I'll be honest: I cried at least once while reading this. Not in an H-Mart, but in a hotel room in Cuba at 1 am. This memoir shares the profoundly personal relationship that Zauner has with her mother, her family, and with her heritage, and the thing that struck me while reading was the unfamiliar intimacy I felt. Despite the fact that I am Chinese, have a living mother, and go to school with many people who look like I do, I still know the feeling of being sorry for rebelliousness, of regretting rejecting my Asian-ness, and of complicated familial love.

Zauner tells a story that strikes painfully true for those who have lived similar experiences, and opens a window for those who haven't. It is heartfelt, heartbreaking, and heartening to read the tale of a daughter who realizes she might have more of her mother's tongue and mother tongue in her than she thought.

This memoir has unending sincerity and heart. Or maybe I should say H-Mart - I don't think it is a coincidence that the two words are only one letter different.

How many friends and pages does it take to split a cake? Eliezer Yudkowsky, in his "Galilean Dialogue on Friendliness" answers the question with "Five. And probably too many."

The essay is an intriguing dive into fairness, optimization, and understanding each other as human beings when we voice our desires and opinions. If we want to be understood, we must understand that others don't necessarily want to understand us in the first place.

This essay asks the right questions, and gives just enough answers to be alluring. And honestly, it speaks a lot of truth. Do we really need a supercomputer with infallible logic to determine if each person should get 20% of a cake? Or do we just need to trust each other, as members of a species, that fair is fair?