The Last Story of Mina Lee
Fiction
Park Row Books
September 8, 2020
Hardcover
352
Purchased
A profoundly moving and unconventional mother-daughter saga, The Last Story of Mina Lee illustrates the devastating realities of being an immigrant in America.
Margot Lee's mother, Mina, isn't returning her calls. It's a mystery to twenty-six-year-old Margot, until she visits her childhood apartment in Koreatown, LA, and finds that her mother has suspiciously died. The discovery sends Margot digging through the past, unraveling the tenuous invisible strings that held together her single mother's life as a Korean War orphan and an undocumented immigrant, only to realize how little she truly knew about her mother.
Interwoven with Margot's present-day search is Mina's story of her first year in Los Angeles as she navigates the promises and perils of the American myth of reinvention. While she's barely earning a living by stocking shelves at a Korean grocery store, the last thing Mina ever expects is to fall in love. But that love story sets in motion a series of events that have consequences for years to come, leading up to the truth of what happened the night of her death.
Told through the intimate lens of a mother and daughter who have struggled all their lives to understand each other, The Last Story of Mina Lee is a powerful and exquisitely woven debut novel that explores identity, family, secrets, and what it truly means to belong.
My review:
I was excited for this one based on the synopsis, then I began to see some not so great reviews, so went into it with a bit of trepidation. I am happy to report that I really liked this mother/daughter story! This book follows Margot in real time, and her mother Mina throughout her life in America. Margot is a first generation Korean-American, and has always been embarrassed by her mother. They live in poverty, her mother works long hours for them to get by, and she has never learned English after arriving from Korea before Margot was born. Margot is more than happy to escape to Seattle after attending college, but on a rare trip home to visit her mother, she discovers her dead in their apartment. As Margot begins to talk to people and go through her mother's things, she learns a lot about her that she never knew (or took the time to find out). Concurrent with Margot's quest for the truth, we are given the story of Mina, an undocumented immigrant trying to live the elusive American dream. While I did find Mina's story more interesting, I felt that Margot added a lot to the narrative when she begins to understand her mother's plight, and why she acted as she did. By the end of the book, Margot develops empathy, and wishes she had taken more time to engage with her mother while she still could. There are lots of lovely passages about the immigrant experience in America, the promise of a better life, loneliness, and fear, among others. This one is a good summary of Margot's awakening:
Margot, who could only see her mother as the impossible foreigner, with her rapid-fire Korean and embarrassing, halting English, who could only see her as an oppressive prop in Margot's own story, realized more and more that, in actuality, her mother was the heroine. She was the one who had been making and breaking and remaking her own life.
A well constructed, highly enjoyable story about a mother/daughter relationship, and the immigrant experience. Well worth the read.
