American Hagwon: A Novel
American Hagwon: A Novel
by Min Jin Lee
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About the Book
The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic: a masterpiece by turns sweeping and intimate, that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty.
Min Jin Lee brings grand ambition, fierce heart, and the tenderest hope to a novel I didn’t want to end.” —Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger
In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and Mido—find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California—where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.
In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice—for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers—is a kind of prayer.
An immersive, engrossing novel … this is panorama told in brilliant detail.” —Colm Tóibín, bestselling author ofLong IslandandBrooklyn
About the Author
Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times “100 Best Books of the Century.” She serves as the New York State Author Laureate from 2025 through 2027. She is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. Lee has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. She lives in Harlem with her family.
Editorial Reviews
“After 600 pages, how could I want more? And yet I did, and that is the magic of Min Jin Lee.” —Tahmima Anam, author of Uprising
“Readers of American Hagwon will feel as though they know the vibrant and irrepressible Kohs, whose interwoven journeys invite us to reconsider and reflect on the meaning of home, labor, achievement, and belonging across generations and continents. Their challenges are great and their successes hard-earned, yet it is their deep love and ultimate acceptance of one another that makes Lee's characters unforgettable. Their story beautifully captures what it means to find both meaning and refuge in community; to be humbled at times, but never defeated; to make choices that reflect who we truly are; to find good in the unexpected. It shows us that to believe in the next generation is to possess an unquenchable hope for the future. This book is a gift for students of all ages, for those who care for and hope alongside them, and for all of us who are blessed to read and learn from Min Jin Lee.” —Nicole Chung, author of A Living Remedy and All You Can Ever Know
“Magnificent—a deep education from a master storyteller. Surfacing stirring questions about diaspora and striving and the burdens we place on the shoulders of parents and children alike, American Hagwon is among the very best novels of immigration. A work of grace and beauty that unspools one thread at a time, much like life itself.” —Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty, by America and Evicted, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“There are meticulous, beautifully crafted layers to Min Jin Lee's latest novel, American Hagwon. It is, on the surface, an engrossing story about a Korean family and their resilience as forces beyond the control alter the trajectory of their lives. But it is, at its core, a story about striving, the complexities of the hagwon system, and a cultural pressure to succeed at any cost. As Lee's story unfolds, and we get to know a sprawling cast of characters across three continents, the impressive scope and scale of this new epic reveals itself in astonishing ways. She brings grand ambition, fierce heart, and the tenderest hope to a novel I didn't want to end.” —Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist
“Min Jin Lee’s intimate epic of family, sacrifice, and fortune creates a world that will become as real to you as your own. It’s about education and the rice-cooker pressure families face when opportunities run scarce. It’s about capitalism, globalization, and human disposability. It’s about family and the strange forms love takes when the abyss of insecurity nears. It’s about immigrant pain and the truth beneath facile narratives of uplift. In our age of affordability crises, immigration rages, downward mobility, and anxiety about our children’s inheritance, there couldn’t be a more relevant novel—nor one that so movingly captures what it feels like to be a person today and to struggle.” —Anand Giridharadas, author of Man in the Mirror and Winners Take All
“Min Jin Lee has written another masterpiece. American Hagwon is, at once, an intimate story that spans three continents of the Koh family’s love, loss, and disappointments. It is also a story of how the ongoing demand for success can distort how we live and love. In this sense, the novel relentlessly criticizes a world defined by material gain, consumption, and status. The Koh family finds itself caught up in the whirlwind of it all. Despite the devastation wrought by the burden of achievement, faith and a gentle and unshakable love remain. Something we all need to remember and feel in these dark days.” —Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of America, U.S.A.
“Readers of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko won’t be disappointed by the compulsively readable American Hagwon. American Hagwon follows the lives of the Koh family from Korea, Australia, and America, with the breadth and urgency of a saga and the intimacy of a short story. Lee explores essential questions such as the role of education, the nature of love, and the conditions of immigrant life, but to appreciate American Hagwon by its themes alone is to limit what it really is. It is, ultimately, a fully realized vision of compassion, passion, and wisdom.” —Krys Lee, author of Drifting House and How I Became a North Korean
“American Hagwon is a stunning novel, following three generations of families of the Korean diaspora across four continents. Lee's explorations of education, class and gender are finely wrought as each character must find his or her sense of purpose—and anchor that purpose in love as well as labor—notwithstanding the cruelties of economic crises and the disorientations of displacement. Bound together by faith, tradition, and origin, the moral universe of the novel’s characters is brilliant with Lee's ever present ethical clarity and deep sensitivity. Yearning and forbearance, grace and devastation, course through these pages, in a story that is both epic and intimate. Yet again, Lee has written a novel that both speaks to the world and illuminates Korean history and culture. Indeed, she makes clear that it is a history we all would do well to learn and heed.” —Imani Perry, author of Black In Blues and South to America, winner of the National Book Award