The Last Story of Mina Lee

by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

“Sometimes, agreeing to the same lie is what makes a family family,

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 the whole world told women every day, If you are alone, you are no one. A woman alone is no one at all.

She had been mesmerized by the smell and the sound of the waves and the vast expanse of murky blue that was not only a moving color but actually a well of living organisms—fish and algae and octopuses and whales—all moving through their lives unaware of the terrestrial world above it. Knowing also that somewhere at the end of the ocean an entirely different continent of people stared into the same abyss of water and distance and time comforted her. A universal aloneness and yearning.

A single human being could live an entire continent of pain and worry and longing.

Something about this country made it easy to forget that we needed each other.

This was what she had always wanted—a return to feeling minuscule, tiny yet safe somehow again. Here she was so small that she could elude the cruelties that she had endured. Here she could go undetected. Nature in its most extreme forms taught us that there was a design greater than us, and we could unburden ourselves briefly from our individuality in this world, our self-importance. Wasn’t that the relief?

Choosing if and when and how to share the truth might be the deepest, most painful necessity of growing out into the world and into yourself.

If she thought of the labor and resources that went into each piece of fruit—the water, the light, the earth, the training and harvesting of each plant—a box of apples could be special, a sacred thing. Perhaps in this land of plenty, of myth and wide-open spaces, trucks and factories, mass production, we lost track of that: the miracle of an object as simple as a pear, nutritious and sweet, created by something as beautiful as a tree.