Food, Identity, and Mourning: Focusing on Crying in H Mart

This paper is an attempt to examine the relationship between Korean food, mourning for the mother, and cultural identity as revealed in the work Crying in H Mart. The work describes the growth of the author, who was born between a Korean mother and an American father and raised in the United States, and the influence of Korean food on her life after experiencing her mother’s death. As a child, the author loved Korean food and the lifestyle of her maternal family members, but as she grew up in the United States and went through adolescence, she rejected the Korean food that was connected to her Korean identity within herself, and rebelled against her mother’s Korean way of parenting, which sought to raise her with conservative and strict educational standards. When she thought she was ready to reconcile with her mother as a college student, she experienced her mother’s sudden death and felt confusion about her identity as a Korean. As Judith Butler points out, because a loved one constitutes part of oneself, mother’s death permanently changes her. She contemplates the making and fermenting of kimchi, which her mother loved, and comes to think about the beginning of a new form of life, realizing that her mother can also live through her, and thus she will live more fiercely and maturely, including her mother’s share.