Book review: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zuner

• Notable quotes from the book

My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line-generational, cultural, linguistic-we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other's expectations.

I remembered these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it. She remembered if you liked your stews with extra broth, if you were sensitive to spice, if you hated tomatoes, if you didn't eat seafood, if you have a large appetite. She remembered which banchan side dish you emptied first so the next time you were over it'd be set with a heaping double portion, served alongside the various other preferences that made you, you.

"Stop crying! Save your tears for when your mother dies。” This was a common proverb in my household. In place of the English idioms my mother never learned, she coined a few of her own. "Mommy is the only one who will tell you the truth, because Mommy is the only one who ever truely love you." Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always "save ten percent of yourself." What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. "Even from Daddy, I save," she would add.

....She felt Americans were overly cautions and overly medicated and had instilled this belief in me from a young age, so much so that when Peter got food poisoning from a bad can of tuna and his mother suggested I take him to urgent care, I actually had to stifle a laugh. In my household, there was nothing to do for food poisoning except threw it up. Food poisoning was a rite of passage. You couldn't expect to eat well without taking a few risks, and we suffered the consequences twice a year.