The Last Story of Mina Lee Read online

  A profoundly moving and unconventional mother-daughter saga, The Last Story of Mina Lee illustrates the devastating realities of being an immigrant in America.

  Margot Lee's mother, Mina, isn't returning her calls. It's a mystery to twenty-six-year-old Margot, until she visits her childhood apartment in Koreatown, LA, and finds that her mother has suspiciously died. The discovery sends Margot digging through the past, unraveling the tenuous invisible strings that held together her single mother's life as a Korean War orphan and an undocumented immigrant, only to realize how little she truly knew about her mother.

  Interwoven with Margot's present-day search is Mina's story of her first year in Los Angeles as she navigates the promises and perils of the American myth of reinvention. While she's barely earning a living by stocking shelves at a Korean grocery store, the last thing Mina ever expects is to fall in love. But that love story sets in motion a series of events that have consequences for years to come, leading up to the truth of what happened the night of her death.

  Told through the intimate lens of a mother and daughter who have struggled all their lives to understand each other, The Last Story of Mina Lee is a powerful and exquisitely woven debut novel that explores identity, family, secrets, and what it truly means to belong.

  Advance Praise for

  The Last Story of Mina Lee

  “Suspenseful and deeply felt… [The Last Story of Mina Lee] illuminates stories that often go untold, in life as well as fiction.”

  —Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists

  “A stunningly powerful and original novel about social class, immigration and family. Kim is a brilliant new voice in American fiction.”

  —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

  “A fierce, gripping call to love and memory... Kim is a knockout.”

  —Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things

  “Haunting and heartbreaking… Fans of Amy Tan and Kristin Hannah will love Kim’s brilliant debut.”

  —Booklist, starred review

  “Brilliant… A confident and gripping account of where families bury secrets and what happens when you dig.”

  —Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree

  “Unforgettable.”

  —Vanessa Hua, author of A River of Stars

  “The Last Story of Mina Lee had me glued to the page until its surprising and poignant end.”

  —Amy Meyerson, author of The Bookshop of Yesterdays

  “Dynamic and piercing.”

  —E. J. Koh, author of The Magical Language of Others

  “Exquisite.”

  —Corinne Manning, author of We Had No Rules

  The Last Story of Mina Lee

  Nancy Jooyoun Kim

  Born and raised in Los Angeles, Nancy Jooyoun Kim is a graduate of UCLA and the University of Washington, Seattle. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, NPR/PRI’s Selected Shorts, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, The Offing and elsewhere. The Last Story of Mina Lee is her first novel.

  NancyJooyounKim.com

  For my mother

  어머니께

  Contents

  Margot

  Margot’s final conversation

  The next morning after

  Mina

  Mina stepped off the plane

  Mina lay in her twin-size bed

  Margot

  After she collected

  What would Margot do

  Mina

  On the local bus

  Mina didn’t know the other

  Margot

  The following evening

  Mina

  After a month

  On Monday, Mina met

  Margot

  Across from her mother’s

  Mina

  As her speed and confidence

  Margot

  Down residential roads

  Mina

  When she finished her shift

  One week later

  In the back of the store

  Margot

  Last night had been

  Two days of searching

  Mina

  In Mr. Kim’s blue station wagon

  Autumn settled in the city

  Margot

  Underneath vaulted ceilings

  Late afternoon the next day

  Mina

  With the sun hanging low

  Margot

  Lamplights glowed steady

  Mina

  Mina thought about the first night

  At his one-bedroom apartment

  Fifteen minutes early

  Margot

  The morning after

  Mina

  With Mr. Park

  Margot

  The Monday before Christmas

  Mina

  After a dinner

  After another sleepless night

  Margot

  On the floor of her

  Mina

  In her bathroom mirror

  As daylight ended

  Margot

  After Margot had gone

  Mina

  On the Saturday

  “Mina?” Mrs. Baek said

  Margot

  Outside of Mrs. Baek’s door

  A day after Christmas

  On New Year’s Eve

  Accelerating onto the 10

  Acknowledgments

  Margot

  Fall 2014

  MARGOT’S FINAL CONVERSATION with her mother had seemed so uneventful, so ordinary—another choppy bilingual plod. Half-understandable.

  Business was slow again today. Even all the Korean businesses downtown are closing.

  What did you eat for dinner?

  Everyone is going to Target now, the big stores. It costs the same and it’s cleaner.

  Margot imagined her brain like a fishing net with the loosest of weaves as she watched the Korean words swim through. She had tried to tighten the net before, but learning another language, especially her mother’s tongue, frustrated her. Why didn’t her mother learn to speak English?

  But that last conversation was two weeks ago. And for the past few days, Margot had only one question on her mind: Why didn’t her mother pick up the phone?

  * * *

  Since Margot and Miguel had left Portland, the rain had been relentless and wild. Through the windshield wipers and fogged glass, they only caught glimpses of fast food and gas, motels and billboards, premium outlets and “family fun centers.” Margot gripped the wheel, hands cramping, damp with fear. The rain had started an hour ago, right after they had made a pit stop in north Portland to see the famous thirty-one-foot-tall Paul Bunyan sculpture with his cartoonish smile, red-and-white checkered shirt on his barrel chest, his hands resting on top of an upright ax.

  Earlier that morning in Seattle, Margot had stuffed a backpack and a duffel with a week’s worth of clothes, picked up Miguel from his apartment with two large suitcases and three houseplants, and merged onto the freeway, driving Miguel down for his big move to Los Angeles. They’d stop in Daly City to spend the night at Miguel’s family’s house, which would take about ten hours to get to.

  At the start of the drive, Miguel had been lively, singing along to “Don’t Stop Believin’” and joking about all the men he would meet in LA. But now, almost four hours into the road tr
ip, Miguel was silent with his forehead in his palm, taking deep breaths as if trying hard not to think about anything at all.

  “Everything okay?” Margot asked.

  “I’m just thinking about my parents.”

  “What about your parents?” She lowered her foot on the gas.

  “Lying to them,” he said.

  “About why you’re really moving down to LA?” Miguel had taken a job offer at an accounting firm in a location more conducive to his dreams of working in theater. For the last two years, they had worked together at a nonprofit for people with disabilities. She was an administrative assistant; he crunched numbers in Finance. She would miss him, but she was happy for him, too. “The theater classes? The plays that you write? The Grindr account?”

  “About it all.”

  “Do you ever think about telling them?”

  “All the time.” He sighed. “But it’s easier this way.”

  “Do you think they know?”

  “Of course they do. But...” He brushed his hand through his hair. “Sometimes, agreeing to the same lie is what makes a family family, Margot.”

  “Ha. Then what do you call people who agree to the same truth?”

  “Well, I don’t know any of these people personally, but—scientists?”

  She laughed, having expected him to say friends. Grasping the wheel, she caught the sign for Salem. Her hands were stiff.

  “Do you need to use the bathroom?” she asked.

  “I’m okay. We’re gonna stop in Eugene, right?”

  “Yeah, should be another hour or so.”

  “I’m kinda hungry.” Rustling in his pack on the floor of the back seat, he found an apple, which he rubbed clean with the edge of his shirt. “Want a bite?”

  “Not now, thanks.”

  His teeth crunched into the flesh, the scent cracking through the odor of wet floor mats and warm vents.

  Margot was struck by the image of her mother’s serene face—the downcast eyes above the high cheekbones, the relaxed mouth—as she peeled an apple with a paring knife, conjuring a continuous ribbon of skin. The resulting spiral held the shape of its former life. As a child, Margot would delicately hold this peel like a small animal in the palm of her hand, this proof that her mother could be a kind of magician, an artist who told an origin story through scraps—this is the skin of a fruit, this is its smell, this is its color.

  “I hope the weather clears up soon,” Miguel said, interrupting her memory. “It gets pretty narrow and windy for a while. There’s a scary point right at the top of California where the road is just zigzagging while you’re looking down cliffs. It’s like a test to see if you can stay on the road.”

  “Oh, God,” Margot said. “Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

  As she refocused on the rain-slicked road, the blurred lights, the yellow and white lines like yarn unspooling, Margot thought about her mother who hated driving on the freeway, her mother who no longer answered the phone. Where was her mother?

  The windshield wipers squeaked, clearing sheets of rain.

  “What about you?” Miguel asked. “Looking forward to seeing your mom?”

  Margot’s stomach dropped. “Actually, I’ve been trying to call her for the past few days to let her know, to let her know that we would be coming down.” Clenching the wheel, she sighed. “I didn’t really want to tell her because I wanted this to be a fun trip, but then I felt bad, so...”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “She hasn’t been answering the phone.”

  “Hmm.” He shifted in his seat. “Maybe her phone battery died?”

  “It’s a landline. Both landlines—at work and at home.”

  “Maybe she’s on vacation?”

  “She never goes on vacation.” The windshield fogged, revealing smudges and streaks, past attempts to wipe it clean. She cranked up the air inside.

  “Hasn’t she ever wanted to go somewhere?”

  “Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. I don’t know why, but she’s always wanted to go there.”

  “It’s a big ol’ crack in the ground, Margot. Why wouldn’t she want to see it? It’s God’s crack.”

  “It’s some kind of Korean immigrant rite of passage. National parks, reasons to wear hats and khaki, stuff like that. It’s like America America.”

  “I bet she’s okay,” Miguel said. “When did you see her last?”

  “Last Christmas,” she said.

  “Maybe she’s just been busier than usual. We’ll be there soon.”

  “You’re probably right. I’ll call her again when we stop.”

  A heaviness expanded inside her chest. She fidgeted with the radio dial but caught only static with an occasional blip of a commercial or radio announcer’s voice.

  Her mother was fine. They would all be fine.

  With Miguel in LA, she’d have more reasons to visit now.

  The road lay before them like the peel of a fruit. The windshield wipers hacked away water falling from the sky.

  * * *

  In Redding, California, shrouded by mountains and dense national forests, Margot and Miguel stopped at the first place they could find—a greasy spoon with red vinyl booths, a jukebox, a waitress in white uniform. The hostess, a blond ponytailed college student, led them to a table and handed them plastic menus. An old man in a trucker hat sat at the counter by himself. In a neighboring booth, two girls colored paper place mats while their parents observed.

  Being from LA, in particular Koreatown, where Korean food and Mexican joints had been the norm, Margot always thought of the classic diner as “charming” and “novel,” a location of unspoken heroism out of a movie or a short story about decent, hardworking white Americans trying to catch a break. Margot remembered when she had moved to Seattle eight years ago and made her first white friends—people who seemed to navigate their identities, their skin tones, their appearances so easily, in such an invisible way, as if the world had been created for them, which, in a sense, it had. Many of them—with their blue eyes and tall noses—appeared intrinsically attractive because even white people who weren’t supermodels were at least white.

  She didn’t want to think that way since, theoretically, it made no sense. Beauty is a construct, but theory is not the reality we live, she thought. Theory didn’t live in the bones. Theory didn’t erase the years of self-scrutiny in a mirror and not seeing anyone at all, not a protagonist or a beauty, only a television sidekick, a speechless creature, who at best was “exotic,” desirable but simple and foreign. Growing up, she had often wondered, If only I had bigger eyes or brown hair instead of black. If only...

  The food arrived, interrupting her thoughts. Margot and Miguel devoured their meals—a cheeseburger and fries, a tuna melt on rye, and tomato soup—like animals. Margot tried to slow down, but everything tasted too good, perfect, American. All she could hear was mutual chewing, sips, and gulps—an orchestra of fulfillment. She wanted to sit here forever, forget about her problems, LA, her mother.

  “We should hit the road, no?” Miguel asked. “Wanna switch?”

  They paid the bill and went outside, where clouds had cleared out for an evening sky that promised stars. The moon glowed silvery white like a door’s empty fisheye. Margot regretted not packing a winter coat, only a windbreaker and a few sweaters for the warmer weather in LA.

  About five inches taller than Margot, Miguel adjusted the mirrors, then the seat to give his legs more room. The top of his pomaded hair brushed up against the fabric of the roof.

  He merged onto the freeway, driving hard and fast. Whistling around slow-moving cars, he always signaled, never cutting anyone off. Margot had never imagined how quick and nimble her car could be, how such confidence and fearlessness could both impress and terrify her. She had become so used to going at her own, or her mother’s, speed.

 
Her mother never liked the idea of traveling anywhere far. She rarely spoke of the past, but she had once told Margot that at the age of four, she had fled with her family from the north during the Korean War. Somehow, she had been separated from her parents permanently in that bloody time. Movement for her mother was essentially an experience of loss that Margot, American-born, could never imagine. And yet Margot herself had inherited the same anxiety about driving fast, particularly on freeways. She thought too much about the experience of speed itself, its danger, rather than getting somewhere at last.

  Hitting flat straight highway without traffic through farms and fields, Margot untied her ponytail. She could feel herself relax, her shoulders and grip loosening. The sky—an inky ombré of blue and black—stretched wide to reveal a field of stars, twinkling at them from vast distances.

  Once, twenty years ago when Margot was six, her mother had packed up their Oldsmobile for a weekend trip to Vegas—the only road trip she had ever taken with her mother, who never took more than a day off work. On the way there, she had driven below the speed limit in the slow lane the entire time, stretching what should’ve been a four-hour trip into an entire day. Cars and trucks zoomed by, honking. Through open windows, a dry breeze carried an odor of petroleum, mesquite, and sage. Dust powdered Margot’s face and arms as she slumped low in her seat.

  “Where are we going?” Margot had asked.

  “Somewhere very special,” her mother said.

  “Will there be ice cream?”

  Her brown eyes, hard as cabochons the entire drive, softened in the rearview mirror. “Yes.”

  Driving down the Strip, Margot had marveled at the seductive lights, a wonderland of distraction and pleasure. Here they could have anything—ice cream, games, stuffed animals, cheeseburgers for breakfast, walls made from hard candy that they could lick. But instead they spent most of their one full day in a shabby motel outside of Vegas, waiting for what—or for whom—Margot never knew.

  After hours of waiting, they left the next morning. On the drive back, her mother had seemed so utterly deflated that Margot didn’t have the courage to ask why they had driven so far. She always assumed that her mother didn’t want to talk about the things that hurt her. But maybe Margot was wrong about that. Maybe now as an adult, she was growing into a woman who could understand and support her mother, despite the different languages they knew.