How Crying in H Mart, Pachinko, and Minari Illuminate the Intergenerational Landscape of Korean Memory
In recent years, three works have carved space in global consciousness for Korean and Korean-American narratives: Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart, Min Jin Lee’s novel Pachinko, and Lee Isaac Chung’s film Minari. Though distinct in form and scope, they are connected by a shared emotional terrain: stories of family, displacement, longing, and the fragile rituals through which memory persists. Each work reveals what is inherited, what is lost, and what we try to rebuild from fragments.
Together, these narratives form a cultural triptych of diaspora. In place of epic declarations, they offer quiet gestures—a grandmother planting herbs, a mother cooking kimchi, a child trying to translate pain. They ask: What are the small, persistent things that shape who we are?
I. Grief and Language in Crying in H Mart
Michelle Zauner’s memoir begins in a supermarket—H Mart, where the aisles are filled with Korean groceries and a longing too heavy to name. Zauner, lead singer of Japanese Breakfast, charts her mother’s death from cancer and the identity crisis it leaves in its wake. The book is a meditation on grief, but also on bilingual belonging. As her Korean falters, so too does her connection to a maternal history carried in language, gesture, and taste.
What makes Crying in H Mart so arresting is its refusal to universalize loss. Zauner’s mourning is culturally situated: the way she watches her mother peel fruit, the unspoken rules of filial piety, the silence between English and Korean. Her grief is textured by immigrant expectation and generational misrecognition. In that way, Zauner speaks for a generation of bicultural readers caught between tongues, mourning not only loved ones but the versions of self that die with them.
II. Lineage and Shame in Pachinko
Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko opens in a fishing village in Korea and ends in urban Tokyo, but its emotional arc spans four generations of a single family. It is a novel of survival and the soft violence of assimilation. Through the character of Sunja and her descendants, Lee examines the legacy of Japanese colonialism, the precarity of Korean identity abroad, and the social costs of silence.
Unlike Zauner’s memoir, where intimacy is built through food and domestic ritual, Pachinko shows how survival often requires severing such connections. There are moments when characters must abandon tradition to survive—a son who denies his ancestry to keep his job, a mother who hides her shame to preserve her child’s future. Lee does not moralize these choices; instead, she lets the slow accumulation of compromise and resilience speak for itself.
It is also a novel of women’s labor—emotional, economic, and cultural. Sunja’s strength is not in rebellion, but in the steadiness with which she endures. Her choices echo through time, shaping descendants who never know the full cost of their legacy. If Pachinko offers a lesson, it is that history is not just something we learn. It is something we inherit.
III. Immigrant Soil in Minari
Where Crying in H Mart focuses on loss and Pachinko on endurance, Minari dwells in hope. Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical film tells the story of a Korean-American family who moves to rural Arkansas to start a farm in the 1980s. It is, on the surface, a familiar immigrant narrative. But beneath its simple plot lies a quiet radiance.
The emotional center of Minari is Soonja, the grandmother, whose arrival from Korea unsettles and ultimately transforms the household. She brings with her not only snacks and folklore, but also a reminder that memory is physical—lodged in plants, smells, rhythms. The minari she plants near a creek becomes a living metaphor for resilience: a plant that thrives where it is rooted, even in foreign soil.
There is little exposition in Minari. Chung lets glances, pauses, and miscommunications carry the emotional weight. It is a film of feeling rather than statement, and in that way, it mirrors the unspoken contracts of immigrant life: don’t complain, keep going, make it work.
IV. What Holds Them Together
Across these three works, we find no grand resolutions, no neat conclusions. Instead, they offer memory as process—fragmented, intergenerational, sensory. They suggest that identity is not a fixed inheritance but a field of negotiation.
- In Crying in H Mart, that field is a grocery store aisle where a daughter remembers her mother through food.
- In Pachinko, it is the layered sacrifices of four generations.
- In Minari, it is a field by a creek where minari takes root.
What they share is a deep attention to the texture of lives. The mundane becomes sacred: cooking, planting, speaking, forgetting. These are the rituals through which memory persists, even when names fade.
V. From Memoir to Montage: Why It Matters
We often ask: What does a life story look like?
These works tell us: it is not always a biography or a formal timeline. Sometimes it’s a smell. Sometimes a story passed down half-remembered. Sometimes it’s a scene in a film where a boy watches his grandmother fall ill and still finds her spirit in a plant she left behind.
Together, Crying in H Mart, Pachinko, and Minari remind us that we don’t need to be famous or fluent to be remembered. We just need to be noticed, as we are.
Their stories are an invitation: to look more closely, to ask differently, to notice the soil where memory grows.
Story Table 