American Hagwon

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

Min Jin Lee is a recipient of fiction fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard. Her second novel Pachinko (2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017. A New York Times Bestseller, Pachinko was also a Top 10 Books of the Year for BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the New York Public Library. Pachinko was a selection for “Now Read This,” the joint book club of PBS NewsHour and The New York Times. It was on over 75 best books of the year lists, including NPR, PBS, and CNN. Pachinko will be translated into 25 languages. Lee’s debut novel Free Food for Millionaires (2007) was a Top 10 Books of the Year for The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air, USA Today, and a national bestseller. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, NPR’s Selected Shorts, One Story, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Conde Nast Traveler, The Times of London, and Wall Street Journal. She served three consecutive seasons as a Morning Forum columnist of the Chosun Ilbo of South Korea. In 2018, Lee was named as an Adweek Creative 100 for being one of the “10 Writers and Editors Who are Changing the National Conversation” and a Frederick Douglass 200. She received an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Monmouth College. She will be a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College from 2019-2022.

“Some books are very worthy but held at arm’s length. This one demands to be pressed into friends’ hands.”―New York Times Book Review

“A simultaneously sweeping-but-intimate novel about the complexities of immigration, the fragile promise of America and the purpose of education, American Hagwon is also a classic page-turner populated by characters who are hard to leave behind at the end of 600-plus pages. It's an overwhelming reading experience, one that appeals to the head as well as the heart…Lee is so deft that she conjures epiphanies out of the simplest material. I wish I could read to you the very last sentence of American Hagwon to demonstrate her mastery, but, instead, I'll just say that the simple possessive pronoun "his" unexpectedly appears in that sentence and its effect is spiritually redemptive and emotionally shattering. What a novel.”―Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, NPR

“Well worth the wait…With an exacting pen, Lee creates an automaton of intricate detail, where each character plays a vital role in staking out a path in a world marred by globalization, socioeconomic upheaval, and competition.”―Boston Globe

“The publication of American Hagwon…doesn’t disappoint. It is imbued with the elegance, empathy and erudition that have become Lee’s hallmarks…I will be thinking about this deeply affecting novel for a long time to come.”―Observer (UK)

“After 600 pages, how could I want more? And yet I did, and that is the magic of Min Jin Lee.”―Tahmima Anam, author of Uprising

“Readers of American Hagwon will feel as though they know the vibrant and irrepressible Kohs, whose interwoven journeys invite us to reconsider and reflect on the meaning of home, labor, achievement, and belonging across generations and continents. Their challenges are great and their successes hard-earned, yet it is their deep love and ultimate acceptance of one another that makes Lee's characters unforgettable. Their story beautifully captures what it means to find both meaning and refuge in community; to be humbled at times, but never defeated; to make choices that reflect who we truly are; to find good in the unexpected. It shows us that to believe in the next generation is to possess an unquenchable hope for the future. This book is a gift for students of all ages, for those who care for and hope alongside them, and for all of us who are blessed to read and learn from Min Jin Lee.”―Nicole Chung, author of A Living Remedy and All You Can Ever Know

“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’s intimate epic of family, sacrifice, and fortune creates a world that will become as real to you as your own. It’s about education and the rice-cooker pressure families face when opportunities run scarce. It’s about capitalism, globalization, and human disposability. It’s about family and the strange forms love takes when the abyss of insecurity nears. It’s about immigrant pain and the truth beneath facile narratives of uplift. In our age of affordability crises, immigration rages, downward mobility, and anxiety about our children’s inheritance, there couldn’t be a more relevant novel―nor one that so movingly captures what it feels like to be a person today and to struggle.”―Anand Giridharadas, author of Man in the Mirror and Winners Take All

“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.

“Readers of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko won’t be disappointed by the compulsively readable American Hagwon. American Hagwon follows the lives of the Koh family from Korea, Australia, and America, with the breadth and urgency of a saga and the intimacy of a short story. Lee explores essential questions such as the role of education, the nature of love, and the conditions of immigrant life, but to appreciate American Hagwon by its themes alone is to limit what it really is. It is, ultimately, a fully realized vision of compassion, passion, and wisdom.”―Krys Lee, author of Drifting House and How I Became a North Korean