The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

Author:Nancy Jooyoun Kim
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781472281609
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2020-08-31T18:30:00+00:00

Mina

Fall 1987

WITH THE SUN HANGING LOW, A DUSKY AND MOLTEN landscape of clouds striated and stretched thin, and the dark silhouettes of palm trees backlit, Mina and Mr. Kim, on their second date, drove west in his station wagon down Olympic Boulevard, one of the longest streets in the city. It was lined with stores, restaurants, and shopping plazas through Koreatown but rapidly dwindled down to a residential area with mostly single-family homes around its intersection with Crenshaw Boulevard.

Staring out the window, Mina marveled at how much her life had changed in the past several months since moving to America, how large and strange the world now seemed in this foreign place of warm weather and cold surfaces—cars, speed, metal, and glass between people. She missed Korea and its quiet alleyways, snow melting into clear water, the mustard-colored leaves of gingko trees, undulating stone shingles on roofs, despite coups, military rule, wars, a border that was not a scar but an open wound.

And how could she remove the memory of the physical beauty from the memory of her losses, the tremendousness of that pain? Absence was always present. Thunder, bombs dropping. Now she had only this dull ugliness, this dull drone—the charmless buildings, the boring roads, the battered buses, drooping palm trees gone brown—spectacularly lit.

“Are you cold?” Mr. Kim adjusted the temperature with the dial.

“A little. I’m okay.”

“Let me know if you want me to turn the heat up some more.”

“Okay.”

“How was your day today?”

Earlier, Mina had slipped into his car, afraid that someone might see her from the store. She had been at work all day, distracted, ringing up items twice or giving the incorrect change. She had been unable to sleep the night before.

“It was fine,” she said. “Yours? I didn’t see you at all.”

“I took the day off.” He cleared his throat. “I wasn’t feeling so well this morning.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, totally fine. Just some stomach problems I sometimes have.” He sighed. “Been really busy at the store.”

“Yeah, seems that way.”

“I guess, that’s a good thing. More customers, maybe more money.”

“Or maybe just more work.”

He laughed. “Yeah, pretty much. One of these days, I’m going to own my own place.”

“What kind of place?”

“Grocery store. I’m a grocery man.”

She smiled. “You make it sound like that’s your destiny.”

“Why not? I mean, what else? The only thing I like better than food is books. But what am I going to do, sell Bibles? What kind of books do people buy in Koreatown?”

“There’s a bookstore near the market.”

“Have you ever been in there?”

“Sure.” She thought of the Spanish textbook she had bought a couple weeks ago.

“It’s Bibles and English and Spanish books. And maybe some other stuff, but no one has time to read anymore. All we do is work . . . But everyone has to eat.”

“I hope so,” she joked.

“The grocery store is the future.”

“The grocery store is now.” She cracked up, covering her mouth with her hand.

“I’ve been saving, but probably in a few years I’ll start a store somewhere else, maybe in the Valley, so I’m not .

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