Min Jin Lee turns to the high stakes of education in American Hagwon
The Korean-American novelist’s new family epic follows a journey from Seoul through Sydney to California, examining ambition, upheaval and the price of achievement.
Min Jin Lee’s third novel, American Hagwon, centres on a Korean family navigating change across Seoul, Sydney and California around the 1997 Asian financial crisis. In an interview with The Guardian, Lee describes the book as a story of education, power and ambition, and of the costs that can come with striving for success.
Its title refers to the private cram schools ubiquitous in South Korea. Lee says she wants readers to understand the weight the word carries in Korean life. The novel also examines the sacrifices behind the “tiger mom” stereotype and inequities in elite education.
Lee calls the book part of a “Korean quartet”, revising her earlier description of her novels as a trilogy. Her previous novel, Pachinko, was published in 2017 and has reportedly sold more than five million copies worldwide. It was adapted for Apple TV in 2022.
Lee left corporate law in 1995 after doctors warned that her hepatitis B diagnosis put her at high risk of liver cancer. She says the prognosis helped prompt her to write. She now credits experimental drugs with improving her health and says she is planning further work.
That work includes Marshall Plan, a planned novel about Koreans sent to West Germany as miners and nurses under a 1963 bilateral agreement. Lee’s fiction has repeatedly followed Korean diaspora through social and economic upheaval; American Hagwon brings that focus to family, schooling and the pursuit of advancement.
