“We’re all searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves. We look for a taste of it in the food we order and the ingredients we buy. Then we separate. We bring the haul back to our dorm rooms or our suburban kitchens, and we re-create the dish that couldn’t be made without our journey. What we’re looking for isn’t available at a Trader Joe’s. H Mart is where your people gather under one odorous roof, full of faith that they’ll find something they can’t find anywhere else.”

Zauner’s description of H Mart sets it apart as a place of cultural contact for many Asian immigrants. For her, it’s more than a grocery store; it is a place to reconnect with and remember her mother, her time in Seoul, and her love of traditional Korean foods.

“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.”

This quote is one of the cornerstones of Zauner’s writing about her mother Chongmi. One of the memoir’s central threads is the journey toward understanding that Zauner undergoes while her mother is ill and after she has passed. Along this journey, Zauner realizes that her mother withheld 10% of herself from her daughter too.

“I came to realize that while I struggled to be good, I could excel at being courageous. I began to delight in surprising adults with my refined palate and disgusting my inexperienced peers with what I would discover to be some of nature’s greatest gifts.”

Zauner’s love of food is wrapped up in a childhood spent attempting to please her mother and her Korean family members, and she depicts it here as one of her fundamental character traits. Her courage allows her to connect with her mother, something that otherwise eluded her thanks to her mother’s strict parenting style.

“I had wound up doing exactly what my mother had warned me not to do. I was floundering in reality, living the life of an unsuccessful artist.”

The most explicit point of strain between Zauner and her mother during Zauner’s teenage years is Zauner’s budding career as a musician. This continues into her post-college time in Philadelphia, and there’s a keen sense of self-consciousness in the way Zauner presents this period of her life; she has internalized her mother’s disappointment.

“The front woman, Karen O, was the first icon of the music world I worshipped who looked like me. […] Agape at the image, I found myself in a strange state of ambivalence. My first thought being how do I get to do that, and my second, if there’s already one Asian girl doing this, then there’s no longer space for me.”

Zauner relates a common struggle among minoritized groups in America: The lack of representation they see in popular culture can result in the belief that anyone who shares their cultural or racial traits is taking up the space that they themselves might occupy, which is bolstered by a long history of tokenism in the entertainment industry.

“I envied and feared my mother’s ability to keep matters private, as every secret I tried to hold close ate away at me. She possessed a rare talent for keeping secrets, even from us. She did not need anyone. She could surprise you with how little she needed you. All those years she instructed me to save 10 percent of myself like she did, I never knew it meant she had also been keeping a part of herself from me too.”

Zauner’s realization here comes from the cruel revelation that her mother had an abortion, which she explains as Zauner’s fault for being such a bad child. Particularly when their relationship is difficult, this sense of distance has a profound effect on Zauner’s concept of her mother.

“When I slipped them on I discovered they’d already been broken in. My mother had worn them around the house for a week, smoothing the hard edges in two pairs of socks for an hour every day, molding the flat sole with the bottom of her feet, wearing in the stiffness, breaking the tough leather to spare me all the discomfort.”

Despite their tense relationship during Zauner’s teenage years, Chongmi continued to demonstrate her love and devotion through acts of kindness like this one. This detail of the gifts Zauner received in college resonates as an act of tenderness and sacrifice from a woman who often seemed cold in the moment.

“All the Korean moms took on the names of their children. Jiyeon’s mom was Jiyeon’s umma. Esther’s mom was Esther’s umma. I never learned any of their real names. Their identities were absorbed by their children.”

The symbolic nature of this common practice is not lost on Zauner, who realizes how deeply important and meaningful being a mother was to Chongmi.

“‘You don’t know what it’s like to be the only Korean girl at school,’ I sounded off to my mother, who stared back at me blankly.

‘But you’re not Korean,’ she said. ‘You’re American.’”

A central tension of Zauner’s identity is her struggle with the Korean parts of her identity and where she fits within Korean and American culture. This anecdote gets at the root of the problem: Zauner is trapped in a liminal identity in which she feels she is too Korean for the kids at school but not Korean enough to fully be part of her mother’s culture.

“I could never be of both worlds, only half in and half out, waiting to be ejected at will by someone with greater claim than me. Someone full. Someone whole. For a long time I had tried to belong in America, wanted and wished for it more than anything, but in that moment all I wanted was to be accepted as a Korean by two people who refused to claim me.”

Zauner is heartbroken by the way her mother and Kye speak Korean around her and shut her out of preparing Korean foods because she feels like her Korean American identity is keeping her from fulfilling the caretaking duties that she sees as her responsibility. Further, she feels like she cannot connect with her mother on her own terms and like she is being forced to go through the intermediary of Kye.

“Twenty-four chemotherapy treatments later, Eunmi died on Valentine’s Day. A cosmically cruel fate for a woman who’d never known love. Her last words were ‘Where are we going?’”

This history of Eunmi’s long struggle with cancer and death informs Chongmi’s decision to stop treatment. She watched her sister suffer for an extended period and still die young and alone; Eunmi’s last words are a question that resonates with the perceived purposelessness of her suffering.

“There was no one in the world that was ever as critical or could make me feel as hideous as my mother, but there was no one, not even Peter, who ever made me feel as beautiful. Deep down I always believed her.”

Zauner’s desire to have her mother at her wedding is a natural one, but this quote further clarifies what it means for her. Her mother’s sternness and blunt perfectionism, which Zauner struggled with throughout her life, has created a bond that Zauner is only beginning to truly understand.

“‘When you were a child, you always used to cling to me. Everywhere we went,’ my mother whispered, struggling to get the words out. ‘And now that you’re older, here you are—still clinging to me.’”

Zauner and her mother watching television together in bed is a beautiful understated moment that also serves as a thematic thesis for the memoir as a whole: Zauner continues to cling to her mother after she’s gone, first by making music about her and then by writing about their relationship.

“Her art was the love that beat on in her loved ones, a contribution to the world that could be just as monumental as a song or a book. There could not be one without the other. Maybe I was just terrified that I might be the closest thing she had to leaving a piece of herself behind.”

After her mother’s passing, Zauner starts to understand the value of being a homemaker, which she had often scorned as a waste. Here she sees that the effort her mother put into raising her made way for Zauner’s own talents to emerge, and she is reckoning with the significance of who she will be now that her mother’s work is finished.

“I’ve just never met someone like you, as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. […] 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, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.”

For Zauner, the crux of the tragedy of her mother’s death is centered around the idea that they were just starting to understand each other beyond their fraught history as mother and daughter. Now Zauner must interpret and represent who her mother was without the context of the woman herself.

“There are few things I detest more in this world than an adult man proclaiming himself to be a foodie, much less my own father dragging me in to share the title when only moments before he had asked me if I’d ever heard of a ceviche.”

Beyond enacting a common millennial trope (criticizing the inauthenticity of “foodie” culture), Zauner also emphasizes how she and her father are different. Her expertise and understanding of Asian flavors is nuanced and buoyed by years of personal history, and she sees his dilettantish behavior as both embarrassing and as a testament to how little they are connected to each other.

“I got to thinking he really had been cheated his whole life in a way I had never experienced and could maybe never comprehend. Cheated out of a childhood, out of a father, and now he’d been cheated again, robbed of the woman he loved just a few years shy of their final chapter.”

This passage contains a rare moment of sympathy for Zauner’s father, as their relationship struggles under the strain of caretaking and grief during Chongmi’s cancer, which is complicated by Zauner’s realization that he was not a present father earlier in their relationship. She understands what he is going through and how his family history shaped him, but that is not enough for her to forgive him or release her resentment over their impersonal relationship.

“My mother once told me about a time when Nami went to see a fortune teller. She was told she was like a giving tree. Her destiny was to shelter and to nurture, to stand calm and tall and shade whomever lay beneath, but at her base, there would always be a little axe, slowly striking at her trunk, slowly wearing her away.”

This portrait of Nami embodies the anxiety Zauner feels about being connected to her aunt after her mother’s death. She believes she might be asking too much, serving as the little axe in the story that is taking from Nami without providing anything in return.

“My first word was Korean: Umma. Even as an infant, I felt the importance of my mother. She was the one I saw most, and on the dark edge of emerging consciousness I could already tell that she was mine. In fact, she was both my first and second words: Umma, then Mom. I called to her in two languages. Even then I must have known that no one would ever love me as much as she would.”

Zauner is skilled at taking common childhood occurrences and drawing out both the universal and the specific meaning within them. Here, rather than reiterating the bifurcated Korean American identity that troubles her, Zauner’s bilingual childhood reflects a doubling of need and meaning.

“Every dish I cooked exhumed a memory. Every scent and taste brought me back for a moment to an unravaged home.”

This is the power of cooking the traditional Korean foods of Zauner’s childhood: She can travel to happier times and keep the memory of her mother alive as she would want to be remembered.

“She was my champion, she was my archive. She had taken the utmost care to preserve the evidence of my existence and growth, capturing me in images, saving all my documents and possessions. She had all knowledge of my being memorized. […] She observed me with unparalleled interest, inexhaustible devotion.”

When Zauner discovers the photographs that her mother kept, she sees the value of motherhood fully, and the true weight of her mother’s impact on her is clear. The fact that these photos are packaged in Chongmi’s kimchi fridge lends the moment additional poignancy, as making kimchi is one way Zauner works to honor and preserve her mother’s memory.

“For the first time it occurred to me that what she sought in my face might be fading. I no longer had someone whole to stand beside, someone to make sense of me. I feared whatever contour or color it was that signified that precious half was beginning to wash away, as if without my mother, I no longer had a right to those parts of my face.”

Reckoning with resemblance to one’s parents is a common concern of aging and grieving their loss. For Zauner, there is the added significance of losing the part of her that she most overtly identifies with, which is her Korean heritage. She feels as though, with her mother gone, she can no longer claim that as part of her identity.

“I wished that my mother could see me, could be proud of the woman I’d become and the career I’d built, the realization of something she worried for so long would never happen. Conscious that the success we experienced revolved around her death, that the songs I sang memorialized her, I wished even more than anything and through all contradiction that she could be there. I took a breath. ‘Annyeonghaseyo!’ I shout into the mic, and we launched into our set.”

Zauner carefully frame the success of her music career in the wake of her mother’s death as the result of her mother’s love. Her mother didn’t understand why music mattered to her, but Zauner demonstrates that she has found a way to honor her mother, even returning to her hometown to play a show. It’s a powerful moment of triumph and healing in the wake of her mother’s illness.

“Dozens of kids left the venue with sleeves of vinyl held under their arms, fanning out into the city streets, my mother’s face on the cover, her hand reaching toward the camera like she’s just let go of the hand of someone below.”

The photo Zauner chooses for the Psychopomp album cover has significance to her. She frames it as though her mother’s hand is letting go of her own, and she frames carrying the album cover to different parts of the city as a remembrance, like the act of spreading a loved one’s ashes.