Michelle Zauner is of Korean and Jewish descent. She was born in Seoul, South Korea before moving to Eugene, Oregon. In 2018, her essay "Crying in H Mart" was published in The New Yorker, in which she discussed coping with her mother's passing due to cancer and her multiculturalism. The caption read, "Sobbing near the dry goods, I ask myself, 'Am I even Korean if there's no one left in my life to call and ask which brand of seafood we used to buy?'" The essay then evolved into a book.
In a 2021 interview with Slate, Zauner talked about what it was like growing up half-Asian: "I don’t feel like I was really interested in my Korean heritage until my mom passed away. Obviously, it was a part of my life naturally, growing up with a Korean mother and going to Seoul every other summer and having Korean relatives, but it wasn’t something I thought about very much until she passed away, honestly."
"I was definitely really embarrassed at times," she continued. "I went through a phase, especially in middle school, when you’re just, like, so embarrassed of everything. One thing that was really important to me was my mom always referred to herself in the third person as 'Mommy,' which is such a Korean thing. That drove me crazy because I would be at the mall and bump into a friend or something and she’d say, 'Mommy is going to be over there.' And I’d be like, 'Mom, just say I.' Stuff like that. Now it’s like, 'Oh, that’s so cute! What a little bitch I was being!' But at the time it was just mortifying, like, so, so mortifying. My mom’s name was Chongmi and people would call her Chow Mein sometimes."
She then elaborated, "My name is Michelle Chongmi Zauner, and I used to pretend that I didn’t have a middle name, because if you see the name, Michelle Zauner, you don’t know what I’m going to look like. And it felt like a power to me [because] you don’t know anything about me with a name like that. That’s what really bothered me about being half-Asian, was I wanted to be in control of my narrative. Anything that isn’t like being a neutral body, like a neutral white body, makes me feel out of control of my narrative for what you assume of me."