The Last Story of Mina Lee

by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

  They had spoken different languages—drifting further and further apart as Margot had gotten older. Margot’s mother never learned much English in Koreatown, didn’t have to, and Margot, who spent so little time with her mother besides working long hours at the store, distanced herself from Korean culture, which she associated with alienness and poverty and war. She wanted to live like “real Americans” on television with their clean surfaces, their walls without cracks and chipped paint, their dishwashers and shiny appliances. She wanted to live like they did in books—those precarious and fragile skylines in Mrs. Baek’s apartment, paper like teeth once white, now yellow—with beauty and complex feelings, agency, choice interrupted by fate, and vice versa.

  Her mother’s life seemed to have little self-determination at all, only the burden of getting by, knowing that no matter how hard she had worked, she would never leave that apartment. And that was exactly what had happened, wasn’t it? Her mother never left that place. A woman, alone, fallen to tragedy and fate, men who would leave and destroy her.

  She was like a lot of us. Lonely. But that’s what it’s like for women like us.

  The foul stench of the body—bile and rotting fruit.

  But was it an accident? Or intentional? There was still Mrs. Kim and her driver, Sungmin. The surprising push of his hand, as if Margot was just an animal who had wandered in off the street. And where was the landlord still? He couldn’t be trusted either.

  Retiring to the couch, Margot sketched in her notebook a single fork on one page and a set of chopsticks on the next so that she could flip between them, their shapes. She wanted to live somewhere in that movement, like the beat of a dove’s wing.

  There were so many things that she could never explain to her mother. Even if they had spoken the same languages, the chasm that divided them would have still been too great. In some ways, Margot’s success in this country, her independence, relied on this distance from her mother—her poverty, her foreignness, the alienation of her life, the heaviness of her thankless work, the hours and minutes, ignored and even reviled by the world. And there were so many ways to be crushed, to have your heart broken navigating that canyon between them—what they could not say, what they had said to wound each other.

  But maybe only here in these pages, in these drawings, if Margot had shown more commitment to their relationship, if she had been unafraid of commitment, could her mother have understood: that Margot would never leave her in the end, that she would, despite the distance that separated them, never let go of her hand.

  * * *

  After finishing the kitchen, Margot cleaned her mother’s room, where she once again found the sneakers covered in fine dust, the condom wrapper beneath the bed. She threw the discarded, forgotten objects away and placed the shoes in the garbage bag, knowing now that these were remnants of her mother’s reunion with her father, Mr. Kim.

  On her mother’s bed, that sad teddy bear, dingy with time, clung to a satin red heart attached to its round cartoon paws. She squeezed the heart and felt something hard inside. Her pulse began to pound. She tore apart the seam, sloppy and hand stitched.

  A piece of paper with a box number and a bank’s name and a small key fell out.

  She ripped open the rest of the bear but didn’t find anything else. She scavenged through her mother’s belongings, checking the pockets and the linings even more carefully now for anything, any clue that could somehow not eliminate but ease the pain, the barrage of questions clawing inside her head. She wanted answers now. She wanted her mother to be alive so that she could finally ask her all the things she had always wanted to ask, all the things she found herself too frightened to ask before this. Her mother’s life and her past had always been so carefully guarded. It always felt like the wrong move, look, touch, or words would break her mother forever.

  As a child of four or five seated in the lukewarm tub of milky Dove soap–scented water, scratching the petals of the anti-slip stickers beneath her, Margot had asked, “Where is my father?”

  Her mother, knees on the bathroom floor, had winced, pausing to reflect. “I don’t know. He left us a long time ago.”

  “Where did he go?” Margot asked the ceiling above, sloshing the water with her feet.

  “I don’t know.” Her mother adjusted her legs, hands covered in foam. “I never had a father, too. You ask too many questions.” A tear slid down her face, quick and silent.

  Tilting her head back as her mother poured water from above, careful not to splash her face, Margot yearned to push the tears back in her mother’s eyes. It was excruciating to watch her mother, who worked tirelessly and silently day after day, emote, expose herself at once. In these rare moments of great tenderness and fragility, their sanity rattling like glass cups in a cupboard during a quake, Margot learned that families were our greatest source of pain, whether they had lost or abandoned us or simply scrubbed our heads.

  All of these feelings had turned into a kind of rage when Margot became a teenager, when the world demanded answers: Where is your dad? You don’t have a dad? What does your mom do for a living? You’ve been living in that apartment for how long? Questions that were judgments around what she and her mother could not afford or control.

  It was all about control, wasn’t it?

  Money could make the world intimately spotless. That was the illusion.

  Kneeling on the carpet, Margot contemplated the small key on the table beside her mother’s bed. A key was such an obvious symbol, yet sometimes the truth was always there, right in front of your face, until you were ready to swallow its shape and all its edges, until you knew you were strong enough to bear its weight.

  It had been eight years since she had moved to Seattle, eight years of half-understood conversations over the phone and visits during the holidays that revolved around work. Margot had believed they could go on this way forever, that this distance hurt them both the least.

  But she now knew there was so much truth undisclosed. Like a tree that had lost its leaves, silently bracing itself against wind and cold, the sap inside of them could, under the right conditions, push the green, those tender revelations, out of them once more.

  * * *

  With her mother’s safety-deposit key and papers in her purse, Margot opened the apartment door and looked behind her to observe the condition of her mother’s home—donation bags everywhere and piles of junk in the center of the room. The scene both satisfied and terrified her at once. She had finally found a way to get rid of this place, this apartment that had taunted her with its sadness, its poverty, with the dirty windows, the misshapen and faded couch and the coffee table with rings from mugs like wet footprints that had dried on the surface. But then another part of her wanted to throw her body onto those piles and stay there forever like a waiting room until her mother came back, or until the universe somehow delivered the answers that she needed to make decisions, get on with life like the rest of the world. She locked the door behind her.

  In the dark and musty stairwell, the landlord climbed the steps, gripping the handrail.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I left you a message about my mom?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, sorry. I’ve had so much going on—”

  “Why did you lie to the police officer?” Margot interrupted.

  “Lie?”

  “The police officer?” She folded her arms across her chest. “Officer Choi? He said that you didn’t hear a thing from my mother’s apartment. You told me—”

  He smiled as if amused and combed his hand through his thick gray hair. “Didn’t I say that the police weren’t going to do anything? There’s no need to get them involved. I don’t need them hanging around the building, scaring my tenants. What good is that going to do for your mom?”

  “But don’t you think—”

  “We don’t need police around here.”

  “Yeah, but what about my
mom? Don’t you think if someone could’ve killed her, that your tenants would care about finding the guy?”

  “Shhh,” he said, annoyed. He came up the stairs closer to her. “I’m just trying to run a business, okay? It’s not like I don’t care.”

  For a few seconds, she imagined pushing him down the stairwell. His thin-limbed body tumbling to the ground. His head cracked against a step. She flinched at the image, the cruelty. It would look like an accident.

  “I just don’t think you can trust the police,” he said. “Why risk yourself? Why get involved? Don’t you think enough people have been hurt? Enough people have been hurt already.”

  “You made me look like a liar.”

  “Listen, I’m sorry about that. I’m trying—” His voice cracked. “I’m trying really hard to keep things together. Believe me. I’m always about to lose this place.” Tears filled his eyes. “If I thought talking to the police would help your mother, I would, I really would, but I honestly don’t think it would make a difference. I’ve seen a lot in my years.”

  Margot hesitated. Her mother might’ve done the same. She might’ve felt the same way.

  “Maybe I don’t do the best job around here, but I’m trying my best,” he continued. “I know no one likes the landlord. I didn’t even want to get into any of this—it was my wife’s idea. And now I’m stuck like everyone else. What else can I do? No one would hire me now. Nobody wants a guy like me. Nobody wants any of us, you see?”

  “What do you mean?” Margot asked.

  “If they could have their way, they’d tear down the whole thing, make it into fancy condos or something. Get rid of us all. They like the work that we do, but they don’t like our faces or language, you see? It’s a big conspiracy and now we’re all stuck. There’s an episode of Twilight Zone—you wouldn’t remember—but the one with the toys that are all trapped in a bin, a big cylinder. That’s us.”

  “Well, I can see that,” she said. It was obvious that she had reached the limit of what the landlord could provide regarding her mother’s death and he didn’t seem particularly guilty or capable of harm himself. And now she needed to get to the bank, before it closed, with the safety-deposit key and papers, ripped from the teddy bear’s heart. She climbed down the stairs past him. “Let me know if you remember anything else, okay?”

  “She has a friend, right? Lady. Red lipstick. Maybe she can help you?”

  She paused, turning to face him. “She has. She already has.”

  “She has problems, too, or something, right?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I just remember, one time, she was here—maybe in September or October, something like that. I saw her park on the street and it looked like an older man was sitting in his car, waiting for her. You know? Like he was following her.”

  “An older man?”

  “Yeah, a different one. Not your mom’s boyfriend.”

  “Did he have a kind of...square head, big white teeth, big gold watch—”

  “Exactly.”

  “So he followed the woman with the red lipstick to this apartment?”

  “I think so. Yeah, I’m pretty sure of it.”

  Margot’s heart pounded in her chest. Mr. Park knew where her mother lived. But would he want to hurt her? Unless somehow her mother had tried to intervene in his behavior, tried to stand up to him? Maybe he had gone to her apartment, asked her where Mrs. Baek lived or worked now, and she had refused to answer. Her mother would do anything to protect Mrs. Baek.

  Would this be enough for him to fight with her? Push her?

  Margot couldn’t go to the restaurant and confront him now. It might be too dangerous and could jeopardize the waitress as well. If she needed to question Mr. Park, she’d have to find him somewhere else and she’d have to ask Miguel to go with her just in case. Where would he be other than the restaurant? Someone had to know. She couldn’t ask Mrs. Baek because she would be too concerned for Margot. Perhaps Margot and Miguel together would have to follow him after work.

  She ran down to the parking lot and opened the car door. Catching her breath, she glanced at the rearview mirror to make sure she was alone. Chills ran down her spine as she thought of the driver’s hand on her shoulder, the push. Maybe that’s all it had taken. There was blood that had pooled and pressed against her mother’s brain. She was getting too close. Mr. Park followed Mrs. Baek to her mother’s apartment. The net had wrapped around her ankles.

  A safety-deposit box. A bank that would soon close. A door closing. Margot was on her own.

  There were now too many people who might be angry at her mother—Mrs. Kim and her driver-slash-lover, Sungmin, also Mr. Park—too many people who might want to hurt her. Perhaps that was the life of any woman like her mother, a woman who was poor and in so many ways powerless but nonetheless persisted like a kind of miracle, a defiance against the world.

  But who would want her mother dead the most?

  Mina

  Spring 2014

  AFTER A DINNER of doenjang guk, myulchi bokkeum and kimchi as banchan, Mina, in an automatic gesture, turned on the television. As soon as the elderly faces—wrinkled and scrunched in pain beneath men’s hats covering balding heads, grandmothers in hanboks squeezing out tears from behind glasses—appeared (footage of last month’s daylong reunion, the first in three years between families separated in North and South Korea), she fled to the kitchen where she slumped down onto the laminate floor.

  News of the seemingly endless negotiations between governments for these fleeting reunions—the lunch, the afternoon, when these families who had waited their whole lives, sometimes over sixty years, for each other—had this time, more than any other, driven her to the brink. She pressed her forehead and free hand against one of the cabinets as she inhaled all the years in this place, as if this apartment had been a kind of lover, who kept a roof over her head, who had no opinions but provided, despite its sorrow, a certain kind of strength. How long had it been? Over twenty years.

  Time was wearing her down. She was approaching seventy years old now and could see herself in the faces of the elderly reunited, the hair around her temples whitening. She could see herself in those reunions—her vulnerability and pain—rubbing the sadness away from her already worn face.

  How much could the body, how much could the heart take?

  Twenty-six years ago, not long after she had first arrived in Los Angeles, she had caught a similar TV special on these painfully scarce family reunification efforts with Mr. Kim on his couch after a dinner of—what was it?—something simple like shigeumchi or baechu doenjang guk. Like the memory rising now, the crimson crept up the smooth skin of his neck, his face as tears welled in his eyes, which she had yearned to push back inside of him.

  Do you ever wonder if your parents might still be there, in North Korea? Mr. Kim had asked.

  No, I’ve never thought of that.

  But maybe that’s why they never found you, he said.

  That was the evening before the end. On the floor of her kitchen now, she sat leaning against the cabinets, eyes closed, breathing hard through her mouth, tending to images from the past: Lupe’s face on that day that she had been attacked by Mr. Park, how she sobbed in the front seat of the station wagon, the red blood running down the side of Mr. Kim’s face, the smell of iron, Mr. Kim seated in the low glow of the lamp, holding a gun—small, black, and matte.

  Mina still had that gun.

  She had never heard from Lupe again. She prayed that she and Mario had been reunited somehow, but no one knew. No one at the supermarket spoke of them, as if silence was a form of protection.

  Mr. Park had mostly ignored her. Every now and then, she would catch him glancing at her, but he never said a word, as if she were now invisible, an inanimate object. She had no idea if he knew of her involvement in what had happened to Lupe that day, but he ha
d been suspicious about her relationship to Mr. Kim perhaps.

  She had worked at the supermarket, his supermarket, up until the very day that her water broke. That late-June morning had begun like most others with her lumbering to the bathroom, eating breakfast alone in the kitchen’s nook, and making her way through a gray malaise of smog to the bus stop. She climbed the stairs onto the bus and eased herself onto one of the seats up front. Staring out the windshield relieved her nausea.

  After only an hour at the cash register, her stomach, already bulbous and uncomfortable, hardened into a fist. A sharp bright pain sparked. Her water broke as she hobbled to the back of the store. The warmth ran down her legs onto the floor. She placed a maxi pad on her underwear in the bathroom, collected her belongings for the very last time. Exiting the rear door, she waddled around the building to the front of the supermarket, where she called Mrs. Baek at the pay phone. Breathing through the pain, she waited for thirty minutes under a hard sky of sun and haze, the color of laundry water, for Mrs. Baek to drive her to the hospital downtown.

  During two days of agony, mostly alone except for when Mrs. Baek could get off of work, except for the few hours when Mrs. Baek held her hand, consoling her, Mina screamed at the world that threatened every day to tear her apart. Her body was consumed in flames, like a saint’s burned at the stake. Until finally, she held her baby, red and howling, covered in white wax.

  A monster.

  A monster, like her, born into a world, hollow—without a family, without aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, without even gravestones to call their own.