American Hagwon

By: Min Jin Lee

At last, the National Book Award finalist and NYT bestselling author of Pachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic: Min Jin Lee has written a masterpiece by turns sweeping and intimate, one that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty.

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.

Critic reviews

“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 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.

“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