StoryTable Team Readings & Reviews

Between Grief and Soil: Family, Diaspora, and the Stories We Carry

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.

StoryTable Team Life & Memory Insights

What the Body Remembers

Have you ever smelled something—roasted sesame oil, an old book, sun-warmed vinyl seats—and been transported straight back to a moment you hadn’t thought about in years? It’s not just nostalgia; it’s your body remembering. Science tells us that memory doesn’t live solely in the brain. It resides in scent, in texture, in posture, in the small details our bodies carry long after our minds forget.

In this post, we explore what it means to remember through the body. We reflect on how childhood memories—especially the ones that return without warning—can guide, comfort, and challenge us. And we offer practical ways to begin reconnecting with those stories, not just with your head, but with your senses.

The Memory Lives in the Muscle

Think back to your childhood. Not a specific story, but a sensation: the weight of a winter coat zipped too high, the sting of a scraped knee, the burnt sweetness of barley tea. These aren’t just random memories—they are the body’s bookmarks.

Neuroscientists have shown that sensory memory—especially smell and touch—are directly connected to the brain’s limbic system, where emotional memory is stored. That’s why a whiff of your grandfather’s cologne or the feel of a school desk under your fingers can bring back a whole world in an instant.

But there’s more than brain chemistry at work here. Cultural anthropologists have long studied “embodied memory”—how traditions, movements, even emotional habits are passed on and retained physically. If your mother always hummed while doing the dishes, you might find yourself doing the same without realizing it. Not because you decided to—but because your body remembers.

The Stories That Never Got Written

For many of us, childhood stories live under the surface. They’re felt rather than told. We remember the rules of the house through our posture. We recall a sibling rivalry not through a specific argument, but through the tension in our shoulders when that sibling calls.

Some of these memories were never spoken aloud. Maybe the adults around you didn’t talk much. Maybe no one asked. Or maybe certain experiences were too confusing to explain. But those moments left traces.

In our work preserving life stories, we often hear people say, “I don’t know what stories I have.” But once they begin with something small—a smell, a sound, a gesture—the rest follows. That’s not just memory. That’s narrative emerging from the body’s archive.

Sensory Prompts to Access Memory

Want to access these deeper, older memories? Here are a few prompts to try:

  • Smell: Open an old spice jar or childhood shampoo brand. What images come back?
  • Touch: Run your fingers over tree bark, corduroy, cold metal. What does your body recall?
  • Sound: Listen to a school bell, a cassette rewinding, a lullaby. What room are you in?
  • Taste: Eat something your caregiver made. Not the gourmet version—their version.
  • Movement: Mimic a childhood habit—jumping a crack in the sidewalk, tracing wallpaper patterns. How does it feel?

These are not just creative exercises. They are portals. Your senses are time machines, capable of returning you to places your mind forgot.

When Memory Is Painful

Of course, not every memory feels good. The body also remembers fear, confusion, or shame. A slammed door can bring up feelings long buried. A childhood smell might trigger unease instead of comfort.

That’s why revisiting embodied memory should be done gently. You don’t need to force recall. Let what surfaces come without judgment. And know that even difficult memories, when held with care, can offer insight. They show what you survived. They explain how you learned to move through the world.

Sometimes, these memories explain habits we didn’t understand—why we avoid certain sounds, why we tense during holidays, why we cry at smells others barely notice. When we listen with compassion, we start to see the full shape of who we are.

Sharing the Unspeakable

One of the most powerful parts of embodied memory is that it often reveals stories that words never caught. And when we begin to tell those stories—even haltingly—we give others permission to do the same.

A woman once shared a memory of her grandmother’s cracked hands washing rice. She had never thought of it as a story, but as she described it, she realized how much it said: about sacrifice, care, repetition, and silence. Her whole family came to see her grandmother differently.

Stories like this don’t need plot twists. They don’t even need beginnings or endings. They just need presence. If someone you love tells you, “I don’t have a story,” try asking them, “What does your body remember?” Then wait.

The Practice of Remembering

Memory is not a file cabinet; it’s a garden. It needs tending. It grows best when we return to it with curiosity, not judgment.

Here are a few practices to nurture embodied memory:

  • Take a “sensory walk” through your home or neighborhood. What do your senses pick up?
  • Keep a memory journal, not for events, but for impressions—textures, sounds, smells.
  • Share one small physical memory with someone close. A gesture, a sound, a scene.
  • Ask elders in your life to describe how something felt—not just what happened.

You’ll find that memory begets memory. One scent leads to a room, that room leads to a feeling, that feeling to a story. The past unfolds not in sequence, but in pulses.

Remembering Forward

Ultimately, the stories we tell aren’t just about the past. They shape how we walk into the future. When we recover the sensory threads of childhood, we reclaim a sense of self that is grounded, complex, and deeply alive.

And in doing so, we offer something lasting—not just for ourselves, but for those who come after. They, too, will one day ask: What did my parents or grandparents feel? How did they carry memory?

Let’s leave them something textured. Something real. Let’s give them what the body remembers.

J. Kim personal essay

What I Didn’t Hear, But Later Understood

He was born in the early 1950s, in a countryside village where winters were long and electricity arrived late. His earliest memories, I imagine, were of rice fields and the way steam rose from his mother’s morning soup. He didn’t talk much about those days — only that the mountains were close and the neighbors, closer.

He was the first-born of seven children. That role shaped him early — not just in name, but in posture, in restraint. He learned to wait. He learned to give up his share without being asked. Quiet responsibility became second nature. It was the kind of discipline that didn’t draw attention — only respect.

In his twenties, he passed the civil service exam and moved to Seoul for a job at the bank. He started as a teller — meticulous, polite, steady. Seoul in the 1970s was a city in motion, and he moved through it like a man with a plan and no time to waste. His suit was modest. His apartment small. His gestures always measured.

He stayed with the bank his entire life. He rose steadily through the ranks — eventually working at the headquarters, then returning to branch life as a manager. Not the loud kind. He was, as one junior teller once described to me, “the kind of boss who knew every team member’s family situation, but never brought his own into conversation. Always covered someone’s mistake before it became a problem. Always stayed late — but never made you feel bad for leaving on time.”

His colleagues liked him — deeply. They joked around him easily, spoke up during meetings, felt protected under his quiet leadership. He was the one they called when something sensitive needed handling. The flexible one. The dependable one.

But at home, he was different.

He arrived at the dinner table on time, but often silent. He never raised his voice, yet there was a tightness to his approval. We felt his expectations more than his encouragement. He would remind us to turn off lights, to study harder, to keep things in order — but rarely asked us how our day went. My mother sometimes muttered, “He’s warm to everyone but his own family,” not out of anger, but out of knowing.

As a child, I resented that. I didn’t understand how the man who brought pastries for coworkers’ birthdays could forget mine. Or how he could be so generous with strangers, but so measured at home. But with time, I’ve come to see it differently. I think he was lonely in ways he never named. He didn’t know how to relax inside the walls he paid for. He carried so much responsibility that he forgot how to share the weight of it.

Still, his care was present — just structured. He never missed a utility bill. He renewed insurance before it expired. He filed receipts in neat envelopes by month and marked family events on the wall calendar, even if he didn’t say anything about them.

And he never missed work. Even during typhoons. Even when he was sick. Reliability was his way of showing up — and it shaped how I move through the world, whether I like it or not.

After he retired, I visited his old branch. A younger employee recognized my name. “Your father was different,” he said. “Strict when it mattered, but never unfair. He always defended us. We knew we could count on him.”

That’s when I realized something I hadn’t been able to see before: at work, he had space to be who he wanted to be — composed, respected, gently humorous. At home, he was weighed down by things we couldn’t understand, and maybe he didn’t know how to explain. His silence wasn’t distance. It was containment.

Now that I’m older, I find myself doing the same — holding things in, managing without complaint, offering stability without asking for anything back. Sometimes I wonder if I inherited his silence more than his surname.

But I also inherited his steadiness. And perhaps that was his way of loving us: not loudly, not always clearly, but constantly.

He never said he was tired.
But he carried us — and everything else — like a man who couldn’t afford to drop anything.