The Last Story of Mina Lee

by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

  Margot couldn’t help but start at the sight of her face—elegant, long, out of place. Although perhaps in her sixties, she wore bright red lipstick, which seemed tacky and beautiful and defiant all at once. Her eyebrows were perfectly penciled crescents, like slivers of the moon. A midnight blue fleece peacoat with pills along the sleeves swaddled a slender dancer’s frame.

  Margot bowed her head. “Uh, my Korean is really bad.”

  “That’s okay,” the woman said in English with a Southern accent that surprised Margot. “Can I help you?”

  “Did you know the owner of the women’s clothing store over there?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course,” she said, voice shaking.

  “We were just wondering when the last time you saw her was,” Miguel said.

  “She—she’s been gone for a while.” She squinted, laying the pen down. “I’ve been worried about her. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m her daughter,” Margot said. “This is my friend Miguel.”

  The woman widened her eyes, then squinted, creasing the foundation on her face.

  “Oh,” she said, as if she had just recognized Margot somehow.

  But Margot didn’t find her familiar at all. She could tell that the sock lady, like Margot’s mother, might have been beautiful once. The theater of her face told a story, and a rich, sad one at that. Women like her and her mother were always struggling to stay above water, their faces floating on top while their legs treaded frantically underneath. They might wash up dead on the shore one day—like her mother on the carpet.

  “You’ve changed so much,” the woman said, breathless.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I didn’t recognize you at first. Your hair. I guess you wouldn’t remember me.” The woman pointed to herself. “Mrs. Baek?”

  “No.” Margot shook her head. “I don’t remember you at all.”

  Mrs. Baek exhaled with a loud puff and smiled tenderly. “We all lived in the same house together until you were maybe three or four.” Her eyes softened, revealing a touch of sentimentality that surprised Margot, who had no recollection of that time before the riots, before the apartment that they lived in now. According to her mother, when she had first arrived in Los Angeles from Korea in 1987, she had rented a room in a house, gotten pregnant with Margot, and lived there for a few years until the landlady died in 1991. She had then purchased the landlady’s clothing store at a discount from the landlady’s adult children, the same shop that would be mostly destroyed one year later in the riots. At the time she had purchased that first store, her mother had moved herself and Margot to their apartment in Koreatown. She had never mentioned Mrs. Baek or any housemates.

  “Your mother used to bring you to the restaurant that I worked at, Hanok House. Do you remember? It looked like an old traditional house, lots of wood everywhere.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Margot said, a little embarrassed.

  For a few seconds, Mrs. Baek’s face shattered as if the memory had smashed something open that she had been guarding inside. Her red lips hardened into a line. Margot could sense Mrs. Baek closing off somehow. She had to reel her back in. She needed answers.

  “Why did we stop going to the restaurant? Hanok House?”

  “Your mother became...very busy after she opened her store. And when she lost that store in the riots...she had to work so much. It was a very difficult time. A lot of people lost everything—their businesses, their jobs. There was no time for anything but trying to recover, to survive. It was almost like living through the war again.”

  Margot remembered stacks of smoke rising, blackening the air with a noxious chemical smell. A few miles from their apartment, the world had been on fire. On television, there had been a grainy black-and-white video of police officers beating Rodney King, an unarmed Black man, who later said, “It made me feel like I was back in slavery days.”

  There were somber white men in suits, an acquittal. Bricks thrown, glass smashed, gates trampled. Buildings ignited into infernos that released towers of smoke into the sky. The National Guard stood on street corners in camouflage with large guns.

  Her mother cried in front of the television set. Her store, too, had been destroyed. Owning a business where she didn’t have a boss yelling at her, a place where she could bring her child to work, seemed too good to be true. All of it would be shattered, too. Because their life would be part of the lie that this country repeated to live with itself—that fairness would prevail; that the laws protected everyone equally; that this land wasn’t stolen from Native peoples; that this wealth wasn’t built by Black people who were enslaved but by industrious white men, “our” founders; that hardworking immigrants proved this was a meritocracy; that history should only be told from one point of view, that of those who won and still have power. So the city raged. Immolation was always a statement.

  Her mother’s life was just one life in this wreckage. Margot was there to wade with her in what was left, salvaging together what they could. Their family of two might’ve been the smallest country, but it was the only place where they belonged in this world.

  Margot wept, surprising herself. She didn’t think she had any more tears left in her today.

  “Are you all right?” Mrs. Baek asked, reaching out and squeezing Margot’s hand. “I know that was a difficult time. That was a very difficult time.”

  Miguel wrapped his arm around Margot’s shoulders. She had been embarrassed about bringing him to her mother’s store—that he would see how poor she had been—but now she was grateful he was there. He was like her in so many ways; they could both cry or laugh, feel on a dime.

  “How’d you end up here?” Margot asked, sniffling.

  Mrs. Baek handed her a napkin. “I got tired of working at the restaurant, so I saved and bought this shop in March earlier this year. This was the only place that I could afford. It’s hard, but it’s a little easier than working at the restaurant. I’m not on my feet all the time.” She focused again on Margot. “Your mom hasn’t been around for a while. I thought maybe she had gone to visit you, or maybe she had gone to Korea. Is someone sick?”

  In eight years, her mother had never visited Margot in Seattle, not even for her graduation, and couldn’t afford to miss more than a day off work. To Margot’s knowledge, her mother hadn’t been on an airplane since she had arrived in the US twenty-seven years ago.

  “She’s...dead,” Margot said, beating back the images that swelled of how tiny her mother had appeared on the ground. How Margot had fallen to her knees, screaming. “She died two weekends ago.”

  Mrs. Baek gasped, covering her mouth with both hands, eyes welling with tears.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” Miguel asked.

  “A couple of weeks ago,” she said, voice trembling. A streak of red lipstick now on her cheek. She cried, dabbing under her eyes, pink and swollen. Eyeliner streaked gray down her face.

  “Did anything seem off?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, catching her breath. “She...had been depressed for a while.” She squeezed the napkin in her fist.

  “Alma, her friend with the children’s clothing store, said the same thing.” Miguel glanced at Margot.

  “Do you know why?” Margot asked. “Did she mention anything?”

  Mrs. Baek’s hands shook as she smoothed down the crinkled pages of the classifieds on which she had been leaning. It was obvious that she was considering what to tell Margot, like a grown-up protecting a child. Margot wanted to say, There’s nothing you need to hide from me anymore. I’m an adult now. I need to know.

  “She was struggling. We’ve all been struggling, you know? There’s hardly any customers these days. It’s gotten so much worse. Nobody wants to come to a swap meet anymore. You should see the bathrooms, how dirty everything is now. The owner, the manager—no one cares about us anymore.” Fresh tears leaked
out of Mrs. Baek’s eyes. She shook her head. “When did she die?”

  “Over Thanksgiving weekend,” Miguel said. “We were driving down to LA. Margot found her on Wednesday—”

  Mrs. Baek covered her mouth again. “Oh my God.”

  “She had fallen down somehow. She hit her head.”

  “Oh my God.” She held her head as if she might faint.

  “The landlord heard her yelling at someone over the weekend.” Margot’s voice trembled, recalling the conversation in the garage. “He said she had a boyfriend of some kind, a man who visited her over the summer, and maybe I thought someone would...know who he is, or maybe if he was involved somehow.”

  Rubbing the space between her brows, eyes closed, Mrs. Baek exhaled out loud.

  “Do you know him? Do you know how I can—”

  “That’s why she was depressed,” Mrs. Baek said.

  “What?”

  “He died in October.” She wiped the corners of her eyes.

  “So it couldn’t have been him that was with her that night,” Miguel said.

  “With her?” Mrs. Baek asked.

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Margot said. “Who was with her the night she died.”

  “What was his name?” Miguel asked.

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Was it Chang-hee Kim? Mr. Kim?” Margot asked.

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Kim.” Mrs. Baek nodded. “I didn’t even know about him, their relationship...” her voice rising “...until after he died.” She propped herself up, elbows on the counter. “She was so depressed these past couple months, I kept pushing her to tell me what was wrong. Maybe something had happened to you.” She shook her head. “Finally, she told me about him.” She wiped her nose with a napkin.

  “So, she kept him a secret from everyone?” Margot asked.

  “She was ashamed, I guess. He was married.” Mrs. Baek’s voice cracked. “What was she thinking?” She sobbed, grabbing another napkin from inside the glass counter to wipe her face.

  What would be the chances of this lover, the man in the obituary, being Margot’s father? Maybe Margot had deluded herself into thinking that he would be out there somewhere, that he would appear in her life somehow—dead or alive. Maybe she only wanted to see herself in him to solidify the mythology of her life, to make it real. But the only thing real was her mother’s body on the ground, and the knowledge that her mother was in a relationship with a married man, now dead as well.

  “Could she have confronted my mother? The wife. Could the wife—”

  “I don’t know. Maybe? Your mother never said much about her. I wouldn’t know that.”

  “Why would she do that if her husband was already dead though?” Miguel asked. “Why? What would be the point?”

  “I don’t know,” Margot said. “Maybe his wife found out something else, something that pissed her off even more. Or maybe it took a couple months to realize, after his death, that he was cheating on her? So she confronted my mom. Maybe she wanted answers. Either way, we have to find her.”

  Mrs. Baek nodded as she wept again. Her friend, Margot’s mother, was now gone. Her makeup had become a mess—streaks of gray down her cheeks, lipstick smeared. She coughed through her tears, shuddered with a specific loneliness, one that Margot could recognize from her own mother. It was the loneliness of being an outsider.

  Mina

  Summer 1987

  AS HER SPEED and confidence on the register grew, Mina began observing the different customers and their items. She tried to piece together their lives as she scanned and entered in codes.

  White mushrooms. Three packs of tofu. Green onions. Garlic. Dried anchovies. Five Pink Lady apples. A bag of oranges. Toothpaste.

  She even invented little games for herself, estimating how much a bag of produce would cost before she weighed it. Or guessing what a customer would make with her purchased items.

  Kimchi jjigae. Braised mackerel with radish. Seafood pancakes.

  Mario, who must have been only eighteen or nineteen years old, worked with her almost every day now. He said hello, smiled more often. But he still always seemed distracted, running from one task to the next. He meticulously stuffed purchases into plastic bags, went off to help lift or carry something, and appeared just in time to bag items for the next person in line. He had a whole system for how he would manage his job most efficiently. All the other baggers in the other aisles, whom Mina had met several of, seemed to have similar routines. Occasionally, they would stop and say something to each other, joke, but only for a few seconds before they plunged back into work again.

  During the slower hours, Mario spent his time organizing and restocking items up front, while Mina restocked and tidied the smaller items on display by the registers—the drinks and candies and snacks. She sometimes saw Hector and Consuela, either at the back of the store or at the registers as they came forward to do go-backs or grab last-minute items for customers. They still greeted each other with a nod, a smile, or an hola, but now never spoke to each other beyond that. The camaraderie had been lost.

  She said hello to the other Korean cashiers in the store, but they rarely talked as well. All of them seemed bored and unhappy, checking in to do their job and checking out, perhaps running home to their families. Perhaps her life was easier, not having to run around all the time, cooking, cleaning, dropping kids off at and picking them up from school, disciplining them, hugging them, kissing them. Perhaps her life was easier, but she couldn’t help but feel an emptiness as she thought of the lives her coworkers might have. The fullness that she missed.

  Whenever a little girl at the register reminded her of her own lost daughter, Mina’s body trembled with a mix of terror and exhilaration. Her eyes welled up, but she always caught herself before she actually cried. Gripping the sides of the counter, she steadied herself as much as she possibly could. Staring at the stream of items to enter, the cash to collect and return, she did not make eye contact with any customers. She spent the rest of the day trying not to think or feel at all.

  Once, a girl about her daughter’s age with a father, who looked so much like her husband with his long and sensitive face, arrived at the checkout stand. Was Mina imagining this, or were they back again, like specters from the past? She almost ran around the counter to throw her arms around them. Maybe God was giving her one more chance.

  But as soon as the little girl said something to her father in English, Mina realized they were nothing like her own family. They were not the same people at all. The father was much taller and younger than her own husband. The little girl had a different face entirely.

  During her bathroom break, she ran into a stall where she sat on the toilet and cried. She tried to be as silent as possible but couldn’t help the occasional sob escaping from her mouth. She held her face in her hands, gripping it with the pads of her fingers. She couldn’t stop. She knew she had to go back up front, but she couldn’t control herself. The pain in her stomach and chest overwhelmed her, as if she was being stabbed with sadness itself.

  After blowing her nose, she pressed her palms together and whispered, “Please, God, help me. Please, God. Please. I’ll do anything you want. Anything. I promise. Please help me. Help me, please.” She did not want to admit this to Him, but secretly she was asking God to keep her from ending everything, from throwing herself in front of the bus, which she thought about sometimes. As the bus pulled to a stop in front of her, she wondered what would happen if she stepped out in front of it. Only the fear of hell kept her alive.

  Soon after burying her husband and daughter, she stood on the roof of her apartment building, wondering if it was high enough to die if she jumped. As a teenager at the orphanage, after she had been beaten by one of the nuns, she thought of all the places she could hang herself. But she never quite had the courage to do it. She was too scared of the pain she mig
ht feel before dying. Wondering what it would feel like, she would sometimes grab a shirt or a pair of pants, and in the restroom that she shared with the other girls, she’d try to choke herself, but she never got close enough to blacking out. It hurt too much. She couldn’t stand the pain.

  When she was younger, she didn’t even care if she had gone to hell. But now she cared. Now she wanted to survive. How else could she see her daughter again?

  Those tiny fingers. That perfect face. The high clear voice. The near-black eyes.

  When she emerged from the restroom at work with her face red and eyes swollen, Mr. Kim, who had taken her place at the register after she had been gone longer than usual, dropped the closed sign at her register. Mario pretended not to notice and instead busied himself by preopening several of the plastic bags to ready them for the next customers.

  Mr. Kim touched her arm, pulling her aside. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “Oh, nothing. Nothing. Sorry I was gone for so long.”

  “Do you need to go home?”

  “No, I’m okay.”

  “I can take you home. You don’t look good.”

  Strutting by in his white polo, khaki pants, and visor as if he was coming from a day of golf, Mr. Park asked, “Something wrong here?”

  “Nothing, nothing. Everything’s fine.” She didn’t want Mr. Park to see her face. At the register, she removed the sign and waved at a customer waiting in another line. Mr. Kim stood by her side. As soon as she was done ringing the woman up, he asked, “Can I get you something?”

  “No, no. Really, I’m fine.”

  Hours later in the back of the market, she went to her storage basket, where she kept her snacks, jacket, and spare shoes. Unexpectedly, she found a plastic bag full of fruit—bright tangerines, a soothing green Granny Smith apple, a honey-colored pear—topped with two packages of ramen. One of the tangerines wore a little leaf like a hat. The dimpled flesh was clean and bright and sweet under her nose.