The Last Story of Mina Lee

by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

  Mrs. Baek named the baby Margot, a name that she loved.

  Mina had already suffered months of the other Korean women at the supermarket, observing the stretch of her stomach into a bulb. Of course, they gossiped about what kind of lewdness would lead to her pregnancy, the pregnancy of a single Korean woman in her forties. Mina had quit church as soon as she began showing, out of fear of the shame she would bring upon herself among the women there, even Mrs. Shin, whom she trusted, but couldn’t expect to understand what it would be like to come to this country as a single woman, a widow, and fall in love, despite all the best intentions, only to end up again alone.

  At home, Mina cried in bed while Mrs. Baek cared for the baby. She never thought she would ever stop crying, as if she could exhaust herself to death that way. Weeks passed, and she would still burst into tears, without warning sometimes, as she waited her life out, unable to work. She had enough savings to pay for rent, groceries, formula, diapers for a few months, and Mrs. Baek and the landlady helped by preparing her meals, tending to the baby while she slept.

  She couldn’t get out of bed some days. With the light outside, the blue sky, the birds she could hear in the backyard, chirping, the world seemed to move on without her, as she cried, hardly able to bathe and feed herself, let alone her baby. She contemplated leaving the baby somewhere safe and running away, but where would she turn to next?

  Argentina? The San Fernando Valley? New York?

  She didn’t have the energy anymore.

  Yet how could she raise this baby by herself? She couldn’t rely on the kindnesses of Mrs. Baek and the landlady who had their own long hours of work, their own worries, forever.

  After almost two months at home, she dropped her daughter off at the apartment of a local grandmother she would pay to take care of Margot. She worked for a year washing dishes, and then at a fast-food restaurant where she assembled chili dogs, deep-fried corn dogs—bizarre American foods. She worked and worked and worked until she could figure out what to do with her life.

  But as the years passed, and the landlady died, her house sold by her children, and Mina lost her first store in the riots, and Mina and Mrs. Baek went out on their own and lost touch with each other, and her daughter’s limbs became long and loved to draw, and her face grew into questions and thoughts, Mina forgot Mr. Kim’s face.

  She saw only herself in Margot, as if she could not bear to see her in her entirety, as if she was a puzzle with pieces missing forever. She refused to see the entire girl.

  She had moved on that way. When she had saved enough money to buy another store, she didn’t have to worry about a babysitter when Margot was not at school. She could bring her to work. She could teach the girl to help her. At the swap meet, Margot would make friends. Margot would become a woman one day, and she would leave Mina, too. They would all leave her. Her daughter, an American, who spoke English, could hardly say anything with depth in Korean, who would go to college in Seattle. Her daughter had not forgotten about her, but Mina knew that she wanted to forget. Who wouldn’t want to forget all those years of work and pain? To her daughter, this apartment, her apartment was dirty, not suitable to her new tastes, her new life as an actual American.

  Something about this country made it easy to forget that we needed each other.

  The phone rang and she sprang from the kitchen floor into the living room where she gripped the receiver in her hand. It was her. Mina’s body tingled as if reanimated by Margot’s voice, which—despite its clear frustration in its struggle to mix Korean and English—tethered Mina back to this world.

  “What did you eat for dinner?” Mina asked.

  “Some pasta. Spaghetti,” Margot said. “What about you?”

  “Doenjang guk.” For years, Mina would wake up before sunrise to make her daughter a large pot of soup or stew for the day. She couldn’t bear her daughter coming home from school and not having anything nutritious to eat, so she filled her food with as many vegetables as she could afford—zucchini, carrots, peppers, and onions. Even though her daughter craved American meals, she wanted her daughter to always think of their home as, if not the most comfortable place, a shelter in which she’d never go without food. Wasn’t that the most heartbreaking thing for any parent in the world? To know their child was hungry. Sometimes she wondered if perhaps being separated from her own mother might’ve protected them from enduring the pain of watching each other whittle away until they became nothing—bones in the dirt that would be broken by bombs, by soldiers’ boots.

  But no, nothing was worse than losing each other; nothing was worse than being lost. It was as if she and her parents were both half dead and half alive—haunting each other at once. It was almost worse than death. Purgatory.

  “Everything okay?” Margot asked.

  “Yes, everything okay. You?”

  “Busy. A lot of work,” Margot said in Korean.

  “That’s good. Being busy is good.”

  “How’s the store?” Margot asked.

  She didn’t want her daughter to worry, her daughter who, despite her upbringing and how little Mina could provide, managed to go to college and find a nice office job. She knew that her daughter had college loans to pay, her own rent and bills. And Mina was proud of her, too. At church or at the swap meet, she bragged about her, the one that got away, concealing the wound of abandonment beneath her pride.

  “Business is slow, but it’s okay,” Mina said. “I get bored a lot. Not a lot of customers these days.”

  “Why don’t you learn English? Do you want me to buy you some books so that you can learn?”

  “It’s too hard for me now.”

  “Why don’t you try? You can learn,” Margot said in English. “You have time.”

  Her daughter would never understand why she couldn’t make the time to learn a language that would never accept her—especially at her age now. What would be the point? She was in her sixties and couldn’t find a job anywhere except at a swap meet or at a restaurant in Koreatown. She didn’t know a single English language speaker except for her daughter, who only visited once per year. What was the point of learning a language that brought you into the fold of a world that didn’t want you? Did this world want her? No. It didn’t like the sound of her voice.

  “Why don’t you learn Korean?” Mina asked sharply.

  “I’m not bored.” Margot paused, formulating her words in Korean. “There’s no time. I don’t have a use for it.”

  Mrs. Baek laughing flashed in Mina’s mind: I have music. I don’t need a boyfriend. I’m busy. I’m not bored. I’m never bored.

  Would Margot ever realize that when Mina said she was bored, she was trying to say that she was lonely? Bored was a much easier word to say, wasn’t it? She was tired of fighting with her daughter to move back to LA, to come back home. And she didn’t need her daughter to lecture her. She had been through enough already. What did her daughter, American-born, know about time, about survival, about usefulness? What did she know about boredom? About loneliness?

  Mina had spent so many years dedicated to her business, growing and tending the inventory like her own garden, earning pride in something she owned. But now that there were fewer customers, she had little to distract herself anymore. She couldn’t afford to replace broken or old hangers anymore. The racks and rounders had grown bare of clothes. Now only the poorest of customers remained, the ones who haggled and walked away because they could sense her desperation, her fear that she, in her age, would have to again find another way to keep the roof over her head. For their essentials, the other customers drove to big-box stores where they knew they could always get the best deals, where they might become, in some ways, finally American, where the exchange of items—money for shampoo, a new dress for a first date, cough syrup, a sweater for Grandma—might come without any emotional response, familiarity, or bond.

  She had felt the
slow creep of sadness overwhelm her as she realized now that all she had built could not survive. Her business had become her child, hadn’t it? What would or could she do next in this life with so little money and so little time?

  “Okay, well, take care of yourself. Get some rest soon,” Mina said before hanging up the phone.

  She had diverted herself with work all these years. How could she tell her daughter, who had such a limited understanding of Korean, what she had been through, why she couldn’t learn English, why she had chosen this life, how much she loved Margot, how much she was both proud of and frightened by her daughter, who was sharp and quick and strong? Her daughter had to be, of course, because of how she had been raised. They had raised each other in a way. She loved her daughter. She would do anything for her.

  But she would never, ever learn English. She didn’t care. She hated the way the language sounded in her mouth, out of her lips—stilted and childlike. And when she did attempt to speak to someone on the phone, or at the DMV, she often got dirty looks or harsh, condescending responses. She didn’t need a language that wasn’t big enough for her, didn’t want to make room for her.

  She had been through enough, hadn’t she? She had church. She had God. She was fine. She didn’t need anyone at all. This was her language. This was the story she told herself to survive.

  AFTER ANOTHER SLEEPLESS night, Mina rushed back to her shop from the restroom, washed coffee mug and dish soap in hand, and bumped into a small yet powerful figure. She appeared out of nowhere like a sudden earthquake.

  Mina’s insides swayed like hanging lights. The mug smashed to the ground. “Mrs. Baek?”

  Together they bent to recover the pieces scattered along the painted walkway where merchandise hung above or leaned on display carts in an explosion of goods from children’s toys to sneakers, diet green teas, herbal tinctures.

  As she cradled the half-broken mug, filled with its shards, in one hand, Mina unconsciously grabbed Mrs. Baek’s arm with the other. It surprised her how tight her grip was on this now stranger, and Mrs. Baek didn’t even flinch. She was that strong.

  “Do you work here?” Mrs. Baek asked, eyes wide.

  “Yes.” Mina could feel herself slipping below the surface of the water. She had tried not to think about their past for so long—and here she was now.

  “I opened a store around the corner,” Mrs. Baek said. “A sock shop.”

  How many years had it been since they had last seen each other? Over twenty. Her voice—urgent and husky—had remained familiar but her face had ripened into a theater of surprising beauty with lips perfectly lined, a striking shade of red. They seemed to float in the sky toward Mina like an object of surrealism in a mind that had become so heavy and gray, thick as the smog in LA.

  She must have used makeup to conceal the circles under her eyes, the dark circles that Mina had seemingly always had, even in her twenties. Or Mrs. Baek had been blessed with good genes, or the ability to sleep well at night, or maybe because she didn’t have children. How much, despite the years of Mrs. Baek’s intimate knowledge of Mina’s life, the care of Mina’s own baby, did she really know about Mrs. Baek? Where had she been since they last saw each other?

  And what was she doing here now?

  “You left Hanok House?” Mina asked, a pang of sorrow in her chest. She remembered her first date with Mr. Kim—the slabs of dark wood as tables, the Hahoetal masks that laughed, grains of ahl on her tongue—and how later, after Margot’s birth, Mrs. Baek would invite them there for a free meal, piping hot jjigaes and tangs, brothy and slow-cooked. How much Mrs. Baek had nourished them. It was a house after all, wasn’t it? It was a home that none of them could have, where food was safety, temporary shelter from the darkness of the world, the hours of mindless work, the fear that it could all be taken away, any day, at any moment.

  “Yes, I left Hanok House. Earlier this year.”

  Mina wanted to ask why but didn’t. There were many reasons why a woman fled—boredom, fear, frustration, a desire to get ahead. But it was hard to tell whether owning a sock shop was for Mrs. Baek an improvement in the quality of her life or a type of banishment. Surely she couldn’t make much more here than she had at Hanok House where at least she would always be fed.

  “I’ve—I’ve wondered about you,” Mrs. Baek said, her eyes filling with tears.

  Mina nodded. “It’s strange that we ended up under the same roof again.”

  “There aren’t many places left these days for a small business, I guess.”

  “Yes, yes, that makes sense,” Mina said. “I should...get back to my store.” She forced a smile to obscure the quickening of her heart, the rising nausea, the cold sweat on her neck. “I’m sure I will see you around?”

  Not that Mrs. Baek had wronged her in any way, but rather she represented a time that Mina had no reason to relive, a time during which she was particularly vulnerable, when she had first moved to America, when she had been so naive to think that she could run away from the past, when she had replaced the sorrow of losing her husband and daughter with the sorrow of losing a lover, a father to her child, when all the sorrows in her life threatened to undo her, and Mrs. Baek, the entire time, appeared so put together, so confident, educated, and thoughtful.

  As soon as she entered her store, Mina sat down on the floor behind her counter, tending to that history: It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault, how she had longed to say this to Lupe in the station wagon on that day, the blood running down the side of Mr. Kim’s jaw, how she had thrown up in the toilet and Mrs. Baek wiped down her face like a child’s after his final phone call.

  Mrs. Baek had entered her life one more time, like a ship that passed, churning water. But perhaps what terrified Mina the most wasn’t a resurgence of what happened, what could have happened, what had never happened, but instead something that Mrs. Baek threatened to offer—friendship again.

  Why had Mrs. Baek fled Hanok House? Did she need her now?

  Later that afternoon, Mina searched the swap meet for Mrs. Baek’s store—a sock shop—which turned out to be less than a minute away, around a corner she never passed, down one of the aisles toward the rear of the building. Both conservative pajama sets and lacy lingerie hung outside the store’s perimeter constructed, like Mina’s, of gridwall panels. She caught a glimpse of Mrs. Baek near her glass counter, organizing bundles of athletic socks.

  “Mrs. Baek,” Mina called from the center of the walkway. Her heart was racing, as if she had been walking straight into the waves for someone who had been washed away, who couldn’t swim back to the shore by herself. For the past several hours, she had been steeling herself for this moment.

  Mrs. Baek lifted her face, and upon seeing Mina, motioned for her to come forward.

  Trembling, Mina threaded between tables, piled with undergarments, to the glass counter.

  Her eyes couldn’t resist the pull of Mrs. Baek’s lips—red and perfectly lined. Now she remembered. A poster of a painting that she had seen once. The long lips stretched across a wide sky spotted with clouds in a faint snakeskin pattern. Women like herself rarely wore red lipstick, not only because a woman who wore it called attention to her face—carved with lines by a life of working long hours—but because red lipstick required the wearer to be vigilant about where they placed their hands on themselves, so as not to mess up or smudge their mouths, vigilant about the lining of their lips so that the color wouldn’t bleed into the tiny cracks that formed as time went by, as they had on both Mina’s and Mrs. Baek’s.

  But she admired the effort Mrs. Baek had put into herself, apparently for herself. Mina wondered with what color she would adorn her lips. Not red. She always preferred soft pinks and berries—like the ones she used to wear when she was young.

  “Everything okay?” Mrs. Baek asked.

  Mina could not feel her feet, as if her torso and head levitated, legl
ess, above the dull gray carpet. For a moment, she fixed her eyes on an English novel on top of the glass counter—Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

  “Yes, it’s been such a long while,” Mina said. “I—I was wondering if you wanted to get dinner sometime?” The shyness of her own voice surprised her. Why was she so afraid?

  “Yes, of course,” Mrs. Baek said, as if she had been waiting all these years for Mina to ask.

  A weight lifted off Mina’s chest. “How about tonight or tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Yes, yes, anywhere is fine,” Mrs. Baek said. “Just not—”

  “Hanok House.” Mina smiled.

  “Yes. Somewhere else.” Mrs. Baek smirked. “Tonight is fine.” Her neck appeared to grow red. “I was only planning on finishing that book.” She tilted her head toward the counter.

  “Is it any good?” Mina thumbed through the pages, impressed by Mrs. Baek’s ability to read so many English words. She didn’t know a single person who loved novels like her.

  “Yes, I read it a long time ago. In college,” Mrs. Baek said. “It’s sad but beautiful.”

  Mina set the book back down and rested her hand on the cover as if she could absorb through its flesh some of her friend.

  “But it’s full of terrible men,” Mrs. Baek said, shaking her head. “And I always hated the end.”

  * * *

  Short ribs, sugar, sesame, and garlic caramelized over flames, sizzling around them, accentuated by the sharpness of kimchi jjigaes and fish stews boiling in earthenware pots. Mina hadn’t had a meal at a restaurant in ages it seemed, not since she had dined with her daughter last Christmas. The assortment of banchan—seasoned soybean sprouts, acorn jelly, potato salad, tofu jorim, fried fishcake, grilled gulbi, kkakdugi—strummed her senses like pure sunlight pressing on seedbeds.

  “Do you remember the banchan I used to bring home from work?” Mrs. Baek asked.

  “Yes, of course. They were always the best.” The potato salad melted like a mousse in Mina’s mouth.