![]() In some ways I value that now because it makes me look at myself critically. They don’t deserve you.” My mom’s reaction would be, “What did you do? Anyone can hold a tray.” Everything was always my fault. When I got fired from a job, she’d say something like: “That’s crazy. Like, my husband’s mom is a coddling kind of mother. I never witnessed my friends enduring that type of thing. How? I mean, she had this blunt honesty that felt exquisitely cruel at times. Scott Legato/Getty ImagesĮarlier you said your mom’s affection was so different from the affection shown by your peers’ parents. Michelle Zauner performing with her band, Japanese Breakfast, in Atlanta in April. Something like Jhumpa Lahiri’s “In Other Words.” I love the idea of just observing, developing language skills. I’d like to move to Korea for a year and document that process and the funny idiosyncrasies of a specific language. A natural jumping-off point from “Crying in H Mart” is to study Korean. So part of me is interested in writing a book that’s rooted in the present. The most difficult part of writing the book was that I don’t feel like I’m someone with a great memory, which you need for memoir. You know the famous idea that musicians’ first albums are good because they spend their whole lives writing the songs and then the second albums aren’t as good because the songs all had to be written quickly? Maybe this is a stretch, but are you finding anything similar about the prospect of writing a follow-up to “Crying in H Mart”? No, I’m dying to! My creative life has been so raw and personal that I would like to do something more analytical. This is a story, and I happen to be Asian American. This doesn’t have to be a specifically Asian American story. And this book has universal themes about mothers and daughters and grief and food and memory. But it’s also insulting, because I would like to believe that the success of this book is because I’m allowed to be a main character for the first time in the world. There’s weird guilt and heavy feelings about that. I’m sure there were a number of Black authors that also experienced this during the Black Lives Matter movement. There are some people who feel like woke readers want to support Asians.Īnd so they’re buying “Crying in H Mart” out of solidarity? Yeah. What’s been less gratifying to learn from people about the book? I think they don’t even mean it, but I find it offensive when people think that the book has been successful because of the attacks on Asian Americans, because of anti-Asian hate. It wasn’t until after she died that I was able to realize how different her love and affection was from my peers’ parents’ love and affection. I was so angry at my mom for so much of my life, and I was just starting to get to this wonderful place with her when she got sick. We had no reference point for why we were so at odds and how to manage our cultural divide and probably not even realizing that it was a cultural divide. That’s why it was so challenging for my mother and me to figure out. I just did an interview with the Korean press, and a lot of times they ask me, Why do you think that your book is so successful? I feel like part of it is that this kind of relationship hasn’t been showcased before. Well, I can say that the most gratifying thing to learn from other people about the book is that it shined a light on a different type of parental affection. What have those questions revealed to you about other people’s assumptions about Asian Americans? It’s such a diffuse category. I read an interview where you said that as a musician you tend to get a ton of “What’s it like to be a girl in music?” questions, but now, after “Crying in H Mart,” the cliché questions are about racial identity. “This kind of validation makes life a lot easier.” “For a long time, and maybe still in some part of me, I felt like I had to have a backup job,” says Zauner, who is currently working on the screenplay for a film adaptation of her book and will be touring with Japanese Breakfast this summer. The book, about food and memory, the confusion that can come with biracial identity, Zauner’s fraught relationship with her hyper-demanding Korean mother and then her grief at losing her mother to cancer, has stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for more than 40 weeks. Under the nom-de-band Japanese Breakfast, Zauner, who is 33, has released three albums of dreamy alternative pop, including last year’s critically acclaimed “Jubilee.” That effort came close on the heels of her memoir, “Crying in H Mart,” which was not only an artistic triumph - artfully observed and emotionally rich - but a surprise runaway best seller. Michelle Zauner, improbably, has done both. Finding success as a memoirist is equally unlikely. ![]() The odds are against making a career as an indie musician.
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