The first hint that I needn’t be so anxious to interview Min Jin Lee came as the bestselling author descended the creaky stairs of her five-story Harlem townhouse and pronounced my name.
asserted
author → interview → name
Not in the way my brain has articulated it for decades, smoothed over by an anglicized version that made it easy for teachers to call out from an attendance roll.
asserted
teachers → articulate → roll
Which is to say, Lee, on a Friday afternoon in August, pronounced my name the way the people who brought me into this world had intended.
asserted
who → say → world
The next came when Lee, smartly dressed in a gray vest and jeans, with a pair of delicate drop earrings, doled out lively profanities.
asserted
Lee → come → profanities
She was recalling her time attending Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the landmark case that would later reach the Supreme Court and dismantle race-based affirmative action, as part of her nearly decade-long research process for American Hagwon, the much-anticipated third installment of a planned quartet dedicated to Korean diasporas.
asserted
that → recall → diasporas
As a supporter of affirmative action, she witnessed testimony teeming with stereotypical portrayals of Asian American students, including, as Lee puts it, making them out to be like “machines.”
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them → witness → machines
“I sat there in the press box, and I remember thinking, this whole idea that Asian Americans have shitty personalities—that’s really shitty.
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that → sit → personalities
It’s a really shitty thing to say.”
asserted
It → ’ → ?
“Also, we’re talking about children,” she continued, her voice intensifying.
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voice → talk → children
“How dare you insult the children of my community?”
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you → insult → community
To hear Lee condemn the racial stereotyping of Asian Americans, including the “stupid, horrible racial epithet called ‘tiger parenting,’” with such blunt rigor, in a living room sumptuously bedecked with books, was deeply satisfying.
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Lee → hear → books
My own fondness for profanity, my Korean-born mother used to warn, was a sign “of an uneducated person.
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mother → bear → person
“I think your mom was right,” Lee said, warmly laughing as I shared the memory with her.
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I → think → her
American Hagwon is Lee’s third novel and follows Pachinko, the vast 2017 saga that traces four generations of a Korean family as they weather war, discrimination, and cruelty in Japanese-occupied Korea and in Japan.
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they → follow → Japan
A finalist for the National Book Award, Pachinko established Lee as a master of sweeping historical narrative.
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Pachinko → establish → narrative
American Hagwon, on the other hand, takes place in more contemporary times, with Lee’s aperture shifting between a multigenerational family drama and broader meditations on the human costs of heedless ambition.
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aperture → take → ambition
“I asked myself, if I had one more book to write, I wanted to write about what’s most important to Koreans around the world, and it was so clear to me that it was education,” Lee said.
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Lee → ask → me
“It’s not money.
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It → ’ → ?
It’s not religion.
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It → ’ → ?
It’s not status.
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It → ’ → ?
It’s actually education.
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It → ’ → ?
This kind of faith in it, even if you hated it.
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you → hat → it
As its title telegraphs, the Korean for-profit tutoring academies known as hagwons provide a central motif in Lee’s latest novel.
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academies → telegraph → novel
Hagwons typically offer classes from elementary school all the way through high school, but it is the courses aimed at boosting test scores for college entrance exams that they are best known for.
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they → offer → that
(If you’re imagining a Korean equivalent to a Kaplan prep, think bigger; in South Korea, hagwons are a multibillion-dollar industry that one of the country’s leading English-language newspapers once described as “thriving on anxiety.”)
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one → imagine → anxiety
To outsiders, they can conform to a long-standing stereotype of Asian students: relentlessly driven, much to their own personal misery, with cutthroat parents digging into their bank accounts to further their children’s competitive advantage.
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parents → conform → advantage
The criticism hagwons attract can be well earned; as I once experienced, fierce competition, at times bordering on toxic, is often central to the hagwon mentality.
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competition → attract → mentality
But for Lee, sensationalistic portrayals of them risk reinforcing simplistic racist tropes.
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portrayals → risk → tropes
For kids in the United States, hagwons are also often places of community, one of the few spaces, in a white world, to connect with other kids of Korean descent.
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hagwons → connect → descent
They can also function as de facto daycare centers, she said, where parents can have their kids picked up from school, safely driven to the hagwon, and “given a juice box, pretzel rod, and worksheets” instead of having a child “stay at home and have a shelf fall on them.”
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shelf → function → them
In a country lacking adequate childcare, Lee sees hagwons as “an ethnic solution to a state problem.”
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Lee → lack → problem
American Hagwon arrives amid a wider reckoning over the value of a top-tier education, particularly in the United States, as the yearly total cost of some colleges surpasses $100,000 and AI threatens the very foundations of what it means to hold knowledge.
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it → arrive → knowledge
There’s an “anxiety that the modern person feels right now,” Lee said, referring to the existential questions born out of AI.
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Lee → ’ → AI
A similar anxiety courses through American Hagwon, as multiple families of Korean ethnicity, compelled as so many émigrés are by the desire to secure better futures for their children, are upended by unexpected outside forces, including the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
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émigrés → course → crisis
When we first encounter the novel’s central family, the Kohs, John and Helen appear to be typical middle-class parents who had just moved to Seoul from Sydney, Australia, dutifully attentive to their three children’s education, while John toils away as a manager at a large corporation.
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John → encounter → corporation
But when he endures a devastating betrayal, both professionally and personally, it forces the family to emigrate, eventually landing in Southern California.
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it → endure → California
Throughout the sacrifices that follow—John takes up a physically demanding job at a fish-fry restaurant; Mido, the youngest and only daughter, pauses her college education and works at an American hagwon to support her family, including her brothers’ education—the thread of familial devotion grows only stronger.
asserted
thread → follow → devotion
It is through this lens of empathy, paired with prolific research, that Lee shows us how hagwons reflect the deep-rooted desires of a culture fixated on upward mobility and one that has long identified education as the ticket to a vertical trajectory.
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that → pair → trajectory
As one mother in American Hagwon notes: “The cost doesn’t matter.
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cost → note → Hagwon
We all know you have to pay up for the best coaching.”
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you → know → coaching
…and 33 more, not listed.
The Aporia
