Review of THE LAST STORY OF MINA LEE by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

 2.5 Stars

I was underwhelmed by this book.

Margot returns to Koreatown in Los Angeles and finds her mother Mina dead in her small apartment.  The police rule Mina’s death as an accident, but Margot thinks someone might have killed her.  She starts asking questions and digging through Mina’s past and discovers a mother she barely knew.

The book alternates between Mina and Margot’s perspective.  Margot’s story is set in 2014, beginning with her drive from Seattle to Los Angeles; Mina’s story begins almost 30 years earlier with her arrival in the United States. 

Mina’s sections are very interesting.  We learn about her being raised in an orphanage after being separated from her parents while fleeing North Korea during the war, about her losing her husband and daughter in an accident, about her challenges as an undocumented immigrant, and about becoming a single mother after a brief romance.  I kept wishing Mina’s story would be more fully detailed. 

Margot’s sections fall flat.  She herself is a flat character.  For a 26-year-old, she seems very immature.  She does not know her mother or appreciate her at all.  She supposedly has artistic aspirations but she lacks passion.  Then, for someone who has expressed no interest in anything Korean or her mother’s story, she suddenly becomes an expert on the Korean immigrant experience!

As a personal immigration narrative, this book does work to some extent, though more focus on Mina would have strengthened it.  As a mystery, the book doesn’t work because the police are portrayed as inept and Margot is able to uncover the truth only because of implausible coincidences.  As a mother-daughter drama, this book also does not work because we are only told about the difficult relationship between Mina and Margot; we are not shown their difficulties so there is a lack of depth.  The Last Story of Mina Lee is certainly not a Korean immigrant version of The Joy Luck Club which excels at showing the complex relationships between immigrant mothers and their daughters.

I enjoy reading books which will help me learn about other cultures.  Unfortunately, this novel seems to focus only on Korean food.  The names of dishes are always given, every time someone sits down to eat, but to a non-Korean these mean nothing.  The constant reference to food just becomes tedious. 

The novel’s tone also becomes didactic.  Here’s just one example of Margot’s pontificating about the exploitation of immigrants; she argues that the U.S. repeats a lie to live with itself:  “that fairness would prevail; that the laws protected everyone equally; that this land wasn’t stolen from Native peoples; that this wealth wasn’t built by Black people who were enslaved but by industrious white men, ‘our’ founders; that hardworking immigrants proved this was a meritocracy; that history should only be told from one point of view, that of those who won and still have power.”  Rather than explicitly stating its theme, good literary fiction develops its theme.

I listened to this novel as an audiobook and that also tainted my enjoyment.  I appreciated Greta Jung’s Korean pronunciation, but otherwise her voice often set my teeth on edge.  The voice used for Mrs. Baek in particular doesn’t fit what she is saying:  she always sounds whiny and displeased, even when her words suggest otherwise.

This book does not do justice to the experience of Korean immigrants.