On the way home, she sat at the front of the bus, staring into space, transfixed, her mind numb. She wanted to go home, shower, and close her eyes. She wished she had a television to distract herself from the sadness that she felt rising within her. Had she made a mistake? Would she be able to survive the glares, the impatience of the customers? Would she be able to handle the steady flow of interaction when all she wanted to do was to be left alone, to not think or feel, with only the physical pain of work transcending to numbness like a drug?

She understood how delicious and easy it was to become an addict. A few times, she had drunk herself unconscious after her husband and daughter died. After burying them, she wanted to throw herself in that same ground. She would drink and end up with a splitting headache the next day, crawling to the bathroom and vomiting.

But she couldn’t have gone on that way. The most important thing now was to be good, to work hard, to make it to heaven, where she would be reunited with them someday. That was all that mattered now. Not even Mr. Park, his words like hands lingering too long, could stop her.

Sitting at the front of the bus, swaying with its movement, she told herself that she’d be fine. She’d get used to the registers, the cash, the people, and if not, she could always ask to move back to stocking shelves, or she could go somewhere else. She could find another job. And once she felt a bit more stable financially, she could find a lawyer that would help her stay in the country permanently. Thinking of the darkness of her days in Seoul, that apartment, the streets her husband and daughter once walked upon, she could never go back to Korea.

The place had become a graveyard.

She looked up at the bus driver, a Black woman about her age with a short bob curled inward. This woman had spent her hours within the confines of the bus, trying to do her job, navigating through traffic, yet also having to respond to the steady needs of riders on the bus, who could be either kind and friendly or harried and rude. The woman had the responsibility of driving all these people to their homes or jobs every day.

The driver glanced back at Mina.

“You doin’ all right?”

“Me?”

“You all right?”

“Yes, thank you.”

Mina wanted to say something else. But she didn’t know what or how.

Should she ask how she was doing? No, that would be awkward.

Was the bus driver concerned about her? Or had Mina been staring too long at her, making her uncomfortable?

Mina got off the bus as quickly as possible and walked less than half a block to the house. Inside, she unlocked her room where she gathered her pajamas and a towel so that she could shower, rinse the day off (all that currency, the counting, the impatient customers, Mr. Kim’s English thank you, his smile). She needed to clear her head, relax.

As she touched the knob to open her door, she overheard the landlady say, “Mrs. Baek,” down the hall toward the other renter’s room.

That was unnie’s name.

Margot

Fall 2014

ACROSS FROM HER MOTHER’S GATED-UP SHOP WAS THE children’s clothing store of her mother’s friend Alma—likely one of the last people to have seen her mother. Perhaps Alma had noticed something or someone suspicious at that time.

Margot and Miguel stepped into Alma’s booth, empty of people. Baby and children’s clothes hung from fixtures along the walls and on rounders and racks. Little superhero sweater sets for boys, and princess and pony ones for girls.

“Maybe she’s in the bathroom.” Margot exited the shop, ducking beneath a tiny white dress wrapped in plastic. Miguel followed.

“Should we wait a little?” he asked.

“Let’s open my mom’s store and see if we can find anything there. We’ll be able to see if she comes back.”

Margot’s mother worked in a swap meet called Mercado de la Raza, an old warehouse with a tin roof, high ceilings, and concrete floors filled to the brim with stores. It was located southeast of LA—a dusty landscape of dilapidated factories and fruit vendors gripping bags of oranges on street corners—where a mostly working-class Latino population flourished, carving a community for themselves among the ruins of the defense and manufacturing industries.

Locals gathered on the weekends at swap meets that bumped banda and norte?o music. Men with face and neck tattoos roamed the walkways in peace with their children. Families and churches rented a covered corner of the parking lot of the swap meet as a staging area for performances, religious gatherings, quincea?eras.

In this topography intersected by railroad tracks, where garbage and large objects (mattresses, used furniture, broken shopping carts) once destined for landfills disintegrated, Margot’s mother, Mina, and other Korean Americans made a living because of the relatively cheap rent for their stores. Even Koreatown proved too competitive and too expensive, so they found themselves adrift in South Central or Bell or Huntington Park, working long hours, sometimes seven days per week, behind counters in places that felt continentally far from both literal and figurative homes.

Margot had detested following her mother to the store on the weekends and weekdays during summer and winter breaks when she imagined children all over the world enjoying their middle-class vacations, tumbling in white sand or green grass. Instead, she had spent her days off from school in the store among plastic hangers and clothing smelling of the factories from which they came, while her mother, in her exhaustion, sometimes even yelled at customers.

Amiga! Amiga! she would holler in her Korean accent to shoppers after they had perused some of the items on the racks and walked away. That image and sound had been seared into Margot’s memory—the sight of women’s backs in departure while her mother tried to speak in their language. Amiga! Amiga! I show you something. The sadness, no, maybe the courage of the unheard. Amiga! Amiga! To women who didn’t need another friend. The pitch and tone of her mother’s voice, during some of their most desperate moments, when her mother hadn’t been sure if she could pay the rent or buy groceries, resembled that of a woman thrown overboard, treading water, calling out to other women who drifted by on rowboats.

As Margot navigated the swap meet now, the dirtiness of the surroundings settled into her. She was terrified that Miguel—someone from her middle-class life in Seattle of dishwashers, fleece, and stainless steel water bottles—would finally see this other side of her life, how she grew up. She had been ashamed for so long of her home, her mother’s work, her life. But why?

Perhaps sprawling lawns and shopping malls were one version of the American dream, but this was another. She could see that now. Maybe it was not mainstream, maybe it was not seen with any compassion or complexity on television or in the movies, because it represented all that middle-and upper-class people, including Margot, feared and therefore despised: a seemingly inescapable, cyclical poverty. But in actuality this was the American dream for which people toiled day and night. People had left their homelands to be here, to build and grow what they loved—family, friendship, community, a sense of belonging. This was their version of the dream.

Margot unlocked the rusted accordion gate with the lump of keys she had found in her mother’s purse, jerking it open enough for them to slide inside—a women’s version of Alma’s store, jam-packed with clothing. Slinky cocktail dresses, tight tops with shoulder cutouts, and conservative, embroidered blouses for older women hung on display from the walls, along with jeans that had safety-pinned signs, handmade from colored construction paper and permanent marker: sale $20.

On the dusty glass counter, a ceramic Virgin Mary, a twin to the fractured one in her mother’s living room, stood by the cash register. Its drawer was empty and open—the sad broken lip. Her mother had always left the machine ajar to ward off thieves, as if to say, Nothing here. Please go away.

Margot searched her mother’s usual hiding spot for the cash change she kept, underneath a bunch of free holiday calendars in one of her display cases for costume jewelry—rhinestone necklace and earring sets, large beaded hoops, plastic bangles—accessories that she hoped customers would buy to go with the clothing they had purchased. Margot found a roll of ones, fives, and tens rubber-banded together.

“Well, the money’s all here,” she said, standing up from behind the display case, only to see that Miguel hadn’t followed her into the shop.