“I don’t know how to write short novels,” admits Min Jin Lee.
Her first two books—2007’s Free Food for Millionaires and 2017’s Pachinko—were both about 500 pages. Her third, American Hagwon, is well over 600. “I just want to die most of the time when I’m writing them,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Why would you do this to yourself? You could have been a lawyer, you big dummy!’ ”
American Hagwon has a wide scope, though not quite as sweeping as the four-generation span of Pachinko. Set during the 1990s and 2000s, it’s a stunning, sometimes shocking domestic drama about a middle-class family, the Kohs. There’s Helen, the conscientious mother who manages the family’s finances and works in retail. Her introverted husband, John, is a middle manager at a corporate trading company. Their oldest son, Bo, is the most academically gifted, while his younger brother, DH, is a soccer star, and their shy little sister, Mido, struggles to make friends.
After living in New Jersey and Sydney, the family moves back to Seoul, South Korea, for John’s job in 1992, but the kids face unexpected challenges in their new school system. “The way they teach math here would decimate most children in America,” one of their teachers warns. Already strapped for cash due to a higher cost of living in their new neighborhood, but determined to improve her children’s odds for success, Helen makes the difficult decision to enroll all three Koh siblings in a for-profit tutoring program—what’s known as a hagwon in Korea.
During her research for American Hagwon, Lee visited hagwons in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, Japan, the U.K., Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia and California. What she found didn’t match up with oft-repeated stereotypes about academic rigor in Asian households.
“Due to a terrible misunderstanding of Asian families, people tend to pathologize the focus on education as something punishing, or bad, or too stressful, or too pressure-oriented,” Lee says. “When I looked at these families and listened to them and observed them, that’s not what I saw.”
“Parents are spending so much money on this shadow education. It’s a very controversial topic.”
First of all, hagwons aren’t just for grade-schoolers. “If you want to become a police officer, you can go to a civil service exam hagwon. If you want to become a K-pop idol, you can go to a K-pop idol hagwon.” The expense can be steep, however.
“I interviewed Korean economists for this book, and they would say things like, ‘Hagwons are destroying the fabric of Korea’ because parents are spending so much money on this shadow education,” Lee says. “And when you look at the economic model, I can see why they’re against it. The average Korean household only makes $3,800 a month, and then they spend $400 a month sending their 4-year-old to a hagwon to learn English. Apparently, the elderly savings rate in Korea is very low because parents have spent all this money on hagwons. It’s a very controversial topic.”
Yet around the world, Lee observed that for many low-income families, hagwons also functioned as child care. “I saw women who were cashiers, who really had no other choice: Nobody could watch their kids after school, but the hagwon would pick their kids up from public school in a van, take them to the hagwon center, give them a box of juice, some pretzels and some worksheets. And they weren’t getting in trouble or getting in accidents.”
When Helen and John’s jobs are cut during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the family moves again to Orange County, California, where their children wind up getting jobs at another hagwon. Korea’s financial collapse of 1997 caused a generational shock even more sudden and disruptive than the Great Recession a decade later. “People lost their education, they lost their families, they lost their jobs, and some of them never found their foothold again,” Lee says. While wealthier families bought up distressed assets and came out better than ever, many middle-class families were forced into diaspora, like the Kohs.
“I lock myself up for a couple weeks and bang my head against the page. I write whole drafts and then I chuck them.”
Growing up in Seoul before moving to Queens, New York, when she was 7, Lee didn’t attend hagwons herself as a student, but private tutoring has been a big part of her life. She took an SAT prep course with The Princeton Review in high school, then taught a class for the company when she was in college. After getting her J.D. from Georgetown in 1993, she worked as a corporate lawyer in New York until 1995, when she quit to become a full-time writer. Over the next 20 years, she privately mentored dozens of students for free, including helping high school seniors craft their college application essays.
Lee wrote the first drafts of American Hagwon in hotels, drawing on years of research. “I lock myself up for a couple weeks and bang my head against the page until the words . . . fall out,” she says. “I write whole drafts and then I chuck them.” The final version was mostly written in the fourth-floor library of her Queen Anne row house in Central Harlem, where she’s lived with her husband since 2012. “It’s really gorgeous here, especially if you look up. Harlem doesn’t get enough attention for its architecture, and it feels magical to walk in the same streets as the writers from the Harlem Renaissance. They made a huge impact on me as a young person.” The first section of American Hagwon opens with a quote from James Baldwin, who grew up in Harlem: “The paradox of education is this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which one is being educated.”
Lee keeps three desks at home: one with a computer wired for email, one with no computer at all and one with multiple monitors for research and Scrivener, the writing software she credits with helping her keep track of so many characters, places and times. “Most people I know who are writing academic books use Scrivener, but I do as a fiction writer because I take such a long time, and my momentum is broken endlessly,” she says. “In Microsoft Word, you have to scroll all the way from beginning to end. With Scrivener, if you’re on page 150 and you want to see what you wrote on page 70, you can just click the chapter on the left-hand side of your screen.”
“I test every single thing I write in a novel, and I do it because I need you to trust me.”
Even more than most novels set in the past, American Hagwon is hyperspecific about time and place, right down to the month. “Time is always a really important choice for fiction writing,” Lee says. “If you’re a parent, July is different from September. Since I write social novels that are rooted in reality, and my characters’ primary concern is children, the school year is really important.”
Lee wields her omniscience as a narrator to peek inside the mind of nearly every character the Koh family encounters. “Every single character is made up, but they need to be believable to the experience of the reader,” she says. While visiting hagwons, Lee immersed herself in the idiosyncrasies within Korean diaspora communities, including how families moved from cities like Los Angeles to suburbs like Orange County. “As a New Yorker, it was very eye-opening to me to see that they’re almost like two different countries.”
For Lee, these details aren’t just decorative, they’re part of the contract between a writer and a reader. “When I trust an author, I’m calm,” she says. “I test every single thing I write in a novel, and I do it because I need you to trust me.”
Originally, American Hagwon was going to be the final book in a thematic trilogy about the Korean diaspora, alongside Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko. But now, she’s decided to make it the third novel in a planned quartet. “I didn’t know how my health was going to be because I had liver disease for a long time. But I was tested recently, and now I’m really well, so I decided that I want to write another novel,” Lee says. “It’s called Marshall Plan, which is an organizing metaphor for this idea of reparations and rebuilding of a devastated place. It’s about the Korean nurses, miners, artists and writers who went to Germany, as well as military spouses in the American South. It’s about all the different diasporic Koreans that sent their money and their culture back to spark the growth of modern Korea.”
She’s already begun working on Marshall Plan from home, but to get the details right—to make sure it’s as immersive and spellbinding as American Hagwon and the rest of her quartet—she’s planning a research trip to Germany. “I’ve started my interviews and readings,” she says. “But I need to go see these places.”
Read our starred review of American Hagwon.
Photo of Min Jin Lee by Hae Ran of Channel Yes.
