How many hours had she spent, words stumbling like stones out of her mouth, trying to explain something in Korean to her mother? A utilities bill. How to work the remote control. A car insurance policy. And in those hours, Margot would always slip, somehow yelling at her mother, as her mother had often done to her as a child when she had misbehaved by oversleeping, by missing church, even by falling ill and needing to go to the hospital.

Her mother had once screamed, “How am I going to pay for this? Why don’t you take better care of yourself?” Her mother didn’t have time for empathy. She always had to keep moving. If she stopped, she might drown.

“Would you mind waiting in the car?” Margot asked. The broken security gate shrieked, then slammed behind her. Holding her breath, she climbed the dark, dank staircase, which smelled of wet socks and old paint fumes, to the second floor, where she knocked on the apartment door. The fisheye was empty and dark.

This was no longer her home. Yet with a memory that lived not in her head but in her hands, she turned the key for the dead bolt, which was already unlocked, and then the doorknob. She had spent most of her life, her childhood, dreading the inside of that apartment, not out of fear but out of hatred and spite. Hatred for her mother. Hatred for the money they didn’t have. Hatred for her father, missing, gone, a coward. Hatred for her mother’s accent. Hatred for the furniture, stained, falling apart. Hatred for herself, her life. She hated it all. She wanted this world to disappear, to burn it all down.

As she opened the door, a dark odor of decayed fruit, putrid and sharp, swelled around her head like a tidal wave. Acid erupted from her mouth onto the arm that shielded her face. She flipped on the light. There was a broken ceramic sculpture of the Virgin Mary on the floor, tour brochures on their coffee table, and in this intimate chaos, her mother facedown on the carpet with her right arm extended, the left one by her side, her feet in sheer nude socks.

Later, Margot would remember the screams and would realize that they were coming from her.

She fell to her knees. The hallway’s amber glow was soft like feathers. Face tingling, she lay her forehead on the carpet where the head of a tiny nail pressed against her skin. Miguel’s hands abruptly gripped her shoulders from behind, easing her to her feet. They wobbled, weak, down the stairs into the open air, the street.

As the sun disappeared below the horizon, the sky became the longest bruise—purple and blue. The cruel light left its mark.

She rested on the uneven curb, head in her arms folded on her knees, Miguel next to her. Hiccuping through tears, she struggled to breathe.

Maybe she should have checked her mother’s pulse, maybe she shouldn’t have called the police. What if her mother was only hurt badly, or drunk? No, she never drank and a person that was hurt would not lie on the floor facedown like that. And she couldn’t bear the thought of being near that smell, that body, the first time she had seen her mother in almost a year.

That was her umma. That was her head. Those were her feet.

Sirens blared from a distance, getting louder as they arrived. She directed two police officers and an EMT to her mother’s apartment. Another two officers asked her questions. She was appalled at how little she could answer. But she did tell them miscellaneous things about her mother—that she worked all day at this store and that she went to church.

A wiry Korean man in his sixties, perhaps the landlord or even a janitor, spoke to the officers for about ten minutes. Afterward, he stood on the sidewalk, smoking with a few casual observers who had emerged out of the surrounding buildings, curious about the lights and the noise.

They took her body away in a black bag on a stretcher.

Her name was Mina. Mina Lee.

Yes, that was her mother.

Mina

Summer 1987

MINA STEPPED OFF THE PLANE INTO A FLASH OF HEAT, thinking she had made a grave mistake. But it was too late. The world opened up like a hot mouth devouring her. Yet hadn’t it been that way her whole life already? She reminded herself that this airport, LAX, was actually easier, much more organized than Seoul, or any other great city, much safer even than her own childhood.

She fought back the memory of the screaming, stampeding crowd in which she had been separated from her parents while fleeing the north during the war. Her four-year-old hands groping to grab them. The rush of bodies. The moment she lost sight of her mother and father. Surrounded by the distress, the pain etched into strangers. The dead along the road, the elderly who had fallen, and those shuddering, hungry people who did not have anything left to protect.

And in the airport now, her heart throbbed as she waded through the crowd to get out. She was doing this again, and again she was doing it alone.

A steady stream of people jostled in the same direction—friends and families, smiling, reunited, businessmen in gray and navy suits traveling by themselves. She was in another country, foreign, alone. The breath rushed in and out of her lungs. Her underarms were clammy and cold. What if she fainted now before she could even make it out the door?

On paper, she was on vacation, visiting a friend from work. She had always wanted to visit America. She would be here for a month to see the sights—Disneyland, the beaches, Yosemite. On paper, she would relax, enjoy herself, and return to her life in Seoul, her job as a designer of women’s casual clothes.

The papers did not say that she was going to find a job here, that she was going to start a life, that she hoped to find an employer to sponsor her, and if she could not do that, she would stay anyway—invisible, unofficial, undocumented. The papers did not say that she had nothing to return to, nothing that she wanted or could live with any longer. The papers did not say that she did not know how to sit still anymore, that she did not know how to stay in her apartment by herself, that she could not bear the gnawing familiarity of that haunted place, those ruined streets, that ruined home. The papers did not say that everything in her suitcases was now all that she had. Every single one of her belongings had been stuffed compactly inside of them. Selling and giving away most of her life had been an act of self-immolation, whittling herself down enough to stay alive until God took her home, wherever that meant.

A wave of relief washed over her as she stepped outside of the airport into the blast of hot air and sunshine. After loosening the hand-dyed silk scarf, sienna-and-ocher-colored, around her neck, she reached inside her purse for a napkin to wipe her forehead.

She had already secured a place to stay—a small bedroom in a house owned by an ahjumma who lived by herself in Koreatown. Her friend Mrs. Shin, a former coworker in Seoul, had recommended the place after she, her husband, and two children had immigrated and stayed there for a few months themselves three years prior.

On the edge of the sidewalk, Mina raised her hand, hailing a cab. The driver, a tall Sikh man, helped her with her luggage, heaving her two large suitcases into the trunk. She realized that she had never seen a person who was Sikh before. Sweat streamed down her face and neck inside the sauna-like car despite the windows being open. She reached forward, showing him the address she had written in English on a slip of lined paper. The shakiness of the letters, the seismographic script revealed to her how nervous she had been writing down that address, as if signing a contract for the rest of her life.

“First time?” he asked, his eyes smiling in the rearview mirror. His dark turban skimmed the roof of the car.

“Ex-cuse me?”

“First time?”

“Oh.” She scoured her mind for English words like a dresser with too many drawers.

“English?”

“No.” She shook her head.

“Chinese?”

“Korea.”

The driver accelerated onto the freeway, weaving in and out of a brash symphony of traffic. A horn section of big rigs. Brakes screeching. A chorus of road rage. Synthesized pop music, all leg warmers and big hair, blasted from an open window, while records scratched into “The Batterram” one lane over. A man shouted, “Go fuck yourself,” like cymbals crashing.

Damp clothes clung to her body. She wiped her face, trying not to ruin her makeup, and gripped the door handle.

As they passed pedestrians in the streets of LA, Mina wondered where the Koreans were. Occasionally, another Asian face appeared in a neighboring car. But here in this cacophonous world of concrete, metal, and glass, in this smell of gasoline and rubber, she could not see herself. She felt disembodied in this new place, where she did not know the language, where the signs, the billboards all blared something in English, gibberish.