Min Jin Lee's new novel, American Hagwon, has been nearly 10 years in the making; if it had taken 20, I'd still wonder how she held all these stories, these lives, such pain and love in her imagination for the time it took to find the words to embody them on the page.
The novel is the third in her projected four-novel series about the Korean diaspora. Pachinko, the second in the series, was a finalist for the National Book Award.
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.
The Koh family is at the center of this teeming narrative, which spans the years 1992 to 2007. When we meet them, John and Helen Koh have just returned to Seoul, South Korea, from six years in Sydney, Australia, where John, a senior manager for a Korean conglomerate, had been stationed.
Before Australia, the Kohs were in the U.S. — all three of their now adolescent children, Bo, DH and Mido, were born in Paramus, N.J. But, given, their on-the-move family life, Korea doesn't feel exactly like home anymore and 13-year-old daughter Mido, the shy youngest child, is having an especially hard time in school.
Korea, however, will turn out to be yet another temporary post, thanks to a cowardly betrayal by John's oldest friend and superior at his company. Taehun Shin, we're told, was a man who "was clear in his professional goals and muddy in his private life."
Shin, a married man and exuberant cheater, has become besotted with a beautiful, sexually adventurous young employee named Danbi. Because Danbi is pressuring him to leave his wife, Shin orders John to set up Danbi to fail at the company and then fire her. John, a man of integrity, objects, but finally must obey his best friend's orders. That's when Danbi, a femme fatale to the max, turns the tables and sets John up, for a fall.
The novel soon jumps to 1997, when the Asian financial crisis wreaks more havoc. Most of the Koh family, along with a multitude of other fully-realized characters, wind up in Southern California. Even Shin and Donbi eventually land there.
A network of family, as well as friends from school and the Korean church, help prevent the newcomers from going under, although the Kohs must settle for less. John finds work in the kitchen at Shrimp Castle, a fish place in a Korean shopping mall. By the end of a long day, "[h]is hair was matted down with sweat and oil beneath the net" and his "crisp white apron from the morning was spotted with oil and soapy disinfectant."
Almost everyone else we meet works themselves to the bone. Late in the novel, our omniscient narrator surprisingly introduces another key character: Shin's estranged wife, Mary, who works in a florist's shop in New Jersey. Mary pointedly reflects that: "Over the years, at her church, poor men and women her age had died of different cancers, and sometimes Mary wondered if hard work alone could kill people."
The Koh offspring, in whom all hopes for a better future reside, also work: All three of them, at one time or another, are employed by a hagwon, an after-school private prep academy. Most hagwons — in Korea and here in America — prepare their students to excel academically and, preferably, go on to Ivy League schools; but the hagwon the Koh kids work at is run by an idealistic Korean American nicknamed Lion who thinks differently. The bittersweet set piece toward the end of this novel, where Lion addresses a gymnasium packed with some 500 parents, all ethnically Korean, and tells them education should be transformative, not just transactional, is so powerful it should read by anyone called upon to defend a liberal arts education.
Lee's style throughout American Hagwon is striking in that it counters the old "show, don't tell" writing adage: Instead, there's plenty of exposition in this novel and, yet, not a page is workmanlike. In fact, 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.
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