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This week on the podcast, we're joined by Michelle Zauner, most known as indie pop musician Japanese Breakfast, and whose memoir, Crying in H Mart, was released April 20. Michelle, who is Korean on her mother's side, centers her the book around her relationship with her mother—describing the foods that brought them together, their rituals on mother-daughter trips to Korea every other summer, and how she experienced the grief that came with her mother's cancer diagnosis. Listen in to hear her recount those summertime trips from her home in Oregon to visit her aunts and grandmother in Seoul and how she developed love for Korean cooking. Plus, she tells us about her love for Maangchi cooking videos on Youtube, the first dishes she'll eat when she gets back to Korea post-pandemic, and what she misses most about touring with Japanese Breakfast. (The short answer? All of it.)
Thanks to Michelle for joining us. Find her book, Crying in H Mart, at your local bookstore or at Bookshop.org, and pre-order Japanese Breakfast's sophomore album, Jubliee, here. As always, thanks to Brett Fuchs for engineering and mixing this episode. As a reminder, you can listen to new episodes of Women Who Travel on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, every Wednesday.
All products featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Read a full transcription below.
Meredith Carey: Hi, everyone. You're listening to Women Who Travel, a podcast from Conde Nast Traveler. I'm Meredith Carey and with me, as always, is my co-host Lale Arikoglu.
LA: Hello.
MC: This week, we're so excited to be joined by author and musician Michelle Zauner, also known as Japanese Breakfast. Her latest album comes out at the start of the summer, but today she's here to talk about Crying in H Mart, her new must-read memoir about family, identity, travel, food, love and grief over the loss of her mother to cancer in 2014. Thanks so much for chatting with us today, Michelle.
MZ: Thank you for having me.
LA: So both of us have torn through the book and it is really beautiful. And as Meredith said, she just listed off a grocery list of topics we're going to talk about. I want to start with, there are many parts in the book where you look back on your childhood trips to Korea with your mum. How do you think those experiences shaped you as you were growing up?
MZ: I think they shaped me quite a great deal especially because I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, which is a smaller town in the Pacific Northwest. And I also was raised largely outside of town in a house in the woods as an only child without many neighboring children. I had a very lonely childhood. So going to Seoul was such an exciting experience for me, not just because it's such a different world to travel to Asia as a young kid—or even as an adult—but also just being in an urban environment was such an exciting thing for me. And I think it granted me with a certain type of courageousness that traveling was never really... To a lot of families traveling is a foreign, scary thing, and it was always a very normalized thing in my household.
MC: We've talked about on the podcast before that traveling to visit your family is often different than traveling for vacation. How did that play out in how you traveled as a kid?
MZ: I think that some people who haven't traveled very often will become a different person when they travel in this way, where they do very [non-]normal things they would never do in their home country. Suddenly it gets a weird free pass when they don't speak the language somewhere. I don't know. I feel like there's so much frantic anxiety that can come with travel [but] I felt having grown up visiting a foreign country essentially every other summer, it felt very natural to me.
So it was never an intimidating thing to do. And I feel like I was just able to be very open to new cultural experiences and not alarmed by them. I know some people with a lot of anxiety about traveling to places where they don't speak the language and I've always felt this semi-belonging to a place in which I don't even speak the language because I had so much family there, and it just felt inherently a part of me that that was never an anxiety-inducing experience for me.
LA: I say this from experience because my dad's Turkish, but it's a funny perk of having a parent that is from a different country from the one that you're raised in, because you do just get this door opened for you to this whole other country and set of experiences. And, at least for me as a kid, I didn't actually realize how great that was until way after the fact. Do you think you were aware of how exciting it was when those trips were taking place?
MZ: I definitely found them to be truly delightful. I really loved getting the opportunity to visit my family. I loved my family so much. I loved Korea. But I don't think I realized how lucky I was especially as a Korean American kid. Now that I have spoken to a lot more Korean American people, I realize that that's a real luxury to get to go to Asia every other summer. It's a pretty expensive trip and even a lot of full Korean people don't get to do that so often. So I'm really lucky that I got to have that experience. And I think I appreciated it as a kid, but not to the full extent that I do now.
MC: You write in the book so fondly about what you did and what you ate and who you were with when you're on these trips. What do you feel like those trips—or even just being in Korea for the amount of time that you were there—what do you feel like it gave you that you weren't able to find in rural Eugene?
MZ: There was definitely a very tight-knit family of women. I felt very coddled there, in a way that was so exciting for me. I grew up in a house in the woods with five acres, and my bedroom was on the second floor so I had an entire floor there. I could not see anyone. And if my parents were leaving me alone, I was really left to my own devices. And then in Korea I would stay in a three-bedroom apartment with my grandmother and my two aunts, and my cousin who had a little closet room. And then my mom and I would sleep on a futon in the living room. I just loved being around all of these women. I come from such a small family. It's just my mom and my dad and myself. So just being with a tight-knit family that had a larger number of people in close quarters was just so exciting for me.
And of course, we were like guests but we were family so we got treated so well. We were always getting whisked away to new restaurants and trying new things. They felt a real responsibility to entertain us. And especially as a young kid, I had my cousin who was only a few years older than me that would take me to the stationery store, to the arcade. I was just very doted on in this way that any kid would have adored at that age.
LA: One thing that really comes across in the book and through your other writing is how much food really was a connective tissue between you and your mother, and also it seems your whole family. Was it a conscious effort to weave so much of that food writing into the book? And, I guess, did the memoir come first or did the food come first?
MZ: So I always knew that food was going to be a major thematic vehicle for the book. The book started largely in 2016. I guess the seed of the idea was this is very obviously a real experience that I had where I was working as a sales assistant for an advertising company and I was just really unsatisfied, and I would get home at 8:00 p.m. and even though I'd been working all day, just felt like I didn't do anything at all. I'd never written nonfiction before and I was having this experience with this YouTube vlogger named Maangchi. And I just thought it was a really cute story. It was like a Korean Julie and Julia situation. The only thing that was giving me real joy during this time was I would go to Flushing, [New York,] to buy my Korean groceries at H Mart, maybe once a week. And then I would watch a new Maangchi YouTube video and it was just a great comfort to me. I wanted to just write an ode to this woman who I just never met and had come to mean so much to me. I submitted that essay to a bunch of food blogs and every writing contest without an entry fee, and no one wanted it for nine months. And then eventually I got an email from Glamour magazine that I had won their essay of the year for 2016. But then to get in the magazine, they had to cut a good maybe two thirds of it or something to fit.
And that was the first feeling that there was a lot more to say there, that there was this whole six months of my life in which so much had happened. And I really wanted to get into that and that had opened the door. And then around that time, my first record Psychopomp started to really take off and the band got to go on tour for two years, and I scheduled six weeks off in Seoul after the tour was over and I casually, but very seriously, spent six weeks writing out what an outline of the book could look like. And it was always going to be my memories of food, my childhood memories of food.
The first line of the book is, “Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.” That was pretty early on, I think. And I think I just set out to ask the question, “Why? Why do I cry in this grocery store? Why has it come to mean so much to me? Why did I gravitate towards food?” And then the rest of the book is just investigating all the different reasons that might have happened. And some of that is this childhood that was very rich with food, and growing up with two cultures, and getting to visit and travel to Korea and eat all the great things over there—and also establishing myself pretty early on as an adventurous eater.
And then there was also this part of the book where I felt really confronted by this woman who came to live with us and barred me from the kitchen in a way. It made me question if I really did know that much about Korean food or Korean culture, if I really did fit in this place that I always felt like I inherently belonged in a way. And I think that psychologically there was the sense of undoing the failures that I felt as a caretaker, that I wasn't able to be the person who was able to prepare the dishes that my mom really needed the way that this woman could. And so I think that was what I was investigating. I think that all of those are different reasons why I turned to Korean cooking in a way. And so I always knew that it was going to be a really big part of the book.
MC: When you were taking your first trips with your mom, is there any food that you really remember loving from those first trips when you were a kid?
MZ: The dish that comes to mind first is, whenever we would land in Korea and then we would drive sometimes, I think, two hours in traffic from Incheon Airport, we would get into my aunt's apartment and they would always call for this Chinese-Korean delivery, which is a really big delivery food item there. And jajangmyeon are these black bean noodles that are just super savory, and there's pork and lots of onions and these noodles. And we would get that and tangsuyuk, which is basically a sweet-and-sour fried, battered pork. And every time we got in, my aunt would call and then within 10 minutes, there would be a delivery man that came up and dropped off these noodles. That was my favorite thing to eat growing up because, even here, there's something in the water where it just never tastes the same as it does there. That is definitely the first one that comes to mind.
MC: When you go back to Korea for the first time after the pandemic, do you think that’s what you’ll want to order first?
MZ: Probably. Actually as an adult, what I've come to love is ganjang gejang, which is this fermented soy sauce raw crab. And that's another thing that I just can't get here. And I could eat that every day. It is the most luxurious, perversely good food. It has this custard, almost briny quality that uni has. And I love cracking into the shell and sucking out this raw meat. It's so good. That was something I don't think I was super into as a young kid when I visited Korea, but it's something I'm super into now that I can't wait to eat again.
MC: Food can be such a comfort in times of stress and grief, which the last year has been filled with. What foods have you been turning to, either making or ordering, during the pandemic?
MZ: I certainly make Korean foods still—it's changed. We've lived like this for a full year now. And in the beginning, there were a lot of themed dinners. I just love a theme so I'd be going all out on a Spanish tapas [night]. Also because you were like, “What else is there to do? I have to find joy where I can.” So we were really making some decadent themed meals, like some Mediterranean dips for a while, and then Spanish tapas. I cooked an octopus for the first time, and then it slowly turned into, I'm going to just eat the worst possible things. I'm never going to get out of this. I might as well just completely indulge in the worst things. And I ate a lot of really crappy... I just devolved into this processed food teenager of like I feel like eating Eggo waffles and I deserve it. And just eating a bunch of crap, which was fine. It's not a bad thing.
But now I'm in this place where I was trying a bunch of fad diets for a while. And I think it's because it gave me the sense of weird control. It was almost like this specific, traumatic experience is very sacred to that moment of making Korean food that now that I'm in this new crisis, I have to do something else. So I can't say that there's a huge romantic narrative arc to my pandemic eating style.
LA: I would be surprised if there was.
MZ: It'd be beautiful if I was like, “I got really into Indian cooking” or something. I did learn how to cook some Indian dishes, especially in the beginning where it was questionable if it was morally corrupt to get takeout for a while. So it was stuff like that. It's like, “I really want Indian food, but I don't know if it's okay to order from here. I guess I'll just try to make it for the first time.” So I did have a couple of those types of experiences.
MC: Cooking an octopus is probably about a full marathon ahead of where I went with my pandemic cooking.
LA: It's very visual as well when you say that. Saying that what you were cooking didn't necessarily have the romantic narrative that one might hope you'd get out of this pandemic life we've had to live… I think another thing that's been really difficult for lots of people is productivity and creativity too. Have you been able to write at all, whether that's music or nonfiction or essays or whatever?
MZ: It was really tough for me because I finished the book in July 2020. So I was working on some revisions in the pandemic. And then I finished this record in December 2019. So I had already felt like I had been quarantining with these huge projects that when March came around, I was like, “I'm ready to live my life now.” And then it was like, “No.” So it was tough because I felt like it was really hard for me to create more new projects because it felt like these ones weren't finished. I couldn't feel like I was ready to move on until these came out, in a way.
I spent some time working on this soundtrack for an indie game called Sable that's going to come out later this year. I wrote some music for that. I did mostly just smaller projects. I wrote an essay for Harper's Bazaar and I feel like that's all I have the capacity for right now is these smaller projects. And maybe once these things come out, I can feel good about working on another large project. But I am also just excited to live my life for a little bit and not work on anything.
MC: And also putting these two things out within a month of each other in 2021 is also an accomplishment in and of itself.
MZ: So I feel like I need that to happen and then to just enjoy that for a little bit before I think about it. For me, I don't feel like I've been that creatively productive. I've certainly done some things, but when that's your main job it is nerve-wracking when it doesn't feel like you're busy doing your job all the time. It was definitely really hard for me to stay creative during this time.
MC: So we talked in an episode a few weeks ago about how the pandemic has resurfaced a lot of past experiences with grief for a lot of people. How has that affected you? If it has, then how have you been processing the last year?
MZ: I don't know if that's really been the case for me. I think if anything, I've experienced this feeling of “there goes a year of my life” before and I feel like that feels very similar to now. When my mom got sick, I lived in Eugene as a caretaker for six months and then I stayed for six months after that helping my dad get the house together and go through all this stuff that you have to go through when someone passes away. So I think that there's this certainly same kind of sadness that I feel where it was like I lost… Everyone feels that way in some way, no matter how old you are really.
I think that high school kids probably feel like they lost a really essential period of their life getting to go to college this year, or in the same breath, people in their 60s who were so looking forward to some of the last years they might have to travel were really devastated by this. Everyone has their own major loss in this period of time. It's very sad that we lost a whole year of our lives in a way. And especially us people who are fans of travel, that's a big thing. So I feel like there was a similar type of grief where it was like, “I know that this is part of what life is, that you can't control [it].”
I'm familiar with this lack of control and this feeling that time is slipping away and that you have just set aside a year of your life to be lost. So if anything, I felt almost better equipped to handle something like this because no one in my life died luckily this year. And luckily my family and my friends were all healthy. So in the grand scheme of things, it didn't really trigger so much. If anything, I felt actually better prepared for it in a way because I've dealt with disaster before, that this didn't feel as severe to me almost because the worst thing that happened to me was that I was bored or whatever, and I didn't get to do my job.
MC: I feel like as somebody who is probably used to traveling, not only on tour but going and seeing family often, not being able to travel this year felt weird. What was being stuck in one place like? And what does your first trip back to Korea look like? Who do you see? Where are you going?
MZ: It was certainly really odd. I really appreciated my job before, but it made me realize just how incredibly charmed of a last three years I really had. It's also just so wild to think of how much we did back then. It's so different now. The idea of doing more than one thing is bonkers. But if anything, I also had to really have a serious confrontation with who am I without my job, and that was tough. I guess I just tried to find small travel experiences, going to the countryside or whatever, to the Adirondacks or upstate or something. I'm not a big outdoor person. And so I think maybe because I grew up in a woodsy majestic Pacific Northwest area, the idea of hiking is not particularly appealing to me. But I tried to get more into that because it was like, “What else are we going to do?” I went skiing for the first time. There were a lot of weird things that I did that I probably never would do. So I guess I just tried to appreciate things on a smaller scale.
My first trip back to Korea… I have developed a really lovely relationship with my aunt who's in the book and she's my last relative there, her and her husband. It's nice to have this new relationship with them as adults, because I feel like if I wasn't married, it wouldn't feel as balanced in a way. I would feel a little bit more like a burden to be looked after or something. And going there with my husband is really nice because it almost feels like my aunt and her husband and I are all just going on a double date together. I would like to believe that they're also enjoying themselves too in this way that if it was just me, I would feel like they're putting it on themselves to take me out. And I actually feel like we have been able to go on little trips together where we just really enjoy each other's company.
The last time that we were together, we went to Jeonju which is, I think, to the south of Seoul. And it's really known for its food culture. The best food is supposed to be in Jeonju. We had a really nice time, staying in a Hanok village which was just a little old school cottage. And we drank this makgeolli from a big copper pot that they make there and the food is really great. And we had such a nice time. I would love to just do that again. I would love to visit different parts of Korea. I've spent most of my time in Seoul and I've visited Busan and Jeju and Jeonju, but there's so much more of South Korea that I would like to explore and appreciate.
LA: You touched on something [earlier] that felt quite relatable. And I thought it was really interesting when you said that in the past year, you've had to come to terms with who you are without your job. As we look ahead into emerging out of this thing, do you think your relationship to your job and to your work will be different? Or do you think that you just want to fall right back into how it was before?
MZ: To be completely honest and selfish, I want to fall right back into the way that it was before. I don't really know if there's a whole lot I want to learn from this experience beyond just appreciating even just the grittiest things that we have to do in order to make our job work. But I'm sure that it's going to be super different. It's going to be a really slow process that I'm so ready to just jump into and get over. But I think that we've had to learn a tremendous amount of patience and I guess I have to bring that into my new life. But I don't know, maybe that sounds really immature and awful of me. I would love to be able to tell you I've learned that I need to really slow down and I don't need to kill myself over this job anymore, but I am just so ready to go back into the way the things were.
LA: Honestly, I love hearing that. I think I worry sometimes there's something a little bit disingenuous when you hear lots of people saying how the past year has taught them so much. They now want to slow down and I'm like, I don't know, I just really miss my life before the pandemic. I loved it.
MZ: That's really real. I want to say that too. I know that that's what people want from me is to be like, “No. One thing a day is enough. We all need to slow down.” But I actually just want to go so hard. I will say the one thing that I've learned is I want to emerge from the pandemic wearing very decadent outfits all the time. I definitely want to. That's one thing that wasn't important to me pre-pandemic that's definitely really important now. I'm going to spend a lot more money on clothing and being just extra as fuck.
LA: It's interesting. And I've started doing my online shopping. For the first time all year, I've started buying clothes again, and I'm like, “This shows a mental shift. Something's happening.”
MC: Something that I have been investing my own money in because it is the thing that I want to get back to despite the fact that maybe it will trigger some level of stress in a crowd, but I have bought four concert tickets-
MZ: Oh wow.
MC: For four weeks in the same month—so October is going to be wild.
MZ: That's great to hear as a musician.
MC: As soon as people start putting them on sale, I'm putting in my credit card information because I miss those experiences so much. Now that you have an album coming out, tour is looking like it's a thing that could happen. You have dates on your website which is so exciting. What does preparing to get back out on the road look like? And how does it feel?
MZ: I'm really trying to manage my expectations because part of me is just... One would not think this about me, but I actually realized that I cope with major catastrophic stress with just wild optimism. I have this entire time just maintained an uncomfortable amount of optimism that this is going to be great, and I can not stand any negativity at all right now. I have a lot of people in my life. And it's like there's nothing that you can do because their fears are valid and that's how they're coping and that's fine. I can't handle it right now. I have muted so many family members and close friends because I cannot handle any negativity right now even if there's a shred of truth in it. That being said, I have tried to not just fully being like, “Yes, yes. We are going to be on tour,” they think, in late July. I don't know if that's real or not. I am at that point where it's like if they tell me that it's safe to do it, I'm going to be doing it. If they are saying they're not sure, then we'll pull out. We've definitely canceled a lot. Everyone is used to things getting canceled at this point in time.
And I think at this point, they're just trying to be optimistic maybe in that the vaccine rollout seems pretty legit right now. But that's what's on the schedule now. And I think once we get closer to tour, it'll feel a lot realer. There'll be a lot of rehearsal. It's a lot of rehearsal, and one thing that's nice is we have all these live streams that we're preparing for. So we are slowly getting to learn the album and getting it prepped for if we do get to go out in stages, whereas before it would have been maybe a little bit more of a rush to learn all this new material.
MC: Is there anything that you miss about the travel aspect of touring that you're excited to get back to? Because I know it can be very hectic but...
MZ: I honestly miss it all. I've come to just really love tour. And part of it is I've gotten a really great group together that has made it so efficient and such a loving, wonderful place. It's very much like I feel very at home on the road with my band family and I just miss feeling good at a job. The older I get, the more I realize a human being’s sense of purpose is so essential that I just miss literally carrying heavy gear into a building and wrapping XLR cables and setting up my pedal. I miss all of that stuff so much because it made me feel like I love physical work. I love feeling like I am working and doing something and that I know how to do something and I know how to do it well. And I've created this group that loves their jobs and loves to put in hard work. I know that sounds really lame, but I miss that feeling tremendously. I miss wandering around the gas station for a snack. I miss getting to the hotel and taking out my contacts. Next time might be really different because we're supposed to be on a bus for the first time this year, which is wild. We've always been in a 15-passenger van and this would be the first year that we get to be on a tour bus. So I'm very excited to have that experience for the first time because I've never gotten to. And it just feels beyond the realm of all expectations for myself. I never thought I would be in a band that would be big enough to get to go on a tour bus. And so it feels really great to maybe get to do that this year.
LA: It's going to feel like the first day back at school, I imagine.
MZ: I'm sure it's going to be so awkward. Can you imagine? You haven't socialized in a year really, and then all of a sudden you're in front of a bunch of people.
LA: And sleeping on a tour bus.
MZ: Yeah, totally.
MC: Amazing. Well, Michelle, thank you so much for joining us. If people want to keep up with you and your book and your album, where can they find you on social media?
MZ: They can find me @Jbrekkie, J-B-R-E-K-K-I-E, on Twitter and Instagram. And my website is japanesebreakfast.rocks. I think we also own michellezauner.com and cryinginhmart.com. So there are a number of ways, or you could google any of those things or my name and find me probably.
MC: Links to by Michelle's memoir Crying in H Mart, which is out on April 20, and pre-order Japanese Breakfast's latest album Jubilee, which is out June 4 will be in the show notes. You can find me @ohheytheremere.
LA: Me @lalehannah.
MC: Be sure to follow Women Who Travel on Instagram and subscribe to our newsletter. We will have links to both those things also in the show notes. And we will talk to you next week.
