The Japanese Breakfast frontwoman finds making kimchi is the best way to grieve her tough Korean mother in this droll memoir
“Save your tears for when your mother dies,” is a proverb that singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner heard a lot from her Korean mum, Chongmi, when she was growing up in Eugene, Oregon. Her
Friends had coddling “Mommy-Moms”, always at the ready with a white lie or a verbal affirmation; her own mother, by contrast, provided love tougher than tough. “It was brutal, industrial-strength,” Zauner writes in her first book, a vibrant, soulful memoir that binds her own belated coming-of-age with her mother’s untimely death, and serves up food,
music and, yes, tears alongside insights into identity, grief and the primal intensity of the mother-daughter bond.
While she wasn’t about to whisk Zauner off to hospital when she fell out of a tree – or, indeed, help her up – Chongmi showed her maternal devotion in other ways. Chief among these was sharing the joy she found in food, and Zauner early on hit on eating as a way of basking in her approval. Biennial trips to visit her grandmother in Seoul were full of opportunities to flaunt her precocious palate, gobbling down everything from spicy soups and exotic banchan side dishes to octopus tentacles still pulsing with life. “This is how I know you’re a true Korean,” her mother would tell her.