Marina Lee

Marina Lee was born around Seoul, South Korea, and moved to Philadelphia when she was four years old with her parents and two older brothers. Her memories of Korea are centered around the unconditional love of her parents, as well as her mother’s legendary cooking, which drew the attention of neighbors who’d “invite” themselves over to Marina’s home for a taste of what her mother had prepared. Every week, it seemed, her family would inevitably host a dinner party for her parents’ friends and families. From dinner parties to rituals of making kimchi with her mother (and other ahjummas), Marina tells us that she holds not a single negative memory of life before moving to the United States.

When Marina was four-years old, her father, an accountant for the US Army, was offered the chance to relocate his family to Philadelphia following the surprise recovery of a sum of money. In the midst of adjusting to immigrant life in her town—where she was the only person of color in her Kindergarten class—Marina began noticing the slow and confusing deterioration of her mother’s mental health: the self-talk, the changing nature of food on the table, and the growing emotional distance in the household. Yet in the face of a new country, where assimilation rhetoric and stigma surrounding mental health prohibited open discussion, Marina was left at a loss for how she could nurse her mother back to health, freeing her from an illness which trapped her in her own mind.

When she was a teenager, she recounts how, in a rare moment of lucidity, her mother apologized to her for her condition, cementing Marina’s conviction to continue fighting for her mother. After graduating from college, she took it upon herself to learn as much as she could about her mother’s schizophrenia, whereupon she learned through other physical screenings that her mother was afflicted by several other health issues as well. Although she was able to provide treatment for her mother which improved her mental health, her mother would pass at the young age of 65.

Today, with a daughter of her own, Marina admits that she is “overly communicative,” though she urges families—particularly those from different cultural backgrounds—to have open conversations about mental health and wellbeing. Her advice for her daughter? “Don’t take life so seriously, have some fun, have a lot of fun, because you only have one.”