43 pages • 1 hour read
Nancy Jooyoun KimThe Last Story of Mina Lee
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 20-25Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 20 Summary: “Mina: Spring 2014”
Mina watches Korean reunion footage. She is almost 70 years old, and the old faces remind her of herself. It was 26 years earlier when she watched a similar show with Mr. Kim. She remembers that it was the day before Mr. Park attacked Lupe. She still has the gun.
Mina’s water broke during a shift at the supermarket, and Mrs. Baek took her to the hospital. When she saw her baby after two days of painful labor, she saw: “A monster, like her, born into a world, hollow—without a family, without aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, without even gravestones to call their own” (229). Women at work gossiped about her belly. Mina quit going to church when signs of her pregnancy became obvious. She cries in bed for weeks with the baby. She imagines leaving the baby and running away. Once she recovers, she washes dishes for a year while a local grandmother watches Margot.
She remembers a phone conversation with Margot. Rather than catching up on each other’s lives, they argued about not knowing each other’s languages. In Margot’s absence, Mina’s business became her child. She decided that she was not only reluctant to learn English; she hated the language and refused to use it whenever possible.
Mina runs into Mrs. Baek at her store. They haven’t seen each other in 20 years. During their brief conversation, Mina realizes that Mrs. Baek reminds her of a time she wants to forget. She remembers Lupe and wishes she could tell her that this isn’t her fault. She wasn’t wrong to resist Mr. Park, even though the results of her screams changed their lives. Mrs. Baek’s reappearance reminds Mina that friendship comes with emotional attachment. However, she invites Mrs. Baek to dinner that night. They catch up. They’re both unable to retire. Mrs. Baek says helping Mina and Margot helped her survive. Mina has always seen Mrs. Baek as free and independent, but now she realizes that Mrs. Baek is just another type of captive woman.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Margot: Winter 2014”
Margot opens the safety deposit box for which she earlier found the key. It is filled with black and white photographs and Korean documents. There is a picture of her parents with her lost sister. The people in the picture look relaxed and happy. She realizes that she is looking at Koreans, not Korean Americans.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Mina: Summer 2014”
Mrs. Baek and Mina buy lipstick. As they try it on in the apartment, Mina’s phone rings. A voice asks for Mrs. Lee, and Mina immediately hangs up. Mr. Kim knocks on her door the next day. She remembers taking the gun to work 26 years earlier, wondering if she would use it on Mr. Park. She doesn’t answer the door, but Mr. Kim leaves a note that says he is dying of cancer and wants to speak with her. He wants to help her and her family. She slaps her Virgin Mary statue, and it falls and cracks.
Mina calls Mr. Kim two weeks later. She had planned to introduce Margot to him in Las Vegas. He invited her and then never came. She has never been able to forgive him for that. Mr. Kim says he can help her find her parents. She hangs up. He calls back and asks her to meet him.
They meet at the pier and Mr. Kim apologizes to her. He tells her that he found out that his father had died. Now that he knows that, he wants to help her find her parents with the time he has left. Mina decides not to tell him about Margot.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Margot: Winter 2014”
On Christmas Eve, Margot and Miguel go to a church. Margot remembers being 15 years old when she told her mother she didn’t believe in God. Her mother asked if she wanted to go to hell. Margot said a god wouldn’t let them suffer.
Margot sees Mrs. Baek. They follow her outside and overhear her arguing with a man. They hear someone say Mina Lee’s name. Margot sneaks close enough to see that it is Mr. Park arguing with Mrs. Baek. He tells her that without men, women act like animals. Mrs. Baek kicks his shin and leaves, saying that she’ll kill him. Miguel and Margot follow Mrs. Baek to her apartment.
Chapter 24 Summary: “Mina: Fall 2014”
One week before Thanksgiving, a month after Mr. Kim’s death, Mina goes into Margot’s room. She remembers the Grand Canyon trip. Three weeks after they returned, Mr. Kim gave her an envelope. It contained her parents’ location, some papers, Korean documents, and the only photo she has of her daughter and husband. Now she accepts that Mr. Kim is gone forever. They grew close again in his final months, and she is glad they had another chance to see each other.
Mrs. Baek comes over. Mina tells her about Lupe, Mr. Park, Mr. Kim, and the Grand Canyon trip. Mrs. Baek cries. She realizes that Mr. Park is the man who has been following her. She tells Mina that she quit working at Hanok House because he bought it. He wants her because she rejected him, and she knows he will never stop.
Mina gets the gun and prepares to show it to Mrs. Baek. She thinks, “In this country, it was easier to harm someone than to stay alive. It was easier to take a life than to have one. Was she finally an American?” (273) She wants to show Mrs. Baek the gun and teach her how it works. She is determined that she will never lose anyone again.
Chapter 25 Summary: “Margot: Winter 2014-2015”
Margot knocks on Mrs. Baek’s door and pretends to be a delivery person. When the door opens, she pushes her way inside. Mrs. Baek is packing. Margot tells her about the documents and the photo. Margot sees a passport on the table: Margaret Johnson is Mrs. Baek’s legal name. She changed it while escaping her husband.
When Margot asks her about Mr. Park, Mrs. Baek pulls out a gun. Margot remembers being robbed with her mother at gunpoint and how scared she was. Mrs. Baek tells her about the day that Mina tried to give her the gun. When she held it out to her, Mrs. Baek remembered her husband pointing a gun at her. She reacted in terror and pushed Mina when Mina got closer with the gun. The resulting fall killed her. Her death was an accident after all.
Margot and Miguel know there is no point in telling the police about Mrs. Baek, but they want to report Mr. Park. Mrs. Baek points the gun at them, tells them to leave, and says that she is ready.
The day after Christmas, Margot decides that she wants to know about her mother’s other family. She thinks, “Choosing if and when and how to share the truth might be the deepest, most painful necessity of growing out into the world and into yourself” (288). She remembers her mother cutting her hair. During the haircuts her mother would sometimes tell her about abusive nuns. Margot never knew how to react when her mother was vulnerable.
At a salon, Margot sees Mr. Park on the front of a Korean newspaper. The stylist says police officers found him dead the day before. He was naked in the bushes in a park. Someone had shot him in the leg, and then animals had eaten him. Margot and Miguel know that Mrs. Baek must have lured him there.
Miguel convinces Margot to go out with him on New Year’s Eve. She sees Officer Choi while getting party supplies. He tells her that he quit the force. He says her phone call—and her frustration—helped him realize how burned out he was. He wasn’t able to help the way he had planned during his time on the force. She gives him her phone number and asks for a favor. She plans on asking him to help her translate the Korean documents.
Margot decides to move to Los Angeles instead of returning to Seattle. She feels as if she and her mother are now free. With the help of an investigator, David Choi learns that Mina’s mother is 92 years old and lives in the Korean city of Gunpo. On a phone call, Mrs. Kim tells her that Mr. Kim had another wife who died. The investigator tells Margot that her sister and Mina’s husband were killed in a car accident. Margot goes to the pier and thinks about everything that has happened. She makes a phone call. A woman answers in Korean. Margot says she is Mina’s daughter and hopes the woman understands her.
Chapters 20-25 Analysis
Margot never thinks of her mother as a loving person. Consider Mina’s description of Margot shortly after she is born: “A monster, like her, born into a world, hollow—without a family, without aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, without even gravestones to call their own” (229). Even though the reader knows Mina is proud of Margot, it is also true that she viewed her daughter—and herself—as a monster because she did not have a family, by Mina’s definition of family. It is unsurprising that Mina grew up without feeling love and warmth from a person who saw her as a monster when she was a baby.
Mina’s obsessive focus on work sometimes blinds her to the reality that other people are suffering in similar ways. During her conversation with Mrs. Baek, she realizes that some of her assumptions were wrong. She saw Mrs. Baek as impossibly interesting, fun, and educated. It confuses her to hear Mrs. Baek talk about feeling confined. Mina then wonders:
How many women had been trapped—in terrible marriages, terrible jobs, unbearable circumstances—simply because the world hadn’t been designed to allow them to thrive on their own. Their decisions would always be scrutinized by the lives at which they were able to sacrifice themselves, their bodies, their pleasures and desires. A woman who imagined her own way out would always be ostracized for her own strength (241).
This is the world Margot sees when she thinks of the world that tells women they are nothing if they are alone.
In these final sections, Margot and Mina both evolve in their views of, respectively, Korea and America. When Margot sees the picture of her mother with her previous family, she has an epiphany:
Margot had always thought of Koreans as workaholics, religious and pragmatic, yet at times showy and status-oriented when they had the means. But studying those relaxed faces in the photographs, those dusty shoes, Margot could see someone else, Koreans—not Korean Americans, not immigrants hardened by the realities of living in a foreign country, who like her father in Calabasas had stubbornly ‘succeeded,’ achieving a sheen of perfection while obscuring his actual complexity, an isolation from the self (243).
Her view of Koreans was myopic, limited to her exposure to her mother and her time in Koreatown. The photo reminds her that her mother came from another country, in a time and place when she could be herself.
Mina’s evolution is disturbing; her becoming what she considers a real American—becoming less Korean in the process—is complete once she has the gun: “In this country, it was easier to harm someone than to stay alive. It was easier to take a life than to have one. Was she finally an American?” (273). She is almost ready to embrace what she has always considered one of the worst aspects of America: its ease with violence and its cowboyish attitude toward vigilante justice.
Mina’s constant abandonments leave her feeling both as if she has nothing to lose and that she is unwanted: “What was the point of learning a language that brought you into the fold of a world that didn’t want you? Did this world want her? No. It didn’t like the sound of her voice” (232). The final section of the book vindicates her choice not to learn English. She sees it as a pointless concession to a society that wishes she had never joined it.
As the novel concludes, Mrs. Baek gets revenge on Mr. Kim. In that moment, she is a representation of all women who have been oppressed by men. She is an uprising of one person who is no longer willing to suffer injustice at the hands of a predator. She ends her own captivity. Her act, combined with Mina’s death, allow Margot to view her future with more hope.
In the final pages, Margot thinks, “Her mother’s death was not a knot but a temporary undoing. Her mother had been carrying the burden of so much truth, […] and now Margot knew: she, like her mother, could handle anything—even love, even family” (297). She sees that her—and her mother’s—avoidance of feelings and relationships cannot serve her well. She has learned enough about her mother’s past that she can now empathize with her. Margot knows that her mother suffered great losses, found love, and indulged a small adventurous streak with Mr. Kim. She now gives herself permission to unapologetically pursue her own desires as she moves to Los Angeles.
The novel ends as Margot calls someone who is almost certainly her grandmother. She chooses to reach out to a family member because family for its own sake is worth preserving. Even though she can’t communicate with her grandmother in Korean, she wants her to know that neither of them is alone. The phone call also ends the cycle of the family-less, heritage-less Lees that led her mother to see herself and Margot as Monsters. In the final scene, Margot identifies herself as Mina Lee’s daughter as if, in that moment, that identity is a source of pride.
