The Last Story of Mina Lee

by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

  Many of the Koreans that she had known as a child had moved out for homes in the suburbs once they had saved enough, and now most of the neighbors were Latino. Yet they all lived here to survive, while longing to be somewhere else. How did the world become a place where jobs and wealth were so concentrated? Why did borders define opportunity? Was it that bad for her mother in Korea? Was she more trapped there than here?

  Parting the white curtains, Margot looked down at the alley with the garbage bins where the neighborhood kids played soccer and handball up against the side of the building after school and at night. She then looked inside the closet where her mother’s clothes hung neatly, unlike Margot’s own back in Seattle where every sweater or pair of pants seemed to already be on the floor. Her mother had accumulated and saved so much through the years—nothing of real value but had still meant something to her—a dated leather jacket from the ’80s, a cobalt blue dress with large shoulder pads, a simple black sheath, some knee-length skirts from Korea that hadn’t fit her for years. Margot dug through the pockets of the pants and jackets, finding coins, faded receipts, a lipstick, small bills.

  A pair of black tennis shoes, covered in a fine rust-colored dust, smelled of mineral and sage.

  Margot was again reminded of that long drive to Vegas once years ago, more vividly this time. How the hot air whipped her skin through the open windows, caking her face and arms with a fine powder like konggaru on tteok, which she could taste inside her mouth, dry and grainy. Big white clouds hovered above as the world—clay and ocher, brittle and burnt—streaked by. Her mother’s eyes, hard as stones, focused on the road. Sweat streamed down the sides of her face and neck.

  “Where are we going?” Margot had asked from the back.

  “Somewhere very special,” her mother said.

  “Will there be ice cream?”

  “I hope so,” she said, eyes softening. “Yes.”

  “Why are we driving so far for ice cream?” Margot asked in English. She laughed.

  “It’s not just for ice cream,” her mother said in Korean.

  “It must be the best ice cream in the world. The biggest ice cream.”

  Her mother adjusted her collar, cleared her throat. She fidgeted with the radio dial for a minute, frustrated with the shrill sounds, the waves of static, a news reporter’s voice, snippets of classical music.

  “If you behave well, I’ll buy you ice cream. Any flavor you want.” Her mother glanced at her in the rearview mirror. A car behind them honked. As he passed on the left, the driver yelled, “Go back to Chinatown, bitch.”

  Margot flinched as if a stranger had thrown a rock at them. She could see her mother’s hands gripping the wheel, knuckles whitening. But she drove on, still dipping below the speed limit.

  “Do you want some water?” her mother asked an hour or two later. Margot had fallen asleep.

  She was thirsty, but she responded, “No. I’m fine.”

  “We might...we might meet someone special in Las Vegas.” Her voice cracked. “Someone I haven’t seen in a long while.”

  Her mother was trying hard not to cry. Daytime had turned to dusk, a wash of hot-pink streaks and a purple horizon.

  “I wonder if this is the right thing to do—bringing you here, on this trip. But I had no one to watch you.” It was as if her mother was talking to herself or another adult, rather than attempting to reason with a six-year-old, but only later did Margot realize that as much as she resented her mother for leaning on Margot, her mother was deeply and unimaginably alone.

  The only people who did not judge her were God and perhaps Margot as a child.

  As they approached the city limits, they stopped at a fast-food restaurant for dinner where they devoured cheeseburgers and fries, much to Margot’s delight. When they reached the hotel, her mother collapsed on the bed and fell asleep. It was Margot’s first time in a hotel, and she stayed awake all night as if to guard her mother, taking in the new sights and smells. The sheets had a chemical floral scent that was foreign to her. The carpet was extra nubby under her toes. The television appeared huge compared to the one they had at home.

  After waiting for an entire day in their hotel room, her mother had seemed so defeated, deflated the next night. Her face and throat were flushed with humiliation. They ordered Chinese food and ate greasy noodles and fried rice, barbecue pork out of the takeout boxes in silence. Afterward, her mother left the bathroom door ajar and ran the hottest water in the tub that she could bear, steaming all the windows, mirrors, glass. She dropped her clothes onto the floor, submerged herself in the tub, her bob tied into a tiny tail, and sweat, glowing red as if preparing herself for a scrub. She lay back, tilted her head, exposing her neck, and closed her eyes.

  Margot had been too frightened to approach her mother. She yearned to ask for whom they were waiting, why she was so sad, if she wanted Margot to scratch her back. Margot wondered what she had done wrong, and where was the ice cream her mother had promised her?

  Instead she perched on the edge of the couch and watched a PBS show on painting, a bearded man with curly brown hair, dome-shaped, swiftly conjuring the curves and shadows of a dramatic alpine mountain, sublime and white. How foreign, how odd that this landscape, so unlike the one outside their hotel—dry and arid, flame-like on the flesh during the day while sizzling with electric lights at night—could exist on one planet. She fell asleep on the couch, dreaming of the snow, which she had never experienced in real life, splashing her face with the icy water in the clear lake that reflected the peaks above.

  The next day, her mother, who wore sunglasses because her eyes were swollen from crying, packed up the car and drove Margot to a Baskin-Robbins, the first time she had ever been to an ice-cream shop. After perusing the marvel of creamy colors—chocolates and pecans and swirls of caramel—she selected one scoop of cookies and cream that dripped down the cone onto her hands, while her mother ordered the strawberry flavor for herself. She had smiled at Margot’s delight.

  Now, with her mother’s dust-covered tennis shoes in hand, Margot went to the living room and picked up one of the travel brochures with a photo of a breathtaking dusky Grand Canyon—all rusty striated peaks and dramatic shadows—that remained on the coffee table. The dust on the shoes matched the specific color of that landscape. Could she have worn these same shoes at the Grand Canyon or a national park? But her mother never would have gone by herself.

  Margot would leave a voice mail for the tour company. She didn’t expect anyone to pick up on a Sunday night.

  But a young woman answered. Her voice was tired and gravelly.

  “My mom might have contacted you about a tour?” Margot asked. “And I wanted to see if you had any information on whether she was with anyone or, I don’t know, if she went to your office?”

  “Uh, I’m not sure we can do that,” the woman said, clearing her throat.

  “Could you please look into your records? Her name was Mina, Mina Lee.” Margot closed her eyes. “She’s dead now.” Her voice cracked. “And I want to know—”

  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry... Hold on.” The woman put her on hold for a minute before coming back on the line.

  “So, it looks like she took a tour with us on September 12 to the Grand Canyon.”

  Shocked, Margot asked, “How many days was she there?”

  “Three days and two nights.”

  “Was she...alone?”

  “No. She had a guest.”

  “A guest?”

  “We don’t have a registered name. She booked a double occupancy room.”

  “Is there any way—I don’t know—is there any way I could talk to the tour guide about this? Maybe someone had seen her?”

  “How about I take your number? Is it okay if he calls you back?”

  Her mother must have worn these black shoes at the Grand Canyon. But with whom had her mother been tra
veling? Was it a man or a woman? Why hadn’t her mother told her? Had she gotten into a fight of some sort before she died? Why had she been yelling?

  Margot felt abandoned and deceived by her mother like never before. What else was her mother hiding? On her hands and knees, Margot searched under her mother’s bed, pushing aside shoeboxes full of buttons and spools of thread. In the corner, something shiny flashed. She pulled the wheeled mattress away from the wall, climbed on top, and recognized a condom wrapper. She jumped and shoved the bed back.

  Sitting on the floor, she buried her head in her arms crossed over her knees. With an urge to scour, to purge everything, she stood up, wanting to scream. The tacky teddy bear, white but dingy with age, paws sewn into holding a red heart, rested on her mother’s bed. She could tear his head off.

  Gathering her resolve, she continued to search the apartment. Inside a slouchy brown leather bag, Margot found sticks of gum, church handouts, a small lime-green notebook with some addresses written inside of it. Most of the names were written in Korean and it would take too much effort to read through and try to recognize any of them.

  She entered the second bedroom, once hers, where her mother kept bills, paperwork, store receipts, and records. Margot’s old clothes remained in the single dresser up against the wall. She needed paper and a pen. She needed somehow to organize now.

  In her worn desk that she had purchased in high school at a thrift store, she found a plastic tray full of pencils, color and charcoal, fancy German erasers, sharpeners that Margot had collected and saved, unused, for whatever reason. It was as if she had accumulated all these supplies for the sake of knowing that she would one day use them rather than enjoy them at the time. But what kind of future had she been saving for—the future that she was living in now without any art? She had so many ideas that she had never pursued, so many sketches she had made but abandoned throughout the years. She realized the part of her that dreamed had died somewhere, too, snuffed by a need for practicality, stability, a sense of value in this world, which always seemed to measure you with fixed numbers that had been created for whom, by whom? Not her. Not her mother.

  She pulled the tray out of the drawer, stuck half-open, for a better look at what she should take.

  Underneath the tray was a business-size envelope with a black-and-white obituary dated in October, cut from the local Korean newspaper inside. The ink of the Korean, which Margot could somewhat read but not understand, rubbed off onto her hands. She struggled, her mind like the fishing net, to catch any word that she could find: cancer, supermarket, wife, Calabasas, church.

  Even though she had never met him, she knew him in her own face—the squareness of the jaw, maybe even a bit of her own nose and cheekbones. It was like catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror.

  Kim Chang-hee.

  Here he was finally. Tiny in a black-and-white photo, a stranger she could’ve passed on the street.

  The stranger was now dead. Could he have been Margot’s father?

  She screamed, shocking herself with the sound that burst from her throat.

  Mina

  Summer 1987

  AFTER A MONTH and a half of stocking shelves and carrying produce at the supermarket, Mina felt strong again, the strongest she had been since losing her husband and daughter in Seoul. She felt almost powerful. She didn’t necessarily like the way she looked, but she didn’t mind. She didn’t need a boyfriend. All she needed were the things she had, enough money to get by and save for the future and her health, until it was time for her to die and rise up to meet her family again. That’s what heaven was, she thought: the presence of her husband and daughter, the few nuns who had been kind to her at the orphanage, her parents from whom she had been separated in the war.

  She remembered vaguely her parents’ faces, her mother’s smile. The way she would chase after her around the house where she’d hide behind the large dark pillars. The elegant curved roofline. The warmth of the ondol, the heated floors in the winter. The gardens where her mother tended to the cabbage and mu. She remembered the smell of doenjang jjigae, anchovy stock boiling, the happiness of a sweet red bean porridge. She remembered her mother’s voice singing along with music, something vaguely operatic, old. But she had never been able to find that song again. Sometimes she would stop and listen to the radio, waiting again to hear that song, but she never did.

  At the supermarket, she had made a few friends, both men and women, mostly Latinos with whom she could hardly hold a conversation. But she learned some Spanish from them, which made her happy. She laughed with them at her inability to pronounce and remember some of the most basic things. She hadn’t felt that silly since her husband and daughter had died last October.

  Hector, who had been helping her since day one, and Consuela, a stout woman with a thin ponytail, would ask, “¿Cómo estás, amiga?” to Mina, and she would respond, “¿Bueno, y tú?”

  “Bien,” they would correct her. And they’d all laugh.

  They taught her the names of produce—naranja, limón, las uvas.

  She had trouble with the letters l and v. But she recited these words as she displayed the fruit, careful not to let them bruise. It felt good to not take herself too seriously, to see herself through the eyes of someone else.

  She tried to reciprocate by teaching them Korean, but they already knew most of the words that would be useful to their work. They knew how to say hello and thank you. They knew all the numbers (hana, dul, set...), all the names of different produce, the food. She couldn’t get over the sight of seeing someone who wasn’t Asian speaking her language.

  She couldn’t get over America.

  * * *

  On a Friday morning, two months after she had arrived in Los Angeles, she stood at a cart, wiping sweat from her face before stocking shelves of soft drinks—7-Up, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, fruit-flavored beverages in obscene colors that did not exist in nature. She couldn’t believe how much soda people drank in America. She occasionally had a 7-Up when she had a stomachache, but by the looks of it, Americans drank the liquid as frequently as water.

  The supermarket owner, Mr. Park, wearing his usual white polo shirt and khakis, approached her slowly with a smile as if he had a little secret to share. Her spine tingled with fear as she froze in place, resisting the urge to run away. He had never done anything untoward, but she hated how he looked at her a shade too long—as if he owned her, too.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “Fine.” The walls of aluminum cans glistened like rounds of ammunition, the bottles like missile shells.

  “Making friends?”

  “Kind of,” she said.

  “I heard you’re making friends with the Mexicans.”

  She didn’t like those words in his mouth.

  “Hector, Consuela,” he said.

  “Yes, they’re very nice.” Her legs trembled beneath her.

  “They work hard.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “They can’t help that they don’t, you know...have the business sense.” He pointed to the side of his head.

  She wanted to ask how he would know that. Did he ever talk to them? He was the idiot, creepy and insensitive. Hanging by her side, her hand tightened into a fist.

  “At least they work hard, you know?” he repeated.

  “Yes.” She exited her body, a shell, as his eyes meandered down. She fixed her eyes on the linoleum floor, speckled like birds’ eggs. Mina had been hiding in the storeroom and the aisles among the boxes and bottles and jars, but in reality, pinned down by his gaze, she had been exposed here, too.

  “Anyway, I thought this would be a good time to move you to the cash registers.” He smiled. “One of our workers is retiring.”

  She might be safer surrounded by more people.

  “That—that would be great,” she said.

  “Want to start nex
t week?” he asked.

  “Sure.” Overcome with relief, her eyes grew wet.

  “Just come in and ask one of the cashiers for Mr. Kim, okay? He’ll help you.” He winked.

  “Mr. Kim? Okay.”

  “Good job.” Those words were like hands trying to touch her.

  As soon as he walked away, tears fell down her cheeks. She could taste the salt, like the ocean. Hastily, she wiped her face.

  Although she enjoyed the company of Hector and Consuela and the other workers who greeted her with a smile, a wave, or a nod every day, she would get paid more as a cashier, a job that would also be easier on her body. She was getting older after all. Her stiff joints and muscles reminded her of this daily.

  Later that afternoon, she joined Hector in restocking the produce section, which had become quickly depleted earlier that day. As they worked (him grabbing and delivering carts stocked with leafy greens and root vegetables, and her neatly piling them), she thought that maybe she should she tell him that she was leaving the floor. Maybe he would think it would be strange if she didn’t tell him, and one day he found out that she was working at the registers. But she didn’t know how. She wasn’t sure about the words, and she didn’t want to offend him.

  “I... Monday... I go at cash register,” she said in English.

  “You?” he said.

  “Yes, me.”

  “Oh, good, good.” He smiled with warmth, as if patting her on the back. “Good. You do a good job, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He stacked the floppy red leaf lettuce with her in silence.

  She could sense his resignation. Hector and Consuela had been in their jobs forever.

  Dealing with Korean customers directly required the Korean language, sure, but at the same time, Hector and Consuela already knew a lot of Korean, and would learn more if they thought it would make their lives easier. It was obvious why she was getting promoted over them.