American Hagwon
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 29 sept 2026
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- USD 15.99
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- Pedido anticipado
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- USD 15.99
Descripción editorial
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lee returns nine years after Pachinko with an illuminating saga of ambition, education, and familial duty. In 1992 Seoul, John Koh loses his job at a prestigious trading firm after a woman he fired at the behest of his boss wrongly accuses him of attempted rape. He finagles a new post in Sydney with the same firm but for lower pay, and his wife, Helen, works in retail to help keep up with tuition costs for their younger son, DH, at Yale and their daughter, Mido, at the University of Sydney. Meanwhile, their older son, Bo, has become a tutor in California at a hagwon after-school academy for students with their sights set on top high schools and colleges. After the Asian financial crisis hits in 1997, eliminating John's and Helen's jobs, they start over in California, where they take menial jobs and Mido, pausing her education, joins Bo at the hagwon. Hardworking and sharp Mido helps the hagwon expand, but she's dismayed by her students' single-minded focus on achievement over learning. Lee's exposition-heavy style feels a bit flat compared to her previous novel, but she writes with precision and keen insights into her characters' obsession with education and the cost of their sacrifices. Patient readers will find much to ponder.
