The Last Story of Mina Lee

Margot remembers her final conversation with her mother two weeks earlier. It was a boring conversation held in half-English, half-Korean. She keeps wondering why her mother hasn’t answered the phone in the two weeks since then.

Margot and her friend Miguel leave Portland on their way to Los Angeles. Miguel is moving from Seattle to take a new job. He and Margot talk about his family and the fact that Miguel hasn’t told them that he’s gay even though he thinks they know. Margot remembers her mother’s face. Again she wonders if something is wrong. She hasn’t seen her mother since last Christmas. As she and Miguel eat in Redding, California, Margot remembers meeting her first white friends. She always envied them and saw them as beautiful simply because they were white.

Miguel drives the rest of the way. Margot’s mother never wanted to travel, and fast driving makes Margot anxious. She remembers her mother taking her to Las Vegas as a child and driving under the speed limit the whole time. They spent their day in a small motel outside Vegas, waiting for someone who never arrived. Margot never knew who they were waiting for, only that her mother was depressed on the trip home.