We Love You, Super H Mart! (or) H Mart as Heterotopian Question
by Alex Paternostro
July 19, 2021
It is not every day that you get to see the National Guard up close. At a covid-19 mass vaccination site, however, I did. Hundreds of soldiers in uniform rows of tables checked in a constantly moving line before nurses injected hope, mRNA, to one end. The scale and efficiency of the operation left me awed. It was like a movie but set in a repurposed Kohl’s.
A short drive, a turn later, and I was outside a monolith whose signage bespoke no palimpsest. With its big, boxy red letters overhead, I entered Super H Mart for the first time. A commonplace experience for many, I was nonetheless amazed. I had had no idea what to expect when I stepped into that purported land o’ Asian plenty. Basket in hand, I could not help myself: Korean chives, king oyster mushrooms, purple potatoes—the diversity of produce was incredible. I took stock of ginseng and galangal, walls of noodles, fresh and dried fish, razor thin meats, and so much more to scan and choose from.
While I was speedier, my mother was also running around. At 4’10” with iPhone in hand, she bounced about to snap pictures of dragonfruit, durians, me in my orange vest, aisle shots, all sorts of things to send home. We had fun, and after I picked out the makings of a hearty soup, I set my basket down in front of her. She was standing, texting in front of sushi rolls and fresh pickles, when I exclaimed, “I’ve got really good stuff in here, a number of meals.” An older Korean lady with her older mother glanced over. Even behind her mask, I could tell that she was smiling.
• • •
I got my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine a few weeks later. Ava Max’s “Sweet but Psycho” and other pop hits energized the otherwise stilly observation area, and afterwards, I returned to Super H Mart. The food court was just opening up, but my mother was at the ready. As vendors unlocked their stalls and plastic-wrapped, Parisian-style pastries started to appear, she grabbed a tonkatsu lunchbox off of a rolling cart and found herself a roll of gimbap. Meanwhile, I hit up the mushroom section and noticed that across from it lay a package labeled “kumquats.” I had never tasted those before. They looked like a bunch of cute, grape-sized clementines hugging shrink wrap, so I just had to buy them. Later, another orange good caught my eye.
So fresh but so cheap, there lay a tray full of cold salmon steaks. As tanks of live clams and assorted seafood bubbled in peace, the fishmonger chopped up a fish. She walked over from her block as I asked the price and general weight of each steak. They were indeed a deal, a pound. Pleased, I lifted their plastic protector and grabbed four. What a haul. In combination with those little fruits, these hunks of protein would become salmon teriyaki with a kumquat compote: Yum.
After I put rice syrup, dried seaweed, gochugaru, and other wins into my cart, I noticed how the checking lady took pride in her work just like the cashier from last time. She placed light greens on top of heavier ones and double-bagged glass bottles with care.
• • •
I brought my dad for the first time a couple weeks after that boon, and it was “like we went on vacation” (funny as that sounds) since there was still so much to see and do. While Blackpink’s “Lovesick Girls” and other KPop bopped through the soundsystem, he picked out beautifully cracked shiitakes, we shoveled shrimp into bags, roamed the aisles for bonito, and after going through the whole store (sharing a laugh over the single, token white people shelf) ate a Chef’s Special Crunchy Roll in the food court. What a time...
• • •
H Mart is a regular stop now, always novel in its vastness but no longer othered as in my family’s initial embrace. For us, it is a place to be happy. To Michelle Zauner, the force behind Japanese Breakfast, however, H Mart evokes more complicated emotions. In her New Yorker essay(-turned-book) “Crying in H Mart,” the musician-writer explains how the store lives inextricably from the memory of her late mother as well as questions of separation:
I wonder how many people at H Mart miss their families. How many are thinking of them as they bring their trays back from the different stalls. Whether they’re eating to feel connected, to celebrate these people through food. Which ones weren’t able to fly back home this year, or for the past ten years? Which ones are like me, missing the people who are gone from their lives forever?
How apt that I came upon H Mart amidst the pandemic, a time when social distancing has crafted a common pain, instilling for many (even if temporarily) the real, life significances of the choices we make as more than six hundred thousand Americans now lay dead. Still sitting in the food court, Zauner goes on to explain, “It’s a beautiful, holy place. A cafeteria full of people from all over the world who have been displaced in a foreign country, each with a different history.” H Mart thus asks us about identities, ours and others, but does it not also foreclose such a discussion? “We don’t talk about it,” Zauner says. There is a certain comfort and sanctity, or holiness, in letting H Mart exert its unspoken charm.
On the other hand, with so many stories in those rows of aisles—of movement, difference, and belonging—of which each new, potentially racing shopper also adds a part, what does the store itself say behind that veil? Even the products themselves possess backgrounds and tales of labor and change, so for a place that for some is like a “piece of home,” and for others like me, a means to widen the palate, how can we think about the store’s position as an ethnic yet expansively American supermarket?
In filling various wants and wishes, the environment in which this world is housed is itself an imagined displacement. It is a business meant to be distinct from commonplace grocery shopping in America yet nonetheless desirous to be the new, best option for all sorts of customers. A sense of the outsider can be located in CEO Il Yeon Kwon’s Founder’s Greeting. He asserts, “We believe the excellence of our products, encourage our fellow Koreans to have profound pride and dignity in the magnificent culture of our motherland, South Korea.” However, this is in contrast to the website’s About Us, wherein one can notice a typically American amalgamation that casts a much wider net: “H Mart offers a full line of Asian foods as well as a broad range of Western groceries to complement its full scale offering to that of a traditional supermarket.” This contradictory stance, while good segmented marketing, also functions to create a vision of H Mart as fundamentally apart from yet within American society.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault coined an apt term for such a place in Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. Originally a lecture that was later translated and published in English by Jay Miskowiec, the piece presents heterotopias as “something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (4). Examples include theaters, cemeteries, libraries, museums, and as I now assert, H Mart.
No identifier is ideal, but H Mart largely tacks towards the six principles Foucault uses to define heterotopias. To begin, the first principle is simply a recognition that “there is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias” (4). Since Foucault speaks with a Western eye, and many of his examples can be found in the United States, we can state with confidence that H Mart is at least geographically in order.
The second principle reads, “[a] society, as its history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion; for each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have one function or another” (5). The first H Mart opened in Woodside, New York, in 1982. It was a simple grocery named Han Ah Reum whose customers sought it out for hard-to-find ingredients and a pleasant presentation. While those material aspects have remained, immaterial meanings have amassed as Asian-Americans have increasingly gained political and social voices in US society. The store evidences the attainability (lacking for most) of the American dream, increasing its offerings and locations while Asian-American shoppers have embraced its comforting and quiet power.
That power, moreover, relies on the idea of H Mart as South Korea in America, Asia on shelves, a place for Western tastes that brings distinct people, products, and evocations under one roof and consumer capitalist vision. In the words of Foucault, “The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible,” (6) and H Mart would fail without its contrastive character.
“Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time – which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies,” (6) explains the theorist, and such connections are perhaps most strongly felt by Zauner. This entails crying “in the freezer section, holding a stack of dumpling skins, thinking of all the hours that Mom and [her] spent at the kitchen table folding minced pork and chives into the thin dough,” and crying “when [she] see[s] a Korean grandmother eating seafood noodles in the food court, discarding shrimp heads and mussel shells onto the lid of her daughter’s tin rice bowl.” For Zauner, H Mart extends painfully into the past just as it shoots into a never realizable future. She wonders what her “Mom would have looked like in her seventies—if she would have the same perm that every Korean grandma gets as though it were a part of [their] race’s evolution.” For myriad immigrants and their children, heterochronies pop up when the mind flashes on memories when shopping, as items offer something tangible to grasp for from that past life and “motherland,” which H Mart’s CEO so consciously reminds us of.
The idea that “heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (7) again reflects H Mart’s balancing act, which can reappear when other members of the company’s family owners decide to make public statements. In The New York Times article “The Lure of H Mart, Where the Shelves Can Seem as Wide as Asia,” for instance, the reporter Ligaya Mishan writes, “To be welcoming to non-Koreans, H Mart puts up signs in English. At the same time, the younger Mr. Kwon said, ‘We don’t want to be the gentrified store.’ So while some non-Asians recoil from the tanks of lobsters, the Kwons are committed to offering live seafood.” Potential customers of all kinds walk through H Mart’s sliding doors, but challenges to fully enter the space greet them.
Finally, “the last trait of heterotopias is that they have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space that exposes every real space...as still more illusory...Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled” (8). H Mart leans towards the latter through its cleanliness, abundance, and imagined displacement. As a place to both buy delicious food and markers of identity and connection, it can also offer a sometimes super-sized escape from America’s uneven yet persistent prejudices.
• • •
Where you shop for food can tell much about you, and in America, options straddle extremes. There are urban food deserts for some and wholesome farmers’ markets for others with all manner of grocers and supermarkets in between. Besides correlating with income and opportunities, which places one chooses can also gauge how open-minded (or not) one is. For example, it took my brother and me over a year to realize that just twenty minutes away from us stands a massive Super H Mart. As individuals who aim to be open-minded, we reflected on how this happened. The main culprit seems to be unconscious, selective habituation. In other words, while we branched out and explored in other ways (cooking, media, etc.) we maintained a closed perspective on part of our sourcing and, unfortunately, acted upon it. Of course, the pandemic got in the way of wanting to venture out too far at first, but covid also ironically allowed for spontaneity and myriad new ingredients. In an age of “personalized recommendations,” which only narrow search results and hence fields of view, the lenses we take to define or imagine ourselves and our world gain even more significance. In viewing H Mart, moreover, none should get too hardened.
H Mart is special since it urges us to think about what we see and hence how we see it. Zauner, by reflecting so personally on the store—as space, memory, and concept—has taken it up on this front. Not everyone has or will. For many shoppers, it is just a quotidien aspect of their lives. Nonetheless, H Mart is not a thing harboring a single “untold truth” or merely the sum of the goods that can be hawked out of it but something more complicated that Zauner’s awareness of a figurative and also largely discursive silence is right on. Even The New York Times fails to push their lens. They focus on the very real and pressing, yet already imprinted message, that anti-Asian hate is bad:
“This is the paradox: that at a time when Americans are embracing Asian culture as never before, at least in its most accessible forms — eating ramen, drinking chai, swooning over the K-pop band BTS — anti-Asian sentiment is growing. With visibility comes risk.”
This simplification of Americans’ behaviors into an ambiguous binary—who embraces? who hurts?—continues to miss the fact that H Mart is not an answer, a cohesive and definable idea, but a question, a call to conversation that includes and extends beyond a present socio-political issue as well as emotions. Engaging with the place openly would be to break through the cracks of fantasy to notice complexity and change. Because from my experience, one detail that stands out most vividly was not in front of the salmon steaks but in the opposite, fish-on-ice stalls.
Blackpink (singing with Dua Lipa) may have continued overhead, but those speakers were overpowered by horns. As Hispanics managed the seafood counter, regional Mexican music provided an ambience wholly contrasting and yet completely a part of H Mart. While Cecilia Kang wrote “Koreans, Hispanics Work for Harmony” in The Washington Post during 2007 to document sometimes tense labor and race relations, the intriguing fact of these workers’ presence has not been addressed in regard to the current and all-too-clear media and marketing narrative about H Mart. It matters, therefore, that H Mart is a heterotopia since this inside-outside denomination makes us think more deeply about difference and diversity in regard to establishments in the American foodspace. H Mart, which is an American success story, asks us why it must be different, not “American” but a “Korean grocer” in the language of Maangchi’s Big Book of Korean Cooking. Without imposing a negatively assimilationist tone, how and when does a shop, or for the same reason, a restaurant become American?
To guard one vision of the store is to see only narrowly the potentials within our national food scene. As a storehouse of underlying ambivalence and conflicting diversity, H Mart speaks to the need to deconstruct identities, encourage alternate readings of and within America’s food cultures and industries, and see distinctly who and what make them what they are.
Alex Paternostro is a writer, culture critic, and food photographer based in Chicago. He is a co-founder of Our American Cuisine and graduated with an A.B. in English from Princeton University. You can learn more about him here.
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