[Crying in H Mart] # Ch 4: New York Style

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[Review previous expression]

I am relishing the american life where people maintain a personal distance from each other.

I erupted into laughter once I found the video that my 조카 bowed to audults.

• 여조카: niece
• 남조카: nephew

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[Summarize this chapter]

When she had to choose her college, she tried to escape from her mother as far as she could to relish her life against her mother's nagging. However, she was told her mother is in bad condition and she ended up being diagnosed with cancer like her sister. So the author reminded of previous family trip when shie tried to show off her life is good even withouth her mom.

 

She is recalling of her parents visit to Philadelphia before her mother got diagnosed. She wanted to get into university which placed in far from her hometown since she wanted to escape from her mother's control. So she tried to show their parents she was right and she was living really well when they were invited over. 

=> chatgpt: She recalls her parents' visit to Philadelphia before her mother was diagnosed. She wanted to attend a university far from her hometown to escape her mother's control. So, she tried to prove to her parents that she was right and that she was living well when they were invited over.

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[Quotes]

 

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[New Expression]

 

(p. 36) I’d been out of college for four years and I was well aware I didn’t have much to show for it.:

(p. 36) It was by sheer coincidence I’d wound up in Philadelphia.

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(p. 36) Like many a kid trapped in a small city, I felt bored

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(p. 36) and then suffocated.

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(p. 36) By the time I was in high school, the desire for independence trailing a convoy of insidious hormones had transformed me from a child who couldn’t bear to sleep without her mother into a teenager who couldn’t stand her touch.

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(p. 36) “Stop touching me!” “Can’t you ever leave me alone?” “Maybe I want wrinkles. Maybe I want reminders that I’ve lived my life.”

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(p. 37) College presented itself as a promising opportunity to get as far away from my parents as possible,

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(p. 37) captious and demanding of inordinate attention.

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(p. 37) seemed to measure up soundly to the ideal image of what we had always imagined a college experience should be.

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(p. 37) truancy

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(p. 37) my mother convinced all of it was a direct attempt to spite her, but somehow I managed to come out on the other side.

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(p. 37) I decided to stick around Philadelphia

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(p. 37) was convinced Little Big League might someday make it. But it had been four years now and the band had neither made it nor shown any real sign of spurning anonymity.

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(p. 37) the longest I’d managed to hold on to a job.

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(p. 37) I worked there with my boyfriend, Peter, whom I’d originally lured there in a long-game play to woo myself out of the friend zone, where I’d been exiled seemingly in perpetuity, but shortly after I finally won him over, I was fired and he was promoted.

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(p. 37) When I

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(p. 37) called my mom for a little sympathy, incredulous that the restaurant would fire such an industrious and charming worker as myself, she replied, “Well, Michelle, anyone can carry a tray.”

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(p. 38) all in an attempt to save up money for our band’s two-week tour in August.

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(p. 38) My new home was a far cry from the one I’d grown up in, where everything was kept spotless

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(p. 38) my mother’s specifications.

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(p. 38) had proudly salvaged from a trash heap.

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(p. 38) began copulating and nesting somewhere above.

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(p. 38) I would wake up to their scurrying and thudding around, which still wasn’t so bad until one of them fell into the hollow space

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(p. 38) Its carcass released a thick, rancid stench into my room, which also wasn’t so horrible until in the unseen guts of the house,

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(p. 39) I had wound up doing exactly what my mother had warned me not to do. I was floundering in reality, living the life of an unsuccessful artist.

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(p. 39) I was starting to get antsy.

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(p. 39) I was harboring a half hope that when the time came to finally give up on trying to be a musician, my interest in music might successfully parlay into a career in music journalism.

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(p. 39) As things stood, that time might be sooner than later.

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(p. 39) Little Big League’s bass player, had recently started playing in another band that was gaining traction.

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(p. 39) seemed a sure-enough sign

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(p. 39) I wasn’t quite ready to admit it, but I was going to New York that weekend, in part, to start laying the groundwork for something to fall back on.

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(p. 39) I knew she was scheduled to meet with a doctor that day, and I sent a few texts in the afternoon to follow up on her appointment.

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(p. 39) It was unlike her not to respond.

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(p. 39) I boarded the Chinatown bus with a sinking feeling.

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(p. 39) I didn’t think much of it at the time.

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(p. 40) My mother rarely saw doctors, committed to the idea that ailments passed of their own accord.

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(p. 40) She felt Americans were overly cautious and overly medicated and had instilled this belief in me

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(p. 40) care, I actually had to stifle a laugh.

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(p. 40) Food poisoning was a rite of passage. You couldn’t expect to eat well without taking a few risks, and we suffered the consequences twice a year.

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(p. 40) It seemed impossible that my mother could get cancer too, like lightning striking twice.

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(p. 40) a small bar on the Lower East Side that booked shows in the basement.

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(p. 40) I’d stuffed a hefty backpack full of clothes for the weekend and felt immediately frumpy and juvenile as I walked up Allen Street toward the bar.

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(p. 40) Spring was giving way to summer and people getting off work were shedding their jackets,

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(p. 40) A familiar itch was creeping in.

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(p. 40) That aching toward something wild—

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(p. 40) when you want to run drunk down an empty street in sneakers and fling all responsibility to the wayside.

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(p. 40) But for the first time it felt like an impulse I needed to turn away from.

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(p. 40) no more idle days.

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(p. 40) I needed to accept that something, at some point soon, would have to change.

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(p. 41) who informed me he was running about twenty minutes late.

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(p. 41) I texted, beginning to feel neglected.

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(p. 41) I dropped my bag beneath

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(p. 41) a bar stool and leafed through the records by the front window.

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(p. 41) He’d advocated for me when I applied to join, and now I hoped he might look out for me again.

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(p. 41) slipped outside to take the call.

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(p. 41) Usually her voice trilled from the other end of the line, but now it sounded as if she spoke from a deadened room. I started to pace the block. “If something’s wrong I’d rather know now,” I said. “It’s not fair to keep me in the dark.”

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(p. 42) one that indicated my mother had started the conversation with the intention of putting me off until I got home but was now beginning to reconsider.

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(p. 42) she said finally, the word falling like an anvil. “They say it’s cancerous, but they don’t know how bad it is yet. They have to run some more tests.”

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(p. 42) I stopped pacing, frozen and winded.

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(p. 42) Calling off engagements.

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(p. 42) The world moved on without pause on a pleasant, warm day in May while I stood silent and dumbfounded on the pavement and learned that my mother was now in grave danger of dying from an illness that had already killed someone I loved.

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(p. 42) in the distance.

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(p. 42) up. I swallowed the lump in my throat, slung my bag back over my shoulder,

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(p. 42) with seconds on standby.

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(p. 42) We caught up on each other’s postgraduate lives. He had just finished a cover story on Lana Del Rey and when I pressed him for details on the interview, he told me she chain-smoked through its entirety and recorded the whole thing on her iPhone to guard against misquotes, which endeared her to me.

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(p. 43) mentally disavowing the information I’d learned only an hour before.

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(p. 43) I might have had were now null and void,

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(p. 43) I was delirious with secrecy.

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(p. 43) It was against my nature to withhold such monumental information,

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(p. 43) from the same stretch of sidewalk

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(p. 43) in September of the previous year.

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(p. 43) in Philadelphia beforehand.

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(p. 43) my self-sufficient, albeit flimsy version of young adulthood,

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(p. 43) I spent weeks researching and reserving tables at the best restaurants in the city

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(p. 43) she always employed to try to get the edges as crispy as possible.

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(p. 44) my mother asked with a laugh.

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(p. 44) with a communal area

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(p. 44) full nudity

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(p. 44) If Peter came with us it would mean he and my father would have to be naked together a little less than twenty-four hours after they first met.

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(p. 44) partook joyfully in the banchan on our table—

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(p. 44) It was as if he believed cutting off one of his senses amplified the others.

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(p. 44) When Peter excused himself to use the bathroom, my parents hunched in toward the center of the table.

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(p. 44) “I bet you he chickens out of the bathhouse,”

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(p. 44) “I bet you a hundred dollars he’s going to do it,” my mother countered.

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(p. 44) Peter moved toward the men’s locker room without flinching.

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(p. 44) My mother shot my father the smug grin of a winner and rubbed her fingers together, expecting him to pay up.

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(p. 45) On the far end were a sauna

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(p. 45) My mother and I showered, then slowly eased our way into the hottest tub,

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(p. 45) diligently scrubbed their subjects.

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(p. 45) I crossed my legs tightly, mortified.

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(p. 45) I said with a blush.

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(p. 45) her vehement disapproval.

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(p. 45) Anyone who has actually lived in New York would be loath to describe Peter as “New York style.”

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(p. 45) Peter lacked the bristly nature and fast-paced hustle a West Coaster usually associates with an East Coast personality.

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(p. 45) He balanced me out in the way my mother did my father, who like me was always in a rush, quick to give up on any task at the first sign of failure and delegate it to someone else. What my mother meant was that she liked that Peter proved early on that he was a stand-up guy.

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(p. 46) “I’ll come up,” Peter said over the phone. “As soon as I get off, I’ll be there.”

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(p. 46) He wouldn’t get off until two and it wasn’t worth coming up for the night when I was already planning on taking the bus back in the morning.

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(p. 46) felt numb.

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(p. 46) we stock up on groceries at H Mart,

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(p. 46) How I held my breath as she entered my dilapidated home,

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(p. 46) she proffered when I’d gotten fired,

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(p. 46) without faltering.

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(p. 46) I kept waiting for her to say something under her breath.

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(p. 47) conceding in her efforts

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(p. 47) Or maybe the three thousand miles between us had made it so she was just happy to be with me.

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(p. 47) he squeezed next to me on the couch and lay still as I cried into his gray college T-shirt, finally able to release the billow of emotions I’d suppressed all day, grateful he hadn’t listened when I told him not to bother.

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(p. 47) He didn’t tell me until much later that my parents had called him first. That he had known she was sick before me, that he had promised them that he would be there when I found out. That he would be there through it all.

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