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.
She rummaged inside her purse for the photograph that she had always kept with her, one of her, her husband and daughter, both now dead. Hands shaking, she rubbed the edges of his face with her thumb and then the face of her daughter, soft and serene after a day of hiking in the woods. She wanted to kiss the photograph. She thought of the last time she had seen her daughter, and how she had scolded her, for nothing, something so stupid—dropping a dish and chipping it on the ground.
Had she known that would be their final moment together, would she have yelled? No, she would’ve held her. She would’ve kissed her. She would’ve confessed that she was terrified of everything her daughter did, things breaking, objects in disarray, because she could not afford to lose another thing that she loved in her life. She didn’t have the strength to rebuild herself.
Then it happened. She lost everything again.
“Here we are.”
She had been crying. In the rearview mirror, the driver frowned, furrowing his brow.
He carried her suitcases up the concrete driveway, which sloped gently toward the entrance of the home. The house appeared broken, too, with cracks along the beige stucco, windows held together with tape. Orange and lemon trees and weeds grew wildly. Shingles peeled away from the roof or lay askew. She placed the photograph in her purse and wiped the tears away from her face, carefully, before knocking on the door.
The driver stood beside her, waiting to make sure someone answered. She felt self-conscious standing with this man, not knowing exactly how to thank him, because his silence, his wordlessness, calmed her nerves. She knocked again. The door opened to reveal a woman in her fifties with a short brown bob, gray at the roots. She bowed her head and greeted Mina in Korean.
“Mrs. Lee?”
“Yes.” Mina turned to the driver. “Thank you. How . . . much?”
“Oh, that’s okay. Next time.” He handed her a business card. “You can pay me next time.”
“No, no.” She reached into her purse.
He lowered the bags inside the house and walked away, but at the bottom of the driveway he stopped and said, “Good luck. You’re going to be okay.”
She waved in response, speechless.
“Here, let me take your bags,” the woman said. “You must be tired.”
“No, I’ve got it.”
They each took one of the heavy suitcases deeper inside the home, dark and cool like a cave. A single fan rotated in the corner, kicking up the curtains with its draft. The house had dirty walls, no artwork except some portraits of Jesus and a ceramic sculpture of Mary.
“Let me show you your room.”
MINA LAY IN HER TWIN-SIZE BED, EAGER TO BE DOING something—shopping for food, finding work, calling Mrs. Shin—anything. But she didn’t have a telephone in her room yet. And the sprawling map of Los Angeles that she had brought, geared toward tourists, confused her—major attractions, such as the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Beverly Hills, and Disneyland, strung together by miles and miles of freeway. She stared at the cottage cheese ceiling, immobilized by the dread of having to decide on what to do next. There seemed to be too much information to learn.
She closed her eyes, taking deep breaths. She didn’t want to panic, to feel anything. She was tired of feeling.
She asked God to help her, to tell her what to do.