Nearly a decade after publishing her literary phenomenon, Min Jin Lee has returned with a new novel that continues her exploration of the Korean diaspora. Her previous work, Pachinko, which chronicles four generations of a Korean family living in Japan, sold over two million copies in the United States and was adapted into a successful Apple TV series. Despite its eventual massive success, Lee noted that the book initially struggled to gain traction. She recalled that the hardcover edition never appeared on bestseller lists and had what she described as abysmal sales figures. It was only after The New York Times named it one of the best books of the year and it became a National Book Award finalist that the novel truly took off.
Lee's new book, American Hagwon, is the third installment in a series she calls The Diaspora Quartet. This ongoing project chronicles the migration of Koreans around the world. Lee explained that she views these stories as social novels that reflect on modern conditions. She compared the current migration patterns to historical industrial revolutions, noting that people are now moving due to environmental factors, such as a lack of water, and economic shifts, such as the disappearance of manufacturing jobs. While her focus is on Koreans because they are the people she knows best, she aims to capture a broader modern condition.
The themes of the novel are deeply personal for Lee, who immigrated to the United States in 1976 at the age of seven. Her family settled in Elmhurst, Queens, where she grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood. Her parents, who had been a marketing executive and a piano teacher in Korea, opened a newspaper stand and later a jewelry shop in New York. Lee described herself as unbearably shy as a child and noted that she did not interact well with her peers. However, she tested into a competitive public high school, where she found friends and eventually established her footing.
Her education continued at Yale University, where she discovered that the institution did not offer courses in Korean language or history. Lee viewed this gap as a rational area for improvement, given the significance of the Korean War in American history during the Cold War era. She organized a letter-writing campaign that successfully convinced the university to start a Korean Studies program. She believes this initiative helped the school and cited her mother's theory that one should always make a place better than when they found it.
During her time at Yale, Lee was also diagnosed with a serious liver condition. Doctors told her she would develop liver cancer in her twenties or thirties. This prognosis gave her a sense of courage and urgency. She decided to pursue law school and then a career at a large firm. However, the stress and long hours caused her disease to flare up, leading her to leave the profession. She reasoned that if she walked away from money, status, and power, she would find tremendous personal enrichment.
In developing American Hagwon, Lee conducted thousands of interviews with people of Korean descent. One topic dominated these conversations: education. The novel centers on hagwons, which are for-profit learning centers in South Korea where students can prepare for careers ranging from police officer to K-pop idol, or learn English. Lee noted that approximately 80 percent of Korean families send their children to these centers starting at ages four or five.
The story follows a family whose life is upended upon moving to America. The father, John Koh, attended the most elite school in Korea but ends up working in a food service job in the United States. This contrast raises questions about the true value of education. Lee explored the tension between viewing college as a path to employment versus seeing education as a form of transformation and liberation. As she worked on the book, her interest shifted toward the concept of wisdom and how one can live a wise life.
Although the novel is set in the 1990s, Lee believes the questions it poses are essential for the present day. She opens the book with the line, The rules of engagement have changed already. She argues that this is the condition of the modern person in the twenty-first century, particularly in the era of artificial intelligence. She suggests that society did not receive a memo about these changes, and now that the paradigm has shifted, individuals must figure out how to educate their children and retool themselves.
Thanks to an experimental treatment in her thirties, Lee's liver disease was cured. She now lives in Harlem with her husband and raised her son. She is already researching the fourth and final book in her Diaspora Quartet. Lee expressed her hope that readers will feel they have the internal resources to manage alarming changes and the fortitude to care for others. She emphasized that navigating this era requires relying on one another.
