of this; losing touch with things or ideas you connected with your person can feel like a new grief yet.

In a larger sense, one’s place and perspective in the world or the universe has been permanently displaced, and one is left trying to make sense of an absurd existence littered with traces of the one you love.

Very well said. The 30 minutes after my Dad passed from cancer were overwhelming. I explain it as having all the good emotions turned off and all the bad ones turned up to 11. Like when you’re at a concert and it’s so loud that your ears start buzzing from the overload.

I’m used to the world without him now but I feel the same irrational frustration as the author seeing people the age he would be now and thinking “why did you get to live and he didn’t?” There are so many things I would like for him to have seen, things that he wanted for me that came true.

It’s strange how some of the grief never leaves and pops up unexpected. I got all teary watching Field of Dreams after probably 25 years...a fun movie when I was a kid but as a grown up the tension between fathers and sons.

I'm sorry for your loss.

If you did not see "Big Fish" when it came out in 2003, I highly recommend it as it is one of the best movies that I have seen that explores the relationship between a father and son.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rziFIdDjfHo

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt000319061/

EDIT: On second thought. This movie might be a bit too heavy/close to home for you or others who have lost their father to watch, but the recommendation still stands for others.

Touching elegy.

It's striking how difficult it is for the children of transplants in the US to preserve (and pass along) the family language and traditions. There're communtities, there's a diaspora, books etc, yet somehow the whole aversion to 'accented' English may be off-putting to the youngsters that it stops them from fully absorbing their parents culture and language, turning it in all but a nuissance of 'old-folks'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com