Crying in H Mart + If I Had Your Face
Do you ever feel like you’re in the version of the world where the really bad things just didn’t happen? Like, you were vacuuming out the electric wall heater in your apartment and the old frayed wiring touched some metal casing and the unexpected spark that blew a fuse and left a massive scorch-mark on the wall definitely should have stopped your heart, but you’re here writing about it so clearly it didn’t?
Or…something like that? Are there, like, a bunch of other possible timelines you don’t know about–because you’d be unalived in them–so matter how unlikely it was that you’d survive, the world where you did survive is the one your consciousness right now continues to inhabit?
Crying in H Mart did that for me. Not that I was a narrow survivor of inevitable tragedy, but that I fell into a world where memoirs made sense to read. I don’t really like them. I didn’t think H Mart was a memoir; I remember reading the cover and can specifically recall seeing the font where it says a memoir and believing that it said a novel. Pure Mandela effect. I would have dropped it the moment I internalized–in this timeline, anyway–that it truly was a memoir except that I started it when my mom was visiting. If you don’t know Crying in H Mart’s basic premise, it’s the absolute soul-crush of watching your mom die of cancer. My mom survived cancer herself (twice): plowing through someone else’s mom-loss while I am still so lucky to still have mine, and within my physical reach for only the second time since 2020, felt like the correct thing to do.
The author is a musician, as well as a strong writer. As someone who spent years attributing literary heft to lyrics—I wrote my undergrad thesis on the intersection of Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet and Beck’s Sea Change (and once flunked a Intro to Shakespeare paper because I wrote about Hamlet as seen through El-P’s song T.O.J., which i thought was a groundbreaking revelation but the title of the song is literally time out of joint, a famous line from Hamlet that I thought I had uncovered)—digging into a real musician’s actual personal history felt both invigorating and unnerving. I left H Mart with its text scrawled across my heart.
In less bleak terms, the author brought me back to my late teens and early twenties in ways I didn’t think were possible anymore:
Bigger bands played the McDonald Theatre, where I saw Modest Mouse and crowd surfed for the first time, spending a good thirty seconds on the edge of the stage beforehand to ensure someone in the front row would in fact catch me when I jumped. Isaac Brock was like a god to us. There was a rumor that his cousin lived in the next town over, in the trailer park that the song “Trailer Trash” is about, and this potential proximity made him all the more relatable–someone we could call our own. Everyone I knew had somehow memorized every word to his sprawling, hundred-track catalog, including the songs from his side projects and B-sides, coveted albums we were constantly trying to track down to burn and slip into the plastic sleeves of our CD binders. His lyrics epitomized what it felt like to grow up in a small gray town in the Pacific Northwest. What it was like to suffocate slowly from the boredom. His swelling eleven-minute opuses and cathartic, blood-curdling screams soundtracked every long drive with nothing to think about.
“Every long drive with nothing to think about:” if that doesn’t encapsulate exurban ennui around the turn of the millennium, I don’t know what does.
After H Mart, I rolled right into If I Had Your Face based on a friend’s recommendation; I had no idea there would be any amount of young-women-sometimes-in-Seoul overlap. The one-two punch of Korea (in fairness it was a triple-whammy because I also watched Single’s Inferno, a rad Korean dating show, with my wife) sent my whole family on a bike trip down to the closest H Mart for some jajangmyeon and general Korea vibes. Otherwise, these books have very little in common, but temporal coincidence and personal necessity have married them in my mind.
Your Face was really great in a soft nightmare kind of way. It’s a really well-paced story that had the general dread of a Gone Girl without relying on a Shamalanyian twist. It made me nostalgic for NYC in a weird making-fun-of-Tisch way, which I always appreciate.
Your Face pushed me, page by page, to unearth its secrets. Each character was so wholly removed from anything I’ve ever lived–almost the opposite of H Mart, where any time the author extrapolated a personal point, I couldn’t help put flail my arms and point and say, “Hey, that’s me!”.
The fictional events of Your Face were just wild enough to remain believable and entrancing, but it was H Mart that helped me, page after page, to understand myself and put some events of my life into a context I didn’t even know existed. I didn’t really respect memoirs before Crying in H Mart, but it shifted me into a reality where I am willing to give a few more a chance.