Author: Nancy Jooyoun Kim
ISBN: 9780778310174
Publication Date: September 1, 2020
Publisher: Park Row Books
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.
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Enjoy this excerpt!
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.
Social Links:
Twitter: @njooyounkim
Instagram: @njooyounkim
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