Nancy Jooyoun Kim: Author of "The Last Story Of Mina Lee" Talks Cultural Divides, Writing Mystery and Seeing Yourself in Your Characters
Nancy Jooyoun Kim’s debut novel The Last Story Of Mina Lee explores family and secrets, revealing how both can shape our lives and unravel them at the same time. The story follows Margot Lee as she makes a surprise trip to see her mother Mina in Koreatown, La. Her mother hasn’t been returning her phone calls and Margot finds herself a little worried. When she arrives she discovers her mother dead in her apartment. So begins Margot’s mission to find out what happened to her mother and along the way unravel the mystery that is her single mother’s life. This is intertwined with Mina’s story of her first years in Los Angeles. The reader is brought on a jaw-dropping, tear shedding journey. As the story of an immigrant mother and her American-born daughter is told.
I spoke with Nancy Jooyoun Kim about writing The Last Story Of Mina Lee, cultural divides, creating a mystery on the page, and how we can see ourselves within our characters.
The first thing that becomes evident in The Last Story Of Mina Lee is that there is a great distance between mother and daughter. Mina and Margot know nothing about each other’s lives beyond the small talk over the phone which Margot describes as “another choppy bilingual plod” indicating that there is even a language barrier between them. Margot further expresses frustration at the fact that her mother will not learn English but also reveals she never learned Korean. Which in a way is a double standard but shows the harsh cultural divide between a mother who grew up in Korea and her first generation born American daughter. What did it mean to you to shine a spotlight on the little talked about cultural divide that can occur between immigrant parents and their American-born children?
Difficulties with language and how we navigate the many secrets and silences in all families are often a source of great frustration and misunderstanding, a sense of loss, and are particularly complicated when one thinks of the role of language within immigrant families. For many immigrants, language is a source of pride, a way of connecting with and preserving culture and meaning, values and history. Yet Margot who is American-born spends most of her life resisting her mother whom she doesn’t view as successful or as a model for who and what she wants to be when she grows up. She resists learning the Korean language because she succumbs to the dominant narrative that in order to succeed in America one should assimilate and excel at English—eventually abandoning the past, leaving whatever culture you come from behind. But the structure of the book, which alternates between the points of view of the mother and daughter, Mina and Margot, past and present, reveals how regardless of Margot’s efforts, the past will always be present, and in conversation with the possibilities of the kind of future that we might create from now on.
I myself don’t speak Korean well and my mother, who is also an immigrant and single mother like Mina, does not speak much English either. And although this book is not autobiographical, I wanted to write a story that was true to the sometimes painful complexities, forms of conflict, and unacknowledged labor within working-class immigrant families. Unlike middle- and upper-class children who might have more access to resources (such as Saturday school and language instruction), Margot has spent her childhood alone, struggling to either translate or explain things to her mother, who was unavailable in so many ways, and so much of their relationship because of the need to survive, is transactional rather than emotional. This is not something that I had really seen explored with much depth in a novel before and I challenged myself to examine my own sense of guilt and shame over my inability to explain, to be heard by, and to really listen to the one person whom I love the most, my own mother.
Mina lived a life of loss. First her parents, then her husband and daughter. When she came to America we see her terrified but full of hope that things will be better in this new country. It’s with sadness that the reader can see that Mina’s move was influenced by pain and heartbreak. Yet still, it took much bravery to leave everything she knew no matter how little it was. When you wrote Mina did you see her in this way scared and alone but somehow so brave?
Although Mina is the type of hero who is often invisible in our society—a single mother, a working-class and undocumented immigrant who hasn’t achieved “success” by the standards of the American dream—she is extraordinarily human and alive, reminding me of so many women I have known, women who for various reasons live on the fringes, outsiders who still manage to find beauty in the everyday, living with earnestness and passion. Not only is she brave but she is an agent for change in her life. She not only endures but she creates, even playing a role in her own demise. As someone who grew up in a working-class immigrant family, Mina’s life is more familiar, more real to me than the examples of Asian Americans as “model minorities” that the media embraces so much, a stereotype that upholds the myth of meritocracy in our country, driving a wedge between communities of color. It was important for me to craft a hero who exists in real life but doesn’t get enough attention because she doesn’t serve the dominant narrative of what it means to succeed in America.
Margot seems to be caught in a cultural tug of war with herself. She’s grown up surrounded by white American culture that portrays this sunshine and rainbows life. Something she’s desperately wanted to be apart of her. Margot doesn’t want to be Korean in America. At the same time, she knows she doesn’t feel “All-American”. Is this internal struggle between American culture which they are born in and the culture of their heritage which they’ve never truly known something you feel many first generations struggle with?
In a country where the majority of representation and storytelling—from books in the classroom to popular movies and television—has been controlled by and centered on the experiences of white people, it only makes sense that a person of color and the daughter of immigrants, like Margot, who lives in Koreatown yet doesn’t have a strong sense of family and community, might experience (and even desire) a sense of alienation from herself. Certainly, as a child of the ‘80s and ‘90s, I hardly witnessed representations of Asian Americans that I felt I could identify with or be proud of; instead, I viewed white people as the heroes of both the everyday and the epic. It wasn’t until I was in college and had begun taking courses in Ethnic Studies, specifically in Asian American Studies, that I began to see how rich and important our stories were, how many writers and artists have already been working for generations toward centering Asian American life in all of its nuances and complexities—for me, so that people like me could exist.
A mother’s mission in life is to protect her children, in this story, we find that Mina protected Margot from many things. It seems this is one of the things that caused Margot to resent her mother. She didn’t understand her past the surface because in order to keep her safe she had to keep parts of her hidden. Is Mina’s decision to withhold in your opinion the only one she had? Despite its part in driving a wedge between Margot and her?
Protectiveness, a fear of vulnerability, and a sense of shame drive Mina to withhold information about her past from Margot. It was certainly not the only option but it is such a human response to hide that which causes us pain. It is a desire to not relive the past, to not expose our vulnerabilities to the people for whom we often work so hard to maintain the façade of being capable and strong all the time. This is how many women, and this is how Mina survived all these years. And so I hope we can, as readers, understand what she had to do to get by in her own mind, in the one body, the one life she had.
Bringing it around to a lighter note, there is an element of thriller/mystery in this story. Margot turns into a sleuth along with Miguel to uncover what happened to her mother. When writing this element into the story did you find it challenging laying clues out carefully without giving away anything?
The novel pays homage to mystery through Margot and Miguel’s sleuthing, instilling in what is often a difficult and painful story with playful elements that we recognize from the genre. I really enjoyed writing this mystery element because it creates a sense of forward momentum in a narrative that is dominated by looking at and analyzing the past. So it was all very challenging but in the best kind of way, allowing me to use different parts of my brain to lay clues that would create curiosity, encouraging the chase.
Some writers, I’ve done this myself, have put pieces of themselves into characters or stories. Especially when they are writing about something with elements they can relate to. Do you relate to either character or to elements in your story?
Although the novel is not autobiographical, I certainly relate to the complexity of being the American-born, English-speaking daughter of a Korean immigrant and single mother whom I love more than anyone else in the world but struggle to communicate with and relate to in so many ways. We have a very difficult yet beautiful relationship. My mother made extraordinary sacrifices for me and never asked for much in return—only that I grow up to be a good person who works hard while caring about others and the world. Like Mina, she also taught me a lot about eating and sharing and nourishing myself. I relate to the love and sacrifice, the shame and the unspoken, the tumult and intergenerational trauma in this book.
Last but not least. If you could give advice to anyone wanting to explore subjects such as you did in The Last Story Of Mina Lee what would you tell them?
That they begin with asking themselves why these subjects matter and figuring out internally what is driving the interest, what is at the heart of the story for themselves. My book began simply with the image of a young Korean American woman who has fled the complexities of her life, her history in Los Angeles only to be left one day with the sound of a phone that rings and rings as she tries for days to contact her mother. I realized that this one image embodied so many of the emotions and thoughts that I’ve carried for much of my life—that I should be ashamed of my mother and also ashamed of how I treated her, that I would never be able to say what I needed to say to her, that I would never be able to pay her back in time. And it’s in that entanglement that I found the threads that I needed to follow in order to know what I needed to know and to finish the story.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Nancy Jooyoun Kim is a graduate of UCLA and the University of Washington, Seattle. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, NPR/PRI’s Selected Shorts, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, The Offing, and elsewhere. The Last Story of Mina Lee is her first novel.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Nena Orcutt is an aspiring author, who thinks too much, Listens to a lot of music. Needs coffee to function. Who thinks Bukowski was a wise man and Hemingway was a genius. And feels romance isn’t dead. She is working on her debut novel “The Crow and The Butterfly” Making her home in Music City she’s ready to conquer the writing world and leave her mark.
