Min Jin Lee Returns After Nine Years With American Hagwon, a Novel That Questions Faith in Education
Min Jin Lee, the author of Pachinko, has published her first novel in nine years. “American Hagwon,” a 656-page novel released Sept. 29, became an instant New York Times bestseller. “I don’t know how to write short novels,” Lee joked in the BookPage interview.
According to the publisher, the story begins in Seoul in 1992. The middle-class Koh family — John and Helen and their three children — loses everything after a friend’s betrayal and the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The family moves to Sydney and eventually settles in Orange County, California. The parents start over in a land where their Korean credentials mean little, while the children seize new opportunities. As the title suggests, education sits at the heart of the story.
The novel opens with a line from James Baldwin: “The paradox of education is this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which one is being educated.” Lee has said she spent ten years writing the book to understand why Koreans stake their lives on education.
In an interview with BookPage, Lee pushed back on stereotypes about Asian families and education. “Due to a terrible misunderstanding of Asian families, people tend to pathologize the focus on education as something punishing, or bad, or too stressful, or too pressure-oriented,” she said. “When I looked at these families and listened to them and observed them, that’s not what I saw.”
“Parents are spending so much money on this shadow education,” she said. “It’s a very controversial topic.”
To research the novel, Lee visited hagwons in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, Japan, Britain and four American states. What she found complicated the stereotype. For many low-income families, she said, hagwons function as childcare: vans pick children up after school, hand them juice and worksheets, and keep them safe until parents get off work. “I saw women who were cashiers, who really had no other choice,” she said. “Nobody could watch their kids after school.”
Lee also revealed her next project. “Marshall Plan,” the fourth book in the planned diaspora quartet, will follow Korean nurses, miners, artists and writers who went to Germany, as well as military spouses in the American South. She is planning a research trip to Germany.
Critics have been enthusiastic. Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Bookpage and Library Journal all gave starred reviews, and authors including Roxane Gay, Charles Yu and Colm Tóibín praised it. Readers rate it 4.9 out of 5 on Barnes & Noble.
The book lands differently across generations. For parent-generation readers, “a life staked on children’s education” is reality, and a story that shakes that faith can feel uncomfortable. For younger readers, it reads as a question of how to answer parents’ sacrifice. It is a novel that asks questions rather than giving answers.
Lee serves as New York State Author Laureate. American Hagwon is the third in her planned quartet about the Korean diaspora, following Pachinko.
Since publication, Lee has appeared on The Atlantic’s podcast and held book talks in Santa Cruz and Orange County. She appears in London on Oct. 22 and in Edinburgh on Oct. 23 — in conversation with former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon — followed by an online Rumpus Book Club session on Oct. 26.
