Tarot Reflections on Crying in the H Mart

I love Target.  It has everything.  Need a quick grocery item? Check.  How about a birthday card?  Done.  And vinyl records?  Yep, with a cheesy Target exclusive Hype Sticker.  Love them.  So, Joe and I often pop into Target to pick up say, frozen DiGiorno pizza, but . . . end up drifting to the vinyl section, which happens to be back to back with the book section.  A few weeks ago, I picked up Japanese Breakfast‘s new album, Jubilee at Target, a fun, poppy, frothy, sugar candy confection of an album.  The next week we again found ourselves in Target’s record department, because of course that’s where you end up when you’re shopping for masking tape, and while Joe was sorting and arranging records, because he can’t look at an unorganized, messy record section, I was looking at the books.  On the endcap was Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart.  I picked it up, because Michelle Zauner is Japanese Breakfast, and it seemed as serendipitous as it can get in a Target.  I read the blurb on the back cover, and discovered, she wasn’t just crying at any H Mart – she was crying at MY H Mart, a few blocks from the very Target were were standing in.  True serendipity, and I bought the book.

 

Crying in H Mart is an exploration of grief, of the connection between food and memories, and of complicated relationships, among other things.  Written after the death of her mother after a six month battle with cancer, Zauner explores their difficult relationship, her mother’s tougher than tough love, and trying to figure out her place among her mother’s expectations and her own desires at the intersection of her Korean heritage and the American landscape in which she found herself shrinking.  How to maintain that connection with her Korean roots without her mother?  H Mart, for so many Koreans, sits at that intersection, the corner of memory and the present, paths that meet over familiar smells, flavors and sounds.  And from that initial essay, Crying in H Mart, that appeared in the New Yorker, Zauner embarked on a difficult journey of sorting out her feelings and how to live in a world without her mother.

Her mother was tough, but I could relate. My mother wasn’t a disciplinarian, or a task master.  It was more subtle than that.  At 15, I went to work in the law office where my mom was a legal secretary.  She was constantly volunteering me for things I didn’t now how to do.  She can answer the switchboard, she can comp medical bills, she can work a dictaphone.  Her answer, after throwing me into the deep end was, learn or drown.  Never say you don’t know how, just figure out it, learn. My mother was tough because she wanted me to be better, to have it better, to excel where she had failed.  But, there was a bit of selfishness in there too – you will bring me naches, she would say.  Yiddishe bragging rights, basically.  I did many a thing I didn’t want to do for the sake of naches.  Michelle’s mother didn’t kiss her boo boo’s when she fell, but rather said, how could you be so clumsy.  When Zauner’s mother says to her, after a defeat, “Save your tears for when your mother dies,” I heard my own mother.  Mothers and daughters have complicated relationships.

I wrote the above in past tense, not because my mother has passed, but because my mother has finally given up trying to guilt me, or motivate me, or whatever.  At 84, she’s passed that.  Oh, once in awhile she’ll give the guilt trip the old college try, but she abandons it pretty quickly.  The book did get me thinking, though, about a world without my mother.  Zauner says in the book, “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.” So, I asked the cards, what’s the world going to feel like without my mother?

Well this will please my mother immensely.  It will feel like a gut punch.  But more than that, a sucker punch.  Because I have been the sucker all along.  Where once I carried one stick, now I’ll carry 9, and that knock out will feel like the weight of the world is sitting on my chest.  Save my tears for my mother, indeed. Someday I will surely find myself crying in the Target over a jar of gefilte fish or a can of matzah ball soup.

Zauner’s mother also gave her this advice:

“Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always “save ten percent of yourself.” What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. “Even from Daddy, I save,” she would add.”

I can see my mother giving me this advice as well.  Protect yourself, always have something to fall back on.

But, is this good advice?  Saving 10% of yourself so you have something to fall back on?

When it comes to decision making, and choices, we can only give our kids the tools, its how the kid uses the tool that makes it good advice or bad advice.

And, then I got to thinking, Zauner was in a few bands before Japanese Breakfast. And, she broke big after the death of her mother, with Pyschopomp, an album about her mother and her grief.  Would the album have been such a breakthrough if she had withheld 10%?  Was it finally putting in that 10% that made the difference? I don’t think Zauner held back 10% in Crying in H Mart.  She was all in, sometimes, as I thought of my own mother, uncomfortably so.  That 10% can really shake a persons comfort level when it comes flying in your face.

Anyway, I asked the cards, can you really create good art, true art, if you hold back 10%?

The cards so no.  If your goal is to be an artist, you had better be prepared to be naked, and to let it all flow.

And there we have it, all of the soul bearing I can take for today.

A note about the deck – I used the vintage Lo Scarabeo Tarot of Reflections, because that’s what Crying in H Mart is, and what reading the memoir caused me to do.  Not only is the memoir a look back, and meditation on how the past influences the present and the future, it’s also seeing your mother as a reflection of yourself – the things you don’t want to become, the things maybe you should want to become, and the questions about what your mother saw, when she saw her reflection in you?  Would she be proud, or as Michelle said in an GMA interview, would she charmingly ask, where’s my handbag now that you’ve made it big?