The Last Story of Mina Lee Read online

  A light every now and then winked from distant points in the black sky and fields around Margot and Miguel. Driving with the road illuminated by the stretch of their headlights made her feel as if she was on a rocket ship, blasting into unknown depths, an infinite spray of stars and planets, tiny galaxies in the void.

  She closed her eyes. Why didn’t her mother pick up the phone?

  THE NEXT MORNING after spending the night at Miguel’s parents’ house, they were on Interstate 5, listening to a story on the local NPR station about the devastation of the drought. She never knew how much she loved the sun—Los Angeles’s interminable light—until she had moved to Seattle where the cold and rain stretched for gray days on end. Growing up, she had often found the light-filled sky oppressive in its ceaselessness, the doldrums of wearing shorts almost every day. That heat, those clothes could be glorious on a day off, but Margot and her mother, who worked long hours at her store six days a week, never had any time for vacation. But now as she contemplated the goldenness of the sun-scorched earth against a backdrop of cloudless blue sky, she could appreciate the warmth and light as if she had escaped a prison.

  Hours later as Margot merged onto the 101 South, the sun began its long descent, transforming the sky into a wash of muted blue that blended into bright streaks of hot pink, the glow of tangerine in the west. After crawling along for thirty minutes with other drivers, possessing that quintessential LA—bored and spiritually deceased—look in the eyes, Margot and Miguel exited at Normandie Avenue and drove down the bustling streets of her neighborhood, Koreatown—clusters of signs in Korean, shopping plazas, parents holding bags of groceries and the hands of children, the elderly in sun hats hunched over and hobbling across streets, teenagers with baggy pants and backpacks.

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever been to Koreatown before,” Miguel said, staring out the window.

  “Have you spent much time in LA? You’ve been a few times, right?”

  “Yeah, I’ve done the touristy stuff. Santa Monica, Venice, Beverly Hills, downtown.”

  “There’s not a lot of reason to be in Koreatown, I guess, unless you’re into the food. It’s changing now, though.” Margot explained how in recent years, developers were carving playgrounds for the fashionable and moneyed, building condos, hotels, and restaurants in the neighborhood. “It’s so strange to me,” she continued. “Why would anyone want to come here?”

  “It’s just different for people, that’s all,” Miguel said. “People want to go places that are different. It’s slumming, what rich people do for shits and giggles.”

  Margot shook her head. “For me, being different wasn’t a good thing. All I wanted growing up was everything on television—dishwashers and windows that shut properly and a yard.”

  “You didn’t have a yard? Even poor people have yards, Margot. With, you know, like clotheslines and roosters and limping dogs...” He smiled, and Margot laughed.

  “We lived in an apartment, the same one my mom lives in now,” she said. “We never had a house.”

  They pulled up to the front of the building that she and her mother had lived in for as long as she could remember—a nondescript, gray stucco three-story complex. The windows on the bottom floor had security bars over them. The large agaves planted out front resembled tired sentinels that badly needed a day off. Margot and her mother lived on the middle floor in a two-bedroom unit with a small north-facing balcony that looked partially out onto another, almost-identical building and back alley.

  “Let’s sit here for a bit?” she asked. The old embarrassment rose from the pit of her stomach, the shame she felt when she brought classmates home from school to work on group projects. Margot and her mother never entertained or invited anyone inside for fun. No matter how clean her mother tried to keep things, the space always seemed shabby and disorganized—a closet for storage and sleeping and fighting rather than a home. But what else could her mother afford?

  It was easy to see now how a place like this, so different from her Seattle neighborhood of green trees and clean sky and open windows without bars, could make her feel embarrassment and shame about her home. Not that life was less confusing in Seattle, but it was much less in her face all the time—the crowd of emotions, the struggle to put food on the table, the fear of being followed down the street at night, kidnapped or stabbed. Always looking behind her. Maybe this was why she couldn’t leave the past behind—everything about her life had trained her to look back. By never looking forward, she was always tripping, falling over things.

  Miguel touched her arm. “Do you want to call your mom again? Does she have a cell phone?”

  Margot took a deep breath and unbuckled her seat belt. “She has one that she uses for emergencies, but it’s never on. It’s a flip phone, and she doesn’t know how to check voice mail.”

  “Sacrilège,” he said in a bad French accent.

  “She’s technologically in the Stone Age,” Margot went on. “She can’t really read English either, and her eyes are kind of bad. My Korean isn’t good enough to help her. It always ends in a fight.”

  How many hours had she spent, words stumbling like stones out of her mouth, trying to explain something in Korean to her mother? A utilities bill. How to work the remote control. A car insurance policy. And in those hours, Margot would always slip, somehow yelling at her mother, as her mother had often done to her as a child when she had misbehaved by oversleeping, by missing church, even by falling ill and needing to go to the hospital.

  Her mother had once screamed, “How am I going to pay for this? Why don’t you take better care of yourself?” Her mother didn’t have time for empathy. She always had to keep moving. If she stopped, she might drown.

  “Would you mind waiting in the car?” Margot asked.

  The broken security gate shrieked, then slammed behind her. Holding her breath, she climbed the dark, dank staircase, which smelled of wet socks and old paint fumes, to the second floor, where she knocked on the apartment door. The fisheye was empty and dark.

  This was no longer her home. Yet with a memory that lived not in her head but in her hands, she turned the key for the dead bolt, which was already unlocked, and then the doorknob. She had spent most of her life, her childhood, dreading the inside of that apartment, not out of fear but out of hatred and spite. Hatred for her mother. Hatred for the money they didn’t have. Hatred for her father, missing, gone, a coward. Hatred for her mother’s accent. Hatred for the furniture, stained, falling apart. Hatred for herself, her life. She hated it all. She wanted this world to disappear, to burn it all down.

  As she opened the door, a dark odor of decayed fruit, putrid and sharp, swelled around her head like a tidal wave. Acid erupted from her mouth onto the arm that shielded her face. She flipped on the light. There was a broken ceramic sculpture of the Virgin Mary on the floor, tour brochures on their coffee table, and in this intimate chaos, her mother facedown on the carpet with her right arm extended, the left one by her side, her feet in sheer nude socks.

  Later, Margot would remember the screams and would realize that they were coming from her.

  She fell to her knees. The hallway’s amber glow was soft like feathers. Face tingling, she lay her forehead on the carpet where the head of a tiny nail pressed against her skin. Miguel’s hands abruptly gripped her shoulders from behind, easing her to her feet. They wobbled, weak, down the stairs into the open air, the street.

  As the sun disappeared below the horizon, the sky became the longest bruise—purple and blue. The cruel light left its mark.

  She rested on the uneven curb, head in her arms folded on her knees, Miguel next to her. Hiccuping through tears, she struggled to breathe.

  Maybe she should have checked her mother’s pulse, maybe she shouldn’t have called the police. What if her mother was only hurt badly, or drunk? No, she never drank and a person that was hurt would not lie on the floor facedown
like that. And she couldn’t bear the thought of being near that smell, that body, the first time she had seen her mother in almost a year.

  That was her umma. That was her head. Those were her feet.

  Sirens blared from a distance, getting louder as they arrived. She directed two police officers and an EMT to her mother’s apartment. Another two officers asked her questions. She was appalled at how little she could answer. But she did tell them miscellaneous things about her mother—that she worked all day at this store and that she went to church.

  A wiry Korean man in his sixties, perhaps the landlord or even a janitor, spoke to the officers for about ten minutes. Afterward, he stood on the sidewalk, smoking with a few casual observers who had emerged out of the surrounding buildings, curious about the lights and the noise.

  They took her body away in a black bag on a stretcher.

  Her name was Mina. Mina Lee.

  Yes, that was her mother.

  Mina

  Summer 1987

  MINA STEPPED OFF the plane into a flash of heat, thinking she had made a grave mistake. But it was too late. The world opened up like a hot mouth devouring her. Yet hadn’t it been that way her whole life already? She reminded herself that this airport, LAX, was actually easier, much more organized than Seoul, or any other great city, much safer even than her own childhood.

  She fought back the memory of the screaming, stampeding crowd in which she had been separated from her parents while fleeing the north during the war. Her four-year-old hands groping to grab them. The rush of bodies. The moment she lost sight of her mother and father. Surrounded by the distress, the pain etched into strangers. The dead along the road, the elderly who had fallen, and those shuddering, hungry people who did not have anything left to protect.

  And in the airport now, her heart throbbed as she waded through the crowd to get out. She was doing this again, and again she was doing it alone.

  A steady stream of people jostled in the same direction—friends and families, smiling, reunited, businessmen in gray and navy suits traveling by themselves. She was in another country, foreign, alone. The breath rushed in and out of her lungs. Her underarms were clammy and cold. What if she fainted now before she could even make it out the door?

  On paper, she was on vacation, visiting a friend from work. She had always wanted to visit America. She would be here for a month to see the sights—Disneyland, the beaches, Yosemite. On paper, she would relax, enjoy herself, and return to her life in Seoul, her job as a designer of women’s casual clothes.

  The papers did not say that she was going to find a job here, that she was going to start a life, that she hoped to find an employer to sponsor her, and if she could not do that, she would stay anyway—invisible, unofficial, undocumented. The papers did not say that she had nothing to return to, nothing that she wanted or could live with any longer. The papers did not say that she did not know how to sit still anymore, that she did not know how to stay in her apartment by herself, that she could not bear the gnawing familiarity of that haunted place, those ruined streets, that ruined home. The papers did not say that everything in her suitcases was now all that she had. Every single one of her belongings had been stuffed compactly inside of them. Selling and giving away most of her life had been an act of self-immolation, whittling herself down enough to stay alive until God took her home, wherever that meant.

  A wave of relief washed over her as she stepped outside of the airport into the blast of hot air and sunshine. After loosening the hand-dyed silk scarf, sienna-and-ocher-colored, around her neck, she reached inside her purse for a napkin to wipe her forehead.

  She had already secured a place to stay—a small bedroom in a house owned by an ahjumma who lived by herself in Koreatown. Her friend Mrs. Shin, a former coworker in Seoul, had recommended the place after she, her husband, and two children had immigrated and stayed there for a few months themselves three years prior.

  On the edge of the sidewalk, Mina raised her hand, hailing a cab. The driver, a tall Sikh man, helped her with her luggage, heaving her two large suitcases into the trunk. She realized that she had never seen a person who was Sikh before. Sweat streamed down her face and neck inside the sauna-like car despite the windows being open. She reached forward, showing him the address she had written in English on a slip of lined paper. The shakiness of the letters, the seismographic script revealed to her how nervous she had been writing down that address, as if signing a contract for the rest of her life.

  “First time?” he asked, his eyes smiling in the rearview mirror. His dark turban skimmed the roof of the car.

  “Ex-cuse me?”

  “First time?”

  “Oh.” She scoured her mind for English words like a dresser with too many drawers.

  “English?”

  “No.” She shook her head.

  “Chinese?”

  “Korea.”

  The driver accelerated onto the freeway, weaving in and out of a brash symphony of traffic. A horn section of big rigs. Brakes screeching. A chorus of road rage. Synthesized pop music, all leg warmers and big hair, blasted from an open window, while records scratched into “The Batterram” one lane over. A man shouted, “Go fuck yourself,” like cymbals crashing.

  Damp clothes clung to her body. She wiped her face, trying not to ruin her makeup, and gripped the door handle.

  As they passed pedestrians in the streets of LA, Mina wondered where the Koreans were. Occasionally, another Asian face appeared in a neighboring car. But here in this cacophonous world of concrete, metal, and glass, in this smell of gasoline and rubber, she could not see herself. She felt disembodied in this new place, where she did not know the language, where the signs, the billboards all blared something in English, gibberish.

  She rummaged inside her purse for the photograph that she had always kept with her, one of her, her husband and daughter, both now dead. Hands shaking, she rubbed the edges of his face with her thumb and then the face of her daughter, soft and serene after a day of hiking in the woods. She wanted to kiss the photograph. She thought of the last time she had seen her daughter, and how she had scolded her, for nothing, something so stupid—dropping a dish and chipping it on the ground.

  Had she known that would be their final moment together, would she have yelled? No, she would’ve held her. She would’ve kissed her. She would’ve confessed that she was terrified of everything her daughter did, things breaking, objects in disarray, because she could not afford to lose another thing that she loved in her life. She didn’t have the strength to rebuild herself.

  Then it happened. She lost everything again.

  “Here we are.”

  She had been crying. In the rearview mirror, the driver frowned, furrowing his brow.

  He carried her suitcases up the concrete driveway, which sloped gently toward the entrance of the home. The house appeared broken, too, with cracks along the beige stucco, windows held together with tape. Orange and lemon trees and weeds grew wildly. Shingles peeled away from the roof or lay askew. She placed the photograph in her purse and wiped the tears away from her face, carefully, before knocking on the door.

  The driver stood beside her, waiting to make sure someone answered. She felt self-conscious standing with this man, not knowing exactly how to thank him, because his silence, his wordlessness, calmed her nerves. She knocked again. The door opened to reveal a woman in her fifties with a short brown bob, gray at the roots. She bowed her head and greeted Mina in Korean.

  “Mrs. Lee?”

  “Yes.” Mina turned to the driver. “Thank you. How...much?”

  “Oh, that’s okay. Next time.” He handed her a business card. “You can pay me next time.”

  “No, no.” She reached into her purse.

  He lowered the bags inside the house and walked away, but at the bottom of the driveway he stopped and said, “Good luck. You’re going
to be okay.”

  She waved in response, speechless.

  “Here, let me take your bags,” the woman said. “You must be tired.”

  “No, I’ve got it.”

  They each took one of the heavy suitcases deeper inside the home, dark and cool like a cave. A single fan rotated in the corner, kicking up the curtains with its draft. The house had dirty walls, no artwork except some portraits of Jesus and a ceramic sculpture of Mary.

  “Let me show you your room.”

  MINA LAY IN her twin-size bed, eager to be doing something—shopping for food, finding work, calling Mrs. Shin—anything. But she didn’t have a telephone in her room yet. And the sprawling map of Los Angeles that she had brought, geared toward tourists, confused her—major attractions, such as the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Beverly Hills, and Disneyland, strung together by miles and miles of freeway. She stared at the cottage cheese ceiling, immobilized by the dread of having to decide on what to do next. There seemed to be too much information to learn.

  She closed her eyes, taking deep breaths. She didn’t want to panic, to feel anything. She was tired of feeling.

  She asked God to help her, to tell her what to do.

  She had already sold all her belongings, quit her job in Seoul. Without her husband and daughter, there was nothing left for her there in that country, on those streets, in narrow alleyways echoing their footsteps. What else could she do now but surrender to her fate, to the multitude of decisions that brought her right here in this room alone with the windows open, feeling damp from her own sweat in a stranger’s clean sheets, staring at a stranger’s ceiling?