SOBBING NEAR THE DRY GOODS, I ASK MYSELF, "AM I EVEN KOREAN ANYMORE IF THERE'S NO ONE LEFT IN MY LIFE TO CALL AND ASK WHICH BRAND OF SEAWEED WE USED TO BUY?"

In the first chapter of Crying in H Mart, we find Michelle Zauner mourning her mother, Chongmi, amid the aisles of H Mart brimming with banchan and rice cakes. Her grief is both summoned and solaced by the aromatics of Korean cuisine that emanate from either side- on one hand, soothed by the familiar pungency of fermented black beans, and on the other, inflamed upon remembering there’s no one left to consult on “which brand of seaweed we used to buy”. Among humdrum shoppers, we witness a poignant moment that cuts deep into the diaspora, capturing the predicament of accessing one’s estranged cultural roots when the only lifeline has been severed.

Crying in H Mart sees Zauner, who is best known for her musical venture Japanese Breakfast, trading in her synths and keys for equally atmospheric prose in a memoir. Emotionally processed yet tender, Zauner dishes into the joys and pains of food through the fertile narrative terrain of grief. Born to a Caucasian father and a Korean umma, Zauner recalls her childhood as a biracial girl living between two worlds- too Asian for the rugged outskirts of Eugene, Oregon, and too white for the cohesive cityscape of Seoul. Without resorting to easy pathos, she relays the ruptures and reconciliations of these cultural plate tectonics; in Double Eyelid, she recalls earning the praise of “aigo yep-peu”- with its twofold meaning of “pretty” and “well-behaved”- for the double eyelid and pale skin she’d inherited from her father. It would be the same reward she’d reap from well-meaning aunts at dinner for dutifully sweeping her plate clean. The aversion she’d eventually develop toward this conflation of moral and aesthetic value mounts tactfully- episodic anecdotes of clashes with her beauty-obsessed mother creep up to a crescendo, a rupturing whose seeds run deep in their cultural differences. Throughout the memoir, we witness how the stability of her Korean heritage was offset by “a complicated desire for whiteness,” a potent force all-too-familiar to those of us born in the diaspora. 

For Zauner and fellow halfies alike, food becomes the love language to be harnessed in resistance to this partial death of cultural identity, hand-in-hand with the death of a loved one. Eschewing heavy-handed facts as well as palliative fictions, the memoir quilts together a candid patchwork of Zauner’s fraught relationship with Chongmi: the joys of a shared penchant for late-night refrigerator scavenging; the severity of their eventual estrangement; the unutterable of cancer, dying and death. She is unsparing and meticulous in her depictions of the indignities involved in Chongmi’s succumbing to cancer. Her final breaths, she writes, bear semblance to “a horrible sucking like the last sputtering of a coffee pot”. Her inability to stomach the more pungent of foods they once gorged on together, “managing only a few bites”. The latter is particularly painful as Zauner, in an attempt to buoy their bonds, begins to decode the once cryptic measurements of umma’s dishes, serving up hearty tteokguk and well-established sick meal, gyeranjjim, only for it all to be “vomited later that night” in a tragically ironic turn of events.

The maturity of Crying in H Mart emerges from a liminal interstice, interweaving two worlds to offer up a Konglish subjectivity that testifies to a childhood in which a mix of English and Korean was ricocheted between family members. Korean words aren’t italicized, and footnotes aren’t offered for every morsel of food. And to insist that this is harnessed as a consciously subversive act to turn cultural hegemony on its head would be to sell short the day-to-day minutiae of diasporic life. Zauner resists privileging one culture over the other, her bilingual introspections glimmering with a dynamic wholeness that is being forged through and in spite of her cultural schizophrenia. 

A viscerally immersive read, Crying in H Mart spurs within us all, in the eye of the storm, a self-reflection that transcends geographic and cultural boundaries. We are urged to cede the comfortable excuses and evasions of ego, to locate solace among the wreckage of a familial fracturing, and to do so with grace, vastness and resilience. Reading the memoir against a backdrop of rising Anti-Asian sentiment, however, we are again shaken by the seismic force of a collective grief whose five stages take on a cyclical formation, where anger becomes overlaid with depression before we ever get the chance to deny. What Zauner reminds us is that even in this absence of touch, unable to hold one another and grieve, we will be found alone together, one arm full of groceries, hungering for a morsel of the homeland. 

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner is out on August 5th 2021 in the UK through Picador.

ten uneasy pieces: digital solidarity, in light of covid-19 and black lives matter - 'we=link: ten easy pieces' review

'WE = LINK: Ten Easy Pieces' is available at: http://we-link.chronusartcenter.org/

While brick-and-mortar spaces dwindle in numbers, there is certainly no shortage of frenzied action being taken by the art world to bring culture straight to the doorsteps, contact-free. The appetite for the arts is now being satiated digitally as cultural institutions go virtual, but with such unprecedented uncertainty and diminishing attention spans- the coronavirus pandemic coupled with the revolutionary fervor re-incited by George Floyd’s death- shows of solidarity through art take precedence over mind-numbing satiation. Culture is metamorphosing as it harnesses the language, aesthetics and existential anxiety of contemporary life- a reminder that despite the universality of virus, demographically localized oppressions persist as structural inequalities are not only sustained but inflamed. Traces of the much needed silver lining of solidarity linger in the Chronus Art Center’s most recent online exhibition, WE = LINK: Ten Easy Pieces, initiated as an open call to the international media art community. Employing network-native works, WE = LINK in its entirety is borne from the internet, existing solely within the quadrilateral frames of our devices. The ten networked art pieces, in their totality, serve as a response to “a general state of humanity that is under pressing peril of natural and social disruptions” (Ga, 2020), disruptions of severe systematic failures that are being exposed during the coronavirus outbreak. 

As screen times soar, we are beckoned to come face-to-face with the internet’s sheer penetrative power like never before; long a ubiquitous given, these networks have felt so fundamental to the human condition they were forgettable- only up until our daily routines were disrupted, however. WE=LINK curator Zhang Ga elucidates this transformation, wherein practice precedes theory, in Heideggerian terms; what was once “Zuhandenheit” (readiness-to-hand), a matter-of-fact extension of the self, is now “Vorhandenheit” (presence-at-hand), a phenomenon eligible for theoretical consideration. And at the core of this theorization is an idea recurring in WE=LINK- connectivity. Network native art, in particular, possesses a kind of virtual viscerality that transcends passive viewing, necessarily so in its competition for attention with the constant stimulation of a text message, an Instagram notification or the urgent desire to check the daily COVID-19 stats. Coupled with the work it hosts, the show’s interface design and title limn both this connectivity and bombardment of stimuli. WE=LINK- a subtle play on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media platform- hosts a landing page featuring a circuitry of pale pink chain-links, overlaid with interactive dots which, hovered over, sporadically display artwork previews.

'get well soon!' (2020) by tega brain & sam lavigne

Commissioned by the Chronus Art Center, Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne’s Get Well Soon (2020) employs digital data as a simultaneous critique and show of solidarity. A squint reveals the fine sans serif print on a vast e-card to be the aggregation of some 200,000 well-wishes amassed from medical GoFundMe campaigns. Beneath all the good will of the repeated variations of “hang in there” and heart emojis is a nationwide illness brewing, one which will not be entirely remedied by mutual aid but ultimately by tangible structural change. More than anything, it is an archive that lays bare the festering wound that is a failing healthcare system which values profit and bipartisan debate over the lives of its citizenry. It is an archive that should not exist. 

As if it wasn’t immensely pertinent at the time of the exhibition’s opening, Get Well Soon is a prescient warning in its paralleling of illness and insurrection. The e-card is accompanied by a politically charged essay by Johanna Hedva, likening the nowness and the immediacy of illness to that of revolution: “When we are desperate for change, as we are both in illness and insurrection, our language drains of complexity, becomes honed to its barest essentials” (Hedva, 2020). Swept up in the fervor of George Floyd protests, almost all of which originates from social media, we occupy a liminal space as “the now becomes a joyous defiance of fate” (Hedva, 2020). At some point though, as Hedva notes, the nowness of revolution becomes wedged in between “the past and the future”, a never-ending wait. And what Get Well Soon reminds us at a time of simultaneous mass illness and revolution, as Roxane Gay puts it plainly, is that “eventually, doctors will find a coronavirus vaccine, but black people will continue to wait, despite the futility of hope, for a cure for racism” (Gay, 2020). WE=LINK’s advocacy of the solidarity elicited by digital networks is certainly a sentiment that reverberates in the now. The ubiquity of these networks have undoubtedly enabled individuals to uphold one another in the face of governmental failures. But as the indignation piles on like volatile layers of sediment, one tragedy after another, WE = LINK inadvertently stresses that digital dialogue can no longer serve as an end goal. No matter its immediacy, the internet will not match the viscerality of taking to the streets. And while the silver lining glimmers of solidarity, it no longer entails a return to normalcy- rather, normal is the very thing we must be liberated of.


'WE = LINK: Ten Easy Pieces' is at Chronus Art Center, March 30 onwards.

Works cited

Ga, Z. (2020). WE=LINK: | TEN EASY PIECES 十个小品. [online] we-link.chronusartcenter.org. Available at: http://we-link.chronusartcenter.org/ [Accessed 8 Jun. 2020].

Gay, R. (2020). Opinion | Remember, No One Is Coming to Save Us. The New York Times. [online] 30 May. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/opinion/sunday/trump-george-floyd-coronavirus.html [Accessed 8 Jun. 2020].

Hedva, J. (2020). A Text by Johanna Hedva. Available at: http://getwellsoon.labr.io/ [Accessed 7 Jun. 2020].

the world’s wife: 'little red cap review' - grit, authority and all things unladylike

WORDS, WORDS WERE TRULY ALIVE ON THE TONGUE, IN THE HEAD

WARM, BEATING, FRANTIC, WINGED; MUSIC AND BLOOD

Carol Ann Duffy with Adrian Henri

Carol Ann Duffy’s 1999 anthology, The World’s Wife, marks a gripping departure from the earlier status quo of male-prescribed narratives and societal expectations in fairy tales, myths and historical events. Saturated with a tinge of British social realism, Duffy tactfully imposes her critical interventions in the hackneyed homogeneity of the literary world, though she extends far beyond the linguistics of gender discourse by unashamedly setting each poem in a contemporary idiom. From illuminating the disregarded status of Lazarus’ wife, to subverting Little Red Cap’s pitifully prescribed gullibility, Duffy’s radical reinterpretations place these women in the limelight for once.

Bet Mrs. Midas never turned to gold. Renowned British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife amalgamates cultural paradoxes as she shines a light on the overshadowed women of history - women who are tender yet tenacious, lyrical yet humoristic, and above all, fall victim to prevailing patriarchal strictures yet conceive an inner tenacity to subvert it. Through archiving a personal history, Duffy eloquently - and rather cathartically - provides a ventriloquised voice to the women behind the scenes and subtly integrates memoirs of personal, yet collectively encountered experiences. Perhaps what remains the most arresting to readers in The World’s Wife is its all-too-familiar essence materialized from its lingering traces of social realism; the Lazaruses no longer exist in a biblical realm as we encounter the colloquial depiction of Mrs. Lazarus’s turbulent emotional ups-and-downs, and Little Red Cap’s folklore veneer disintegrates as we witness parts of ourselves manifest through her premature sexual awakening. These women - the girl next door, the streetwise lolita, the domestic alpha - aren’t your locally televised Jane Doe; they exist as archetypes in contemporary society, although Duffy does much more than to merely fuel these pigeonholed-identities by examining the intricacy of it all.

Exemplifying the personal and political significance of each narrative, Duffy’s Little Red Cap acts as both an intimate anecdote and an ideologically-loaded reinterpretation of the Brothers Grimm’s classic folktale from 1905. As a universally integral narrative in our childhoods, a politicized Little Red Cap (1905) substantiates the current patriarchal status-quo, riddled with man-made norms of femininity and a fueled image of hypermasculinity - because who better to depict girlhood than two old cisgender men seeking to avert their stereotypical narrative from being politicized? The reappropriation of this original folklore, being Duffy’s own mouthpiece, is imbued with a personal reminiscence of a dramatic yet nonchalant transition to womanhood - her first relationship at age 16, with Liverpudlian poet Adrien Henri, 23 years her senior. This begging to believed - girlhood - is implicitly validated through Duffy’s subversion of the prescribed roles for Little Red Cap and the wolf. Substantiating this is an underlying tone of tenacity prevalent throughout the entirety of the poem, as Duffy assumes an intentionally subordinate voice, ironically capitalising on this thetic norm of frail femininity in order to dismantle the norm itself. This acute awareness of the events to come is intricately conveyed through Duffy’s linguistic devices:

It was there that I first clapped my eyes on the wolf                  6

In line 6, Duffy implicitly reinforces the antipodal roles assigned to her and Henri; her assumption of concealed authority is linguistically exemplified through “clapped” - sonorous and plosive, the auditory element of the verb alludes to a physical acquisition of the wolf’s [Henri] attention. Not solely is Red Cap’s [Duffy] predatorial character self-prescribed, but the puppeteer of this ostensibly spontaneous series of events is Red Cap herself. Here, Duffy goes beyond exploring the intricate narratives of the “women behind the scenes” - she is the woman behind the scenes, the puppeteer whose delicate wordplay delivers a carefully curated show.

Red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears.                      9
He had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!                              10

Here, Duffy deliberately employs a tone reminiscent of our childhood bedtime stories - wide-eyed, guileless, repetitious. However, once placed into context, these unelaborated descriptions of the wolf are unanticipatedly rife with wit - perhaps even patronization. And of course it’s political - to recast the folklore in a way that engenders a shift in the power dynamic, especially to assign authority to Red Cap, given her ostensibly subordinate status, is to hum a tender tune to put the patriarchy to sleep.

But we should be reminded that this is not merely Duffy’s mouthpiece. The full-force immersion into a self-initiated departure from childhood holds a contemporary truth - the ritualistic tendencies of budding young girls, sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, to inhabit a invigorating vision of manmade sexual attractivity - because what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf? Note ‘manmade’ - this wide-eyed desire is not an inherent trait, but more so a performative act constructed through ideological forces, lest we forget the coercive forces of heteronormativity and commodity domination in our age. Little Red Cap is a ventriloquised narrative for us all; perhaps not a rumination about “childhood’s end”, or a nostalgic longing for the relinquished naivete of girlhood, but a climactic engrossment into the whirlwind we hastily label ‘adolescence’:

Are the uttered thoughts of trees, that a greying wolf                  34
Howls the same song at the moon, year in, year out                      35
Season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe             36


To a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon               37
To see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf                          38
As he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw                       39
The glistening, virgin white of my grandmother's bones                  40
I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up                   41
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone            42

Beyond a mere narrative, Little Red Cap culminates in an implicit personal victory; however, this feminized “instinct” to possess a hypersexualised exterior is one that, contrary to Duffy’s account of a consequential ‘triumph’, does not always bear fruit.

Perhaps we should not label this a ‘triumph’, but an ostensibly celebratory wave-goodbye to the dewy-eyed fawn, the prey, that has now metamorphosed into a doe, the protector. Little Red Cap’s final stanzas (lines 36-37) emanate a quality of adultish complacency - not solely does a linguistic approach allude to the humdrum cyclicality of adulthood, but the ballad-like, full rhyming of this dramatic monologue pinpoints the solemn adieu to the initial stanzas’ unpremeditated, buoyant half-rhymes. The rambly demeanor is replaced with a desensitization to what we once saw as vivid stimuli; the yearning to truly feel is fruitless, as Red Cap’s futile axe-thrusts fail to harness any sense of vitality. Nonetheless, this futility is overturned by Duffy’s own axe-thrust - one that hits a little too close to home.

Perhaps what keeps us going are these fleeting moments whence this vitality unanticipatedly resurfaces. The axe spontaneously plunges into life and a rustle of leaves reveals the dewy-eyed fawn chastely emerging from behind the vast foliage once again.