The Last Story of Mina Lee

by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

Yet despite those gestures, those fragile attempts to express their feelings, she and her mother couldn’t get along, relax. Were they too foreign from each other? Or was it the intensity of two women alone, two women who would be mirrors for each other, for each other’s sadness, disappointments, rage? If one would experience joy, the other would feel not her own joy rising but a pang of jealousy rooted in a fear of abandonment that would cause her to strike the other down. And where did this fear of loneliness come from?

So much of Mina’s life had been driven by the need to survive in a world created by and for someone else. What would the world look like if she made it her own, even temporarily, for a moment, fleeting, so that she could experience again the throb, the hunger of being alive, eyes wide, teeth showing?