AFTER A DINNER of doenjang guk, myulchi bokkeum and kimchi as banchan, Mina, in an automatic gesture, turned on the television. As soon as the elderly faces—wrinkled and scrunched in pain beneath men’s hats covering balding heads, grandmothers in hanboks squeezing out tears from behind glasses—appeared (footage of last month’s daylong reunion, the first in three years between families separated in North and South Korea), she fled to the kitchen where she slumped down onto the laminate floor.

News of the seemingly endless negotiations between governments for these fleeting reunions—the lunch, the afternoon, when these families who had waited their whole lives, sometimes over sixty years, for each other—had this time, more than any other, driven her to the brink. She pressed her forehead and free hand against one of the cabinets as she inhaled all the years in this place, as if this apartment had been a kind of lover, who kept a roof over her head, who had no opinions but provided, despite its sorrow, a certain kind of strength. How long had it been? Over twenty years.

Time was wearing her down. She was approaching seventy years old now and could see herself in the faces of the elderly reunited, the hair around her temples whitening. She could see herself in those reunions—her vulnerability and pain—rubbing the sadness away from her already worn face.

How much could the body, how much could the heart take?

Twenty-six years ago, not long after she had first arrived in Los Angeles, she had caught a similar TV special on these painfully scarce family reunification efforts with Mr. Kim on his couch after a dinner of—what was it?—something simple like shigeumchi or baechu doenjang guk. Like the memory rising now, the crimson crept up the smooth skin of his neck, his face as tears welled in his eyes, which she had yearned to push back inside of him.

Do you ever wonder if your parents might still be there, in North Korea? Mr. Kim had asked.

No, I’ve never thought of that.

But maybe that’s why they never found you, he said.

That was the evening before the end. On the floor of her kitchen now, she sat leaning against the cabinets, eyes closed, breathing hard through her mouth, tending to images from the past: Lupe’s face on that day that she had been attacked by Mr. Park, how she sobbed in the front seat of the station wagon, the red blood running down the side of Mr. Kim’s face, the smell of iron, Mr. Kim seated in the low glow of the lamp, holding a gun—small, black, and matte.

Mina still had that gun.

She had never heard from Lupe again. She prayed that she and Mario had been reunited somehow, but no one knew. No one at the supermarket spoke of them, as if silence was a form of protection.

Mr. Park had mostly ignored her. Every now and then, she would catch him glancing at her, but he never said a word, as if she were now invisible, an inanimate object. She had no idea if he knew of her involvement in what had happened to Lupe that day, but he had been suspicious about her relationship to Mr. Kim perhaps.

She had worked at the supermarket, his supermarket, up until the very day that her water broke. That late-June morning had begun like most others with her lumbering to the bathroom, eating breakfast alone in the kitchen’s nook, and making her way through a gray malaise of smog to the bus stop. She climbed the stairs onto the bus and eased herself onto one of the seats up front. Staring out the windshield relieved her nausea.

After only an hour at the cash register, her stomach, already bulbous and uncomfortable, hardened into a fist. A sharp bright pain sparked. Her water broke as she hobbled to the back of the store. The warmth ran down her legs onto the floor. She placed a maxi pad on her underwear in the bathroom, collected her belongings for the very last time. Exiting the rear door, she waddled around the building to the front of the supermarket, where she called Mrs. Baek at the pay phone. Breathing through the pain, she waited for thirty minutes under a hard sky of sun and haze, the color of laundry water, for Mrs. Baek to drive her to the hospital downtown.

During two days of agony, mostly alone except for when Mrs. Baek could get off of work, except for the few hours when Mrs. Baek held her hand, consoling her, Mina screamed at the world that threatened every day to tear her apart. Her body was consumed in flames, like a saint’s burned at the stake. Until finally, she held her baby, red and howling, covered in white wax.

A monster.

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.

Mrs. Baek named the baby Margot, a name that she loved.

Mina had already suffered months of the other Korean women at the supermarket, observing the stretch of her stomach into a bulb. Of course, they gossiped about what kind of lewdness would lead to her pregnancy, the pregnancy of a single Korean woman in her forties. Mina had quit church as soon as she began showing, out of fear of the shame she would bring upon herself among the women there, even Mrs. Shin, whom she trusted, but couldn’t expect to understand what it would be like to come to this country as a single woman, a widow, and fall in love, despite all the best intentions, only to end up again alone.

At home, Mina cried in bed while Mrs. Baek cared for the baby. She never thought she would ever stop crying, as if she could exhaust herself to death that way. Weeks passed, and she would still burst into tears, without warning sometimes, as she waited her life out, unable to work. She had enough savings to pay for rent, groceries, formula, diapers for a few months, and Mrs. Baek and the landlady helped by preparing her meals, tending to the baby while she slept.

She couldn’t get out of bed some days. With the light outside, the blue sky, the birds she could hear in the backyard, chirping, the world seemed to move on without her, as she cried, hardly able to bathe and feed herself, let alone her baby. She contemplated leaving the baby somewhere safe and running away, but where would she turn to next?

Argentina? The San Fernando Valley? New York?

She didn’t have the energy anymore.

Yet how could she raise this baby by herself? She couldn’t rely on the kindnesses of Mrs. Baek and the landlady who had their own long hours of work, their own worries, forever.

After almost two months at home, she dropped her daughter off at the apartment of a local grandmother she would pay to take care of Margot. She worked for a year washing dishes, and then at a fast-food restaurant where she assembled chili dogs, deep-fried corn dogs—bizarre American foods. She worked and worked and worked until she could figure out what to do with her life.

But as the years passed, and the landlady died, her house sold by her children, and Mina lost her first store in the riots, and Mina and Mrs. Baek went out on their own and lost touch with each other, and her daughter’s limbs became long and loved to draw, and her face grew into questions and thoughts, Mina forgot Mr. Kim’s face.

She saw only herself in Margot, as if she could not bear to see her in her entirety, as if she was a puzzle with pieces missing forever. She refused to see the entire girl.

She had moved on that way. When she had saved enough money to buy another store, she didn’t have to worry about a babysitter when Margot was not at school. She could bring her to work. She could teach the girl to help her. At the swap meet, Margot would make friends. Margot would become a woman one day, and she would leave Mina, too. They would all leave her. Her daughter, an American, who spoke English, could hardly say anything with depth in Korean, who would go to college in Seattle. Her daughter had not forgotten about her, but Mina knew that she wanted to forget. Who wouldn’t want to forget all those years of work and pain? To her daughter, this apartment, her apartment was dirty, not suitable to her new tastes, her new life as an actual American.

Something about this country made it easy to forget that we needed each other.

The phone rang and she sprang from the kitchen floor into the living room where she gripped the receiver in her hand. It was her. Mina’s body tingled as if reanimated by Margot’s voice, which—despite its clear frustration in its struggle to mix Korean and English—tethered Mina back to this world.

“What did you eat for dinner?” Mina asked.

“Some pasta. Spaghetti,” Margot said. “What about you?”

“Doenjang guk.” For years, Mina would wake up before sunrise to make her daughter a large pot of soup or stew for the day. She couldn’t bear her daughter coming home from school and not having anything nutritious to eat, so she filled her food with as many vegetables as she could afford—zucchini, carrots, peppers, and onions. Even though her daughter craved American meals, she wanted her daughter to always think of their home as, if not the most comfortable place, a shelter in which she’d never go without food. Wasn’t that the most heartbreaking thing for any parent in the world? To know their child was hungry. Sometimes she wondered if perhaps being separated from her own mother might’ve protected them from enduring the pain of watching each other whittle away until they became nothing—bones in the dirt that would be broken by bombs, by soldiers’ boots.

But no, nothing was worse than losing each other; nothing was worse than being lost. It was as if she and her parents were both half dead and half alive—haunting each other at once. It was almost worse than death. Purgatory.

“Everything okay?” Margot asked.

“Yes, everything okay. You?”

“Busy. A lot of work,” Margot said in Korean.

“That’s good. Being busy is good.”

“How’s the store?” Margot asked.

She didn’t want her daughter to worry, her daughter who, despite her upbringing and how little Mina could provide, managed to go to college and find a nice office job. She knew that her daughter had college loans to pay, her own rent and bills. And Mina was proud of her, too. At church or at the swap meet, she bragged about her, the one that got away, concealing the wound of abandonment beneath her pride.

“Business is slow, but it’s okay,” Mina said. “I get bored a lot. Not a lot of customers these days.”

“Why don’t you learn English? Do you want me to buy you some books so that you can learn?”

“It’s too hard for me now.”

“Why don’t you try? You can learn,” Margot said in English. “You have time.”

Her daughter would never understand why she couldn’t make the time to learn a language that would never accept her—especially at her age now. What would be the point? She was in her sixties and couldn’t find a job anywhere except at a swap meet or at a restaurant in Koreatown. She didn’t know a single English language speaker except for her daughter, who only visited once per year. 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.

“Why don’t you learn Korean?” Mina asked sharply.

“I’m not bored.” Margot paused, formulating her words in Korean. “There’s no time. I don’t have a use for it.”

Mrs. Baek laughing flashed in Mina’s mind: I have music. I don’t need a boyfriend. I’m busy. I’m not bored. I’m never bored.

Would Margot ever realize that when Mina said she was bored, she was trying to say that she was lonely? Bored was a much easier word to say, wasn’t it? She was tired of fighting with her daughter to move back to LA, to come back home. And she didn’t need her daughter to lecture her. She had been through enough already. What did her daughter, American-born, know about time, about survival, about usefulness? What did she know about boredom? About loneliness?

Mina had spent so many years dedicated to her business, growing and tending the inventory like her own garden, earning pride in something she owned. But now that there were fewer customers, she had little to distract herself anymore. She couldn’t afford to replace broken or old hangers anymore. The racks and rounders had grown bare of clothes. Now only the poorest of customers remained, the ones who haggled and walked away because they could sense her desperation, her fear that she, in her age, would have to again find another way to keep the roof over her head. For their essentials, the other customers drove to big-box stores where they knew they could always get the best deals, where they might become, in some ways, finally American, where the exchange of items—money for shampoo, a new dress for a first date, cough syrup, a sweater for Grandma—might come without any emotional response, familiarity, or bond.

She had felt the slow creep of sadness overwhelm her as she realized now that all she had built could not survive. Her business had become her child, hadn’t it? What would or could she do next in this life with so little money and so little time?

“Okay, well, take care of yourself. Get some rest soon,” Mina said before hanging up the phone.

She had diverted herself with work all these years. How could she tell her daughter, who had such a limited understanding of Korean, what she had been through, why she couldn’t learn English, why she had chosen this life, how much she loved Margot, how much she was both proud of and frightened by her daughter, who was sharp and quick and strong? Her daughter had to be, of course, because of how she had been raised. They had raised each other in a way. She loved her daughter. She would do anything for her.

But she would never, ever learn English. She didn’t care. She hated the way the language sounded in her mouth, out of her lips—stilted and childlike. And when she did attempt to speak to someone on the phone, or at the DMV, she often got dirty looks or harsh, condescending responses. She didn’t need a language that wasn’t big enough for her, didn’t want to make room for her.

She had been through enough, hadn’t she? She had church. She had God. She was fine. She didn’t need anyone at all. This was her language. This was the story she told herself to survive.