The Last Story of Mina Lee

Mina remembers her first kiss with Mr. Kim. Mr. Kim is kind in ways her husband never was. She worries that she is losing herself to “the illusion of potential happiness” (180). They’ve spent several nights together and went to Las Vegas. Mrs. Baek and the landlady notice a difference in her and that she is dressing up.

During dinner with Mrs. Baek, Mrs. Baek says she doesn’t need a man because she has books and music. Mina takes her comment the wrong way and starts to leave. She thinks Mrs. Baek is implying that she is too educated and interesting to be bored or interested in men. Mrs. Baek clarifies that she can’t ever trust men again. She was married and ran away from her husband because he treated her horribly. Mina realizes that she and Mrs. Baek need each other.

Mina and Mr. Kim see a TV special about Koreans reunited long after the separation of North and South Korea. Mr. Kim begins crying. He wonders if Mina’s parents might not have made it across. Mina goes in the other room. She’s upset that he suggested her parents might not have survived.

Mr. Kim apologizes and says he wanted to watch the show because he hoped he would see his father. His mother left the North when she was pregnant with him. His father stayed behind to work. They never saw him again, and she raised him alone. She is in Busan and never married again because she thought he might be alive. Mr. Kim wanted to come to America and get rich so he could find his father.

Mina wonders if she will be able to face her husband in the afterlife. She is worried that her time with Mr. Kim will end. She remembers her first day at the orphanage. It took her days for her stomach to unclench enough to eat.

At the supermarket, a woman screams from Mr. Park’s office. Mr. Kim pounds on his door and goes in. Mina hears Mr. Park yelling that he is fired as Mr. Kim exits with his arm around Lupe. Mr. Kim’s face is bleeding. He and Mina take Lupe home. Mr. Kim tells her that he saw Mr. Park holding Lupe down, preparing to assault her. Mr. Park threw Lupe off and punched Mr. Kim. Mina wants to kill Mr. Park, but Mr. Kim says that Mr. Park has friends and that he could get rid of them all if he wanted. He believes Mr. Park was responsible for Mario’s deportation. Mr. Kim thinks he should hide. He can’t get arrested because he let his student visa expire. He tries to give her a gun, but she refuses. He says she has to pretend that nothing happened and to keep her job.

Margot drives to Calabasas. She wonders about the connection between Mr. Park and her mother’s death. She worries that if she confronts Mr. Park she could endanger Mrs. Baek. She’s also upset that her mother never told her about her father. She wants to know why he left her mother and came to Los Angeles. Margot now believes that pretending not to care about her father was a mask for her real feelings. She feels that she has been preparing herself for the truth, however hard it may be.

She goes to Mrs. Kim’s house. Mrs. Kim is expensively dressed. When Margot tells her about the obituary, she mentions that her mother’s name was Mina Lee. Mrs. Kim recognizes the name. She saw Mina’s name in her husband’s phone a lot. Mrs. and Mrs. Kim had an open marriage. She says Mr. Kim spent a lot of money on Mina. He hired an investigator who worked to find missing people in Korea, but she doesn’t know what he found. She says that Margot is sentimental like her father. She misses her husband and plans to sell their supermarkets and travel. Mrs. Kim gives Margot her number.

Margot asks the driver, Sungmin, if he knew anything about her father. He says she must leave and pushes her out the door. The push is not hard, but insistent enough to disturb her. Margot then spends two day in bed, sick. She wonders if Mrs. Kim wanted revenge on her mother. She sketches her mother’s Virgin Mary statue and remembers her love for art as a child. In sixth grade, she drew her mother. Her mother looked at the sketch asked if she really looked that old. From then on, Margot was confused about what to draw. She switched from portraits to landscapes because she never wanted to hurt her mother’s feelings again.

Margot thinks about the nonprofit where she worked after college. She realizes that she used to be good at compartmentalizing different pieces of her life, but her mother’s death has changed that.

Mina’s next day at work is oppressive and tense. She tries to call Mr. Kim during a break, but he doesn’t answer. She put his gun in her purse before work, revealing that he talked her into keeping it. She almost steps in front of the bus that night. The bus driver asks her if she’s trying to kill herself.

She eats dinner with Mrs. Baek after Mr. Kim doesn’t answer another phone call. Mr. Kim calls from the airport in the middle of the night. He is going to stay with a cousin in Chicago for a while. He says it will be easier for him to hide alone. He’s not willing to risk her safety by taking her with him, or by staying with her.

When he says I love you, Mina throws the phone. She thinks about killing Mr. Park, and then herself. Mrs. Baek comes in to check on her. Mina throws up, and they know she is pregnant.

Margot feels better before Christmas. As she recovers, she thinks about her childhood. She hated using chopsticks while growing up. She remembers wanting to live like “real Americans” on TV, and they used silverware. Her mother did nothing but get by; she never did anything fun or nice for herself. Margot believes that her success and independence relied on distance from her mother. If she had stayed in Los Angeles with her, then she might have ended up in a similar situation.

She cleans the kitchen, and then her mother’s room. She squeezes a white teddy bear and feels something inside the heart. There is a key inside with a box number and a bank name. She remembers taking a bath and asking where her father was. Her mother cried and said she never had a father either. When Margot was a teenager, questions about her father enraged her. She hated that they didn’t have enough money to take control of their lives, and that she had so few answers.

Margot sees the landlord outside and asks why he lied to the police. He says he doesn’t trust them and doesn’t want anyone else to get hurt. He says that he is stuck like the rest of them, and that developers want to take the apartments and turn them into condos. He says that Mrs. Baek might be able to help her; he believes she is having trouble, too, because a man is stalking her. Margot wonders who would want her mother dead that much.