Kimchi therapy. “Save your tears for when your mother is dead. » Michelle Zauner hated this sentence, as any child hoping to be consoled for a fall, a heartbreak or a bad dream would have hated it. Then the day came when she regretted not hearing him anymore. On October 18, 2014, Chongmi died of cancer at the age of 56. Michelle was 25, an age that, as her mother kept telling her, “promises to be memorable”.
Singer and guitarist of the indie pop group Japanese Breakfast, the author, born to an American father and a Korean mother, has always felt closer to the latter, despite the cultural, generational and linguistic divide. which prevented them from understanding each other. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”Chongmi even admitted to him, taken aback by the choices of her daughter who, with her university diploma in hand, had favored a “broke artist’s life”. Michelle had tried to erase her Korean identity since she was asked as a teenager if she was Chinese or Japanese, until she found strength in this identity to overcome grief.
Crying at the supermarket opens with the image of a young woman in tears in the shelves of H Mart, an American chain of Asian supermarkets where her mother used to shop. “When I go to H Mart, it’s not for the cuttlefish or spring onions for a dollar for three bunches; I look for my childhood there; proof that the Korean in me is not dead. » Korean cuisine imbues the story with its spicy and sweet and sour flavors, while throughout the pages a filial relationship is revealed that the illness will consolidate. When the diagnosis was announced, Michelle returned to Oregon to care for Chongmi alongside her father. Helpless in the face of the rapid progression of cancer, they are soon helped by Kye, a friend of the couple. To please her mother, Michelle prepares Korean specialties for her, to which Chongmi prefers the dishes concocted by Kye. “I was wondering if I should explain to him how important it was to me”Michelle asks, jealous to see that Kye knows how to meet her mother’s needs better than her. “That cooking my mother’s meals now represented a reversal of the roles I was destined to take on. That food was a nonverbal language between us, our connection, our common ground. » To give her mother another horizon than illness and chemotherapy, the young woman decides to propose to her boyfriend. “Instead of ruminating about blood thinners and Fentanyl, we could talk about Chiavari chairs, macaroons and pumps. […] A reason to fight, a celebration to project yourself into. »
If the author describes her mother’s agony without looking away, her story is also that of an intimate reconciliation, of the celebrated memory of the beings sharing our existence. Tender and offbeat, his words testify to an unconditional love which mirrors the relationship we have with those close to us. What do we know about those around us? After the death of her mother, during her honeymoon in Seoul, Michelle discovers that this hated phrase (“Save your tears for when your mother is dead”) was not “a particularly cruel saying” but an injunction with which “rebellious mother” had herself been rebuffed, and which she had unconsciously passed on to him as an inheritance.
Michelle Zauner
Crying at the supermarket
Bourgois
Edition: 12,000 copies.
Price: €22; 320 p.
ISBN: 9782267048919
){kind=link}