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121 " Sometimes my grief feels as though I've been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I'm colliding with a wall that won't give. There's no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again. "
― Michelle Zauner , Crying in H Mart
122 " By the time Iwas in high school, the desire for independence trailing a convoy ofinsidious hormones had transformed me from a child who couldn’t bear tosleep without her mother into a teenager who couldn’t stand her touch. "
123 " I stopped posing with the peace sign in photos, fearing I looked like an Asian tourist. When my peers started dating, I developed a complex that the only reason someone would like me was if they hadyellow fever, and if they didn’t like me, I tortured myself over whether itwas because of the crude jokes boys in my class would make about Asianshaving sideways pussies and loving you long time "
124 " While she never actually taught me how to cook (Korean people tend to disavow measurements and supply only cryptic instructions along the lines of “add sesame oil until it tastes like Mom’s”), she did raise me with a distinctly Korean appetite. "
125 " Not quite my mother and not quite her sister, we existed in that moment as each other’s next best thing. "
126 " There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again. "
127 " Even as she was dying, my mother offered me solace, her instinct to nurture overwhelming any personal fear she might have felt but kept expertly hidden. She was the only person in the world who could tell me that things would all work out somehow. The eye of the storm, a calm witness to the wreckage spinning out into its end. "
128 " I wonder how many people at H Mart miss their families. How many are thinking of them as they bring their trays back from the different stalls. If they’re eating to feel connected, to celebrate these people through food. Which ones weren’t able to fly back home this year, or for the past ten years? Which ones are like me, missing the people who are gone from their lives forever? "
129 " I’m just waiting for you to give this up,” she said. "
130 " we existed in that moment as each other’s next best thing. "
131 " what procellous awesomeness does not in you abound "
132 " When one person collapses, the other instinctively shoulders the weight "
133 " Over time our conversations became a lot like explaining a movie to someone who has walked in on the last thirty minutes. "
134 " If I’m being honest, there’s a lot of anger. I’m angry at this old Korean woman I don’t know, that she gets to live and my mother does not, like somehow this stranger’s survival is at all related to my loss. "
135 " Back at home, I called again to have her walk me through the process, frustrated that her instructions were always so convoluted, even when it came to making rice. “What do you mean put my hand on top of the rice and add water until it covers it?” “Put water in until water covers your hand!” “Covers my hand? Covers my hand until where?” “Until it covers the top of your hand!” I held the phone against my shoulder, my left hand submerged under water, laid flat on the surface of the white rice. “How many cups is that?” “Honey, I don’t know, Mommy doesn’t use cup! "
136 " Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it. Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again. "
137 " It’s a beautiful, holy place. A cafeteria full of people from all over the world who have been displaced in a foreign country, each with a different history. "
138 " We sit here in silence, eating our lunch. But I know we are all here for the same reason. 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. "
139 " But as a teenager newly obsessed with my own search for a calling, I found it impossible to imagine a meaningful life without a career or at least a supplemental passion, a hobby. Why did her interests and ambitions never seem to bubble up to the surface? "
140 " It didn’t matter that she couldn’t translate the chapters into English—her voice was elastic and could swing seamlessly from the cackle of an evil queen to the catchphrase of the resolute heroine, then quiver words of caution from a useless sidekick and resolve with a dashing prince’s gallant coo. "
