American Hagwon
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
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
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Min Jin Lee, author of the acclaimed 2017 novel Pachinko, returns with an engrossing family saga that’s well worth the wait. Helen and John Koh are living happily within their means with their three children in Seoul when the dominoes begin to fall. John’s boss and oldest friend—a man mired in a toxic workplace affair—pushes John to make a serious mistake. The fallout sends the family first to Australia and eventually to California, where they must start over with almost nothing. Over the course of an expertly told narrative spanning 15 years, Lee casts a critical eye on the intense, almost religious focus the family places on education in the hope of giving their children a better life. As each character’s story unfurls and that promise is tested, she forces us to contemplate what a “better life” even means. American Hagwon is a captivating exploration of family and ambition in a rapidly changing world.
