The Language of Grief, the Language of Food

On Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

Some books don’t just tell a story; they sit inside you, altering the texture of how you remember, taste, and grieve. Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart is one of those books.

When I first read it, what struck me wasn’t only the grief, though that pulse is steady throughout, it was how grief moved through ordinary details, a bowl of rice, the tang of kimchi, the silence at a kitchen table, etc. I highlighted the ways grief isn't just in the final goodbyes or a hospital room, but how it's also in the textures of daily life, in the way food carries memory, in the way language both connects and separates us from the people we love, and how it is often messy and nonlinear.

Zauner writes about her mother with a kind of honesty that refuses neatness. The love is fierce, but so is the pain, the misunderstandings, the sharpness of expectations. What stayed with me was how she doesn’t flatten her mother into a saint or a villain; she lets her be a full person, complicated, frustrating, and deeply loved, and that felt truer to the reality of grief. We do not only mourn what was gentle or kind. We also mourn the conflicts, the silences, the things unresolved, and in this book, that felt devastatingly true.

Food becomes the language of that grief, and the memoir is filled with scenes where meals become memory. Cooking isn’t just nourishment, it’s survival, ritual, communion. Each dish is a way of keeping her mother present, of speaking when words fall short. Reading those passages, I realized how powerful the smallest sensory details can be. I kept thinking of the way she describes shopping at H Mart, how aisles of groceries turn into a kind of memorial. Each ingredient holds a history, a reminder of meals shared, of lessons taught in the kitchen. Food here isn’t background, it’s testimony, an archive of care.

The book also lingers on language, on the gaps between English and Korean, on how fluency in one doesn’t make up for distance in the other. Zauner shows how language can both bind and estrange, how not knowing the right word can wound, how hearing the familiar sound of a mother tongue can comfort. The grief here is not only the grief of losing a person but of losing worlds of expression, of realizing what words you never got to say, and yet, even in those gaps, she finds ways of carrying her mother forward, through music, through memory, through food.

Crying in H Mart is not a book that rushes resolution. It dwells in what cannot be fixed. It honors the truth that grief doesn’t close neatly, doesn’t follow a linear path. There’s no triumphant healing, only a reshaping of how to carry what’s been lost, and yet, the book is filled with love, not the sentimental kind, but love that is gritty, messy, alive. Love that is sometimes harsh in its demands but steady in its presence.

This wasn’t a book I moved on from quickly. I finished it and found myself thinking about Zauner’s descriptions of rice, of silence at the kitchen table, of hair washed with care. How those details can summon someone back more vividly than any grand story. How inheritance is carried less in grand gestures and more in fragments of intimacy. It reminded me that grief is not just a memory, it’s a practice, a ritual, an ongoing act of carrying, and sometimes, all it takes is a taste, a scent, or a gesture to bring the person you love back into the room.

Until we meet again.