THE
LAST STORY OF MINA LEE
Author:
Nancy Jooyoun Kim
ISBN:
9780778310174
Publication
Date: September 1, 2020
Publisher:
Park Row Books
Book
Summary:
THE LAST STORY OF MINA LEE (on sale: September 1, 2020; Park Row Books; Hardcover; $27.99 US/
$34.99 CAN). opens when Margot Lee’s mother, Mina, doesn’t
return her calls. It’s a mystery to twenty-six-year-old Margot, until she
visits her childhood apartment in Koreatown, Los Angeles, and finds that her
mother has suspiciously died. The discovery sends Margot digging through the
past, unraveling the tenuous and 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.
Margot
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 stations, motels and billboards, premium outlets and "family fun
centers." Margot’s hands were stiff from clenching the steering wheel. The
rain had started an hour ago, right after they had made a pit stop in north
Portland to see the famous 31-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 axe.
Earlier that morning,
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 away from Seattle, 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
Believing" and joking about all the men he would meet in LA. But now,
almost four hours into the road trip, 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?" Margot lowered her foot on the gas.
"Lying to
them," he said.
"About why
you're really moving down to
LA?" The rain splashed down like a waterfall. Miguel had taken a job offer
at an accounting firm in a location more conducive to his dreams of working in
theatre. For the last two years, they had worked together at a nonprofit for
people with disabilities. She was as an administrative assistant; he crunched
numbers in finance. She would miss him, but she was happy for him, too. He
would finally finish writing his play while honing his acting skills with
classes at night. "The theatre 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?"
"Uh,
scientists?"
She laughed, having
expected him to say friends. Gripping
the wheel, she caught the sign for Salem.
"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 backseat, 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 a memory 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 the 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? When did you
see her last?"
Margot's stomach
dropped. "Last Christmas," she said. "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." Gripping 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. “Maybe she's just been busier than usual, right? We'll be
there soon enough."
"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 glimpse 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 a peel of fruit. The windshield wipers hacked away the rivers that
fell from the sky.
Excerpted from The Last Story of
Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim, Copyright © 2020 by Nancy Jooyoun Kim Published
by Park Row Books
Author
Bio:
Born and raised in
Los Angeles, Nancy Jooyoun Kim is a
graduate of UCLA and the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of
Washington, Seattle. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, The Rumpus, Electric Literature,
Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, The Offing, the blogs of Prairie Schooner and Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her essay,
“Love (or Live Cargo),” was performed for NPR/PRI’s Selected Shorts in 2017
with stories by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Phil Klay, and Etgar Keret. THE LAST STORY OF MINA LEE is her first
novel.
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