After all the holiday excitement and activity, sometimes January can be a bit of a downer. Too cold for outdoor events, so you’re stuck inside? We have the cure! We’re bringing back our Book Club event!
The Alumni Association encourages alumni groups to present educational and cultural activities, so we’re combining those ideas into one activity. We paired up with another alumni group, the Asian & Pacific Islanders Alumni, to present something educational with a splash of fun at the end. We’re going to read the book, “Crying in H Mart,” by Michelle Zauner, a memoir about growing up Korean-American in Eugene, Oregon. (A full description can be found below.)
You can find this relatively inexpensive book on Amazon or order it thru your nearest bookstore. We will all try to complete reading it by March, and then the two alumni groups will get together for dinner to discuss. You’ll get to meet a whole new group of alums, enjoy a great meal, and learn from an interesting discussion. Sometimes we are even able to invite the author to join us, (either in person or by Zoom)!
If you’re interested, just email us at OSUAlumniFranklinCounty@yahoo.com to let us know, and we’ll add you to the list to contact when we schedule the dinner. If we get enough people to join us, the Alumni clubs might even be able to cover the cost of the meal!
Below is a full description of the book. We hope you will join us!
Synopsis:
A memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.
Michelle Zauner tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.
As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band–and meeting the man who would become her husband–her Korean-ness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
