The Last Story of Mina Lee

by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

Maybe it was not mainstream, maybe it was not seen with any compassion or complexity on television or in the movies, because it represented all that middle-and upper-class people, including Margot, feared and therefore despised: a seemingly inescapable, cyclical poverty. But in actuality this was the American dream for which people toiled day and night. People had left their homelands to be here, to build and grow what they loved—family, friendship, community, a sense of belonging. This was their version of the dream.

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, as a child of the war, would have surely died alone if she had not been found. And the whole world told women every day, If you are alone, you are no one. A woman alone is no one at all.

Maybe it was the tiniest of things, at times, on a consistent basis, that kept us alive, and if she could not create such kindnesses for herself, couldn’t she allow someone else to do so for her?

Margot had always thought of Koreans as workaholics, religious and pragmatic, yet at times showy and status-oriented when they had the means. But studying those relaxed faces in the photographs, those dusty shoes, Margot could see someone else, Koreans—not Korean Americans, not immigrants hardened by the realities of living in a foreign country, who like her father in Calabasas had stubbornly “succeeded,” achieving a sheen of perfection while obscuring his actual complexity, an isolation from the self. Or like her mother, who had worked tirelessly yet had never amounted to more than the long days, the long hours, alone.

In this country, it was easier to harm someone else than to stay alive. It was easier to take a life than to have one. Was she finally an American?