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‘아메리칸 학원’ 논쟁…이민진 신작에 엇갈린 평가
10월 28, 2026
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포린폴리시 등 “이민자 희생·교육열 지나치게 단순화” 비판
NPR은 극찬…한국계 이민자 묘사 놓고 미국 문단 평가 갈려
By 박영주 | news@onglfree.com | 온글픽
OCT 28 2026.
2026년 11월 8일 일요일
* 이민진 ‘아메리칸 학원’ 미국 서평 논쟁…‘파친코’ 작가 신작 평가 엇갈려 - 시카고오늘
이민진 ‘아메리칸 학원’ 미국 서평 논쟁…‘파친코’ 작가 신작 평가 엇갈려 - 시카고오늘|온글픽
NewsTop StoriesTown Stories
‘아메리칸 학원’ 논쟁…이민진 신작에 엇갈린 평가
10월 28, 2026
시카고오늘
포린폴리시 등 “이민자 희생·교육열 지나치게 단순화” 비판
NPR은 극찬…한국계 이민자 묘사 놓고 미국 문단 평가 갈려
By 박영주 | news@onglfree.com | 온글픽
OCT 28 2026.
NewsTop StoriesTown Stories
‘아메리칸 학원’ 논쟁…이민진 신작에 엇갈린 평가
10월 28, 2026
시카고오늘
포린폴리시 등 “이민자 희생·교육열 지나치게 단순화” 비판
NPR은 극찬…한국계 이민자 묘사 놓고 미국 문단 평가 갈려
By 박영주 | news@onglfree.com | 온글픽
OCT 28 2026.
우리는 제대로 교육 받았나…한인들이 읽어야 할 '아메리칸 학원' - 애틀랜타 중앙일보
[인터뷰] 우리는 제대로 교육 받았나…한인들이 읽어야 할 '아메리칸 학원' - 애틀랜타 중앙일보
[인터뷰] 우리는 제대로 교육 받았나…한인들이 읽어야 할 ‘아메리칸 학원’
[인터뷰] 우리는 제대로 교육 받았나…한인들이 읽어야 할 ‘아메리칸 학원’
이민진 작가, '좋은 교육' 실마리 찾아 한국·미국·호주 학원가 탐사
“학원은 컨트리 클럽 같은 청소년의 제3의 공간…
한국과 미국, 두 극단 사이 교육의 중도 찾아야”
한국계 소설가 이민진(58)이 ‘파친코’ 이후 9년 만에 새 소설 ‘아메리칸 학원'(원제 American Hagwon)으로 돌아왔다. 한국인이라면 누구도 자유로울 수 없는 ‘사교육’을 디아스포라 연작의 세 번째 주제로 꺼내 든 이 작가는 앞선 두 편의 소설에서 그랬듯 변호사 출신 다운 철저한 증거 주의에 입각한 사전 조사를 바탕으로 650여페이지(영문판 기준)에 달하는 장대한 서사를 펼쳐냈다.
이야기는 1990년대 초반 서울 평범한 중산층 가족의 삶을 다룬다. 1997년 IMF 외환위기 이후 고씨 가족은 뜻하지 않게 이민 길에 오른다. 부부는 서울, 시드니, 캘리포니아를 옮겨 다니며 세 남매를 제대로 교육시키기 위해 모든 것을 희생한다.
지난달 28일부터 책 홍보를 위한 월드투어에 나선 이 작가를 7일 데이드 칼리지에서 만나 인터뷰했다.
-소설 배경이 되는 한미호 3개국 학원가를 직접 누볐다. 의외의 발견이 있었나.
“평범한 한국 사람에게 사교육은 한국에 내린 저주이자 노년층 빈곤의 주원인이다. 특히 조부모 세대는 아이들이 왜 학원에 다니는지 전혀 이해하지 못한다. 하지만 막상 학원을 방문해 학생들과 이야기를 나눠 보니 반응이 전혀 달랐다. 많은 학생들이 의외로 학원 다니는 것을 즐거워했다. 부모 몰래 수업에 빠지고 친구들과 떡볶이를 먹거나 비디오게임을 하더라. 그 경험을 바탕으로 학원의 긍정적 면을 그릴 수 있었다. 삶의 기반을 잃고 이국땅에 도착한 소설 속 인물들에게 학원은 낯선 세상을 안전하게 탐색하도록 돕는 완충지대다. 세대간 인식 차이를 발견한 뒤 상상력을 동원해 그 간극을 채워나갔다.”
이 작가는 학원을 ‘컨트리 클럽’에 비유했다. 어른들이 퇴근 후 회원제 클럽이나 단골 식당을 찾아 위로를 받듯 청소년도 집·학교가 아닌 제3의 공간이 필요한데 학원이 그 역할을 한다는 분석이다.
-현장에서 교육의 해법도 찾았는지.
“우리는 한미 양극단의 교육 시스템 사이에서 균형을 잡아야 한다. 한국식 교육이 무조건 나쁘다는 접근은 틀렸다. 한국인들은 높은 수준의 교육 덕분에 짧은 기간 내 엄청난 성취를 이뤄냈다. 그 사실에 자부심을 가져야 한다. 하지만 동시에 그 교육 시스템이 청소년과 가정, 국가 경제에 악영향을 미친 것도 사실이다. 책에서 내가 장경섭 교수의 ‘압축적 근대성(compressed modernity)’ 개념을 언급한 것은 그 때문이다.”
이 작가는 한국 사회가 겪은 ‘압축적 근대성’이 높은 교육열을 낳았다고 본다. 그는 “1997년 IMF 외환 위기 이후 국민들이 신자유주의적 경쟁에 휩쓸리게 됐다”고 지적했다. “세계와 경쟁하는 한국인들에게 영어 구사 능력은 필수 역량이 됐다. 하지만 학원의 도움 없이 영어를 원어민처럼 구사하는 것은 불가능에 가깝다”고 그는 바라봤다.
“반면 미국은 교육 측면에서 정말 뒤쳐져 있다. 공립학교의 학생 만성 결석률은 충격적이다. 그래서 호주로 눈을 돌렸다. 호주 정부가 운영하는 고등교육 학자금 대출제도(HECS), 공립 직업기술학교(TAFE) 정책은 매우 설득력이 있다. 정부가 제 역할을 다한다면 우리도 그러한 시스템을 갖출 수 있다고 말하고 싶었다.”
문제를 파악하고 해법을 제시하는 과정이 순탄했던 것 만은 아니다. 나라 안에서도 지역마다 다른 교육 제도를 파악하느라 정말 골치가 아팠다고. “세 나라의 교육 시스템을 다양한 사회 계층의 관점에서 파악하는 것은 쉽지 않았다. 동시에 그 답답함을 겪으며 아주 중요한 사실을 깨달았다. 소설의 인물들도 삶의 터전을 옮길 때마다 나와 똑같은 좌절감을 맛봤을 것이라는 점이다. 자녀를 제대로 교육시키기 위해 부모가 으레 거쳐야 하는 막막함과 굴욕감, 겸손함을 몸소 느꼈다.”
-왜 지금 한국계 미국인들이 이 책을 읽어야 하는가.
“자신이 받은 교육이 과연 올바른 방식이었는지 궁금해 하는 이들이 많다. 학원으로 대표되는 한국식 사교육이 워낙 논쟁적인 주제이기 때문이다. 모두들 교육이 어때야 하는지에 대해 많은 호기심을 갖고 있다.”
책은 그가 수년 째 천착하고 있는 주제인 ‘지혜’와도 연관이 있다. 그는 “지혜란 복잡한 현실에 능숙하게 대처할 수 있는 힘”이라며 “미국 대학은 거의 모든 걸 배울 수 있는 곳이다. 그런데 누구와 결혼해야 할지, 어떤 직업을 선택해야 하는지, 어디로 이사해야 하는지와 같은 질문에 대한 답도 가르치나? 학원에서 그 답을 찾을 수 있나? 아니라면 우리는 어디서, 어떻게 지혜를 배울 수 있을까를 깊이 고민하다 책을 쓰게 됐다”고 밝혔다.
한국어판은 오는 14일 출간된다.
장채원 기자 jang.chaewon@koreadaily.com
2026년 11월 6일 금요일
‘I thought, if I’m going to die, I’m going to write a book first’: Pachinko author Min Jin Lee | Fiction | The Guardian
‘I thought, if I’m going to die, I’m going to write a book first’: Pachinko author Min Jin Lee | Fiction | The Guardian
‘I thought, if I’m going to die, I’m going to write a book first’: Pachinko author Min Jin Lee | Fiction | The Guardian
Interview
‘I thought, if I’m going to die, I’m going to write a book first’: Pachinko author Min Jin Lee
This article is more than 1 month old
Lisa Allardice
Her last novel sold 5m copies and was adapted into a hit series. Nearly 10 years on, the Korean-American author has written another epic. She discusses ambition and the diagnosis that inspired her to leave work and write
Sat 3 Oct 2026 18.00 AEST
Back in 1995, when she was in her mid-20s, Min Jin Lee quit her job as a corporate lawyer. As a teenager she had been diagnosed as a hepatitis B carrier and doctors told her she was highly likely to develop liver cancer in her 20s or 30s. “I thought, if I’m going to die, I’m going to write a book first,” the now 57-year-old Korean-American author says of her decision to turn her back on a regular pay cheque and healthcare. “I was told so many times that I was going to get sicker and sicker, that I’ve always felt that if I can get a really good book out then I’m done.”
Lee, looking very much alive and well, is on a video call from her home in Harlem, New York, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves behind her. We are meeting to discuss the publication of her third novel, American Hagwon, the final part in what she calls her “Korean trilogy”, following Free Food for Millionaires in 2007 and her 2017 international bestseller, Pachinko, stylishly adapted for Apple TV in 2022. “Korean quartet!” she corrects me now. Thanks to experimental drugs, she is now so healthy she can commit to another book. “Before I turn 70, I should turn in my manuscript,” she jokes. “I’m writing the four books that I wanted to write and after that I’m going to take a long nap.”
Lee averages a book a decade. It took 11 years of writing before Free Food for Millionaires, about the children of Korean immigrants in New York in the 90s, was published. She worked on Pachinko, which spans nearly a century, and ranges from a fishing village in Japanese-occupied Korea to Wall Street in the 1980s, for 20 years. It was voted one of the New York Times 100 best books of the century and has sold more than 5m globally. American Hagwon, which follows one family from Seoul to Sydney to California in the years leading up to and after the Asian financial crisis of 1997, was bought in a 12-way publishing auction. She has recently returned from Germany on a research trip for her next book, her “European novel”, which already has a title: Marshall Plan. Its starting point is the 1963 bilateral agreement when thousands of Koreans were sent to West Germany to work as miners or nurses to boost the economy back home. The only thing all four novels have in common is the Korean diaspora.
View image in fullscreenSungkyu Kim, Eunchae Jung and Minha Kim in Pachinko. Photograph: Apple TV
“I’ve had to have lessons to do this, to talk to you,” Lee confesses, smiling into the screen. A once desperately shy and poor girl from Seoul, she is both modest about her success – “I’m used to feeling unwanted” – and proud that she has pulled it off. “Wow, I have done this. I have fucking done this. I would love to know how many Asian American women have been published in the New York Review of Books,” Lee told the Believer Magazine. Her NYRB essay was an indepth appraisal of the work of fellow novelist Han Kang, who became the first Korean Nobel prize for literature laureate in 2024. While Lee’s sprawling multigenerational epics couldn’t be more different from Han’s slim, poetic novels, they both tackle periods of their country’s troubled history that the world has chosen to forget. Ironically, they have come to prominence on the crest of hallyu, the Korean Wave, the government-sponsored cultural push that has given the west K-pop bands and Squid Game.
‘I would love to write a short novel, but I don’t know how with these subjects’
Each weighing in at more than 500 pages, Lee’s novels take up as much space on a bookshelf as the life’s work of other writers. “I would love to write a short novel, but I don’t know how with these subjects,” she says. “I always think: ‘God, pick something easier. What is the matter with you? How about two people having feelings at a kitchen table?’”
As big-hearted as they are physically hefty, her books have the immersive narrative drive, social conscience and moral purpose of the Victorian classics, on which she trained herself as a writer. “Almost all the people that I admire the most in terms of writers are old dead British writers,” she says. “Austen and Eliot, they have enormous hearts, they’re so romantic in terms of what they think human beings can be.”
If her first two novels dealt with assimilation and colonisation, respectively, American Hagwon takes on one of the most important things to Koreans around the world: education. “Hagwon” is the term for private cram schools that are ubiquitous in South Korea. “If there was one word that I wanted you to know, that it’s so important for you to understand any Korean person you’ll ever meet, it’s ‘hagwon’,” Lee says. “In Korea that word is almost like the word water.” Some publishers were uneasy with Pachinko as a title, because it was unfamiliar to western readers. But this noisy pinball machine found in pachinko parlours across Japan was the perfect metaphor for the unpredictability of success, especially when the odds are stacked against you, as they were for the Korean-Japanese immigrants.
In American Hagwon, John and Helen Koh are forced to uproot their family after a business betrayal: John swaps a well-paid job in insurance to manage a nail bar in LA, and their three children – Bo, DH and Mido – have to learn harder lessons than those taught in any classroom. More than 600 pages devoted to studying, tutoring and the establishment of a hagwon business, a concept unfamiliar to most readers outside Korea, might be a tough sell. But American Hagwon is about much more than swotting for exams. Lee wants to show the true cost of the overachieving Asian stereotype, the sacrifices of the “tiger mom” and the inequities of the elite education system. “How do you live a wise life?” the novel asks. It is a story of “power and ambition and getting to your goals”, she says. “In America, we really worship work but we also really worship success. We don’t always worship how people get there. In Korea, people really do examine how you get there.”
She likes to set out her thesis in the opening line of each of her novels: “Competence can be a curse” in Free Food for Millionaires; “History has failed us, but no matter” in Pachinko. “The rules of engagement have changed already,” she declares at the start of American Hagwon. “There was a time when we felt we could sort of predict things,” she says now. “But right now most people are feeling: ‘I have no idea what just happened, no idea what will happen. I don’t know how to raise my children or plan my career because shit just keeps happening. And the people who are changing the rules aren’t sending us memos.’ I think that is where advanced economies are right now. Of course,” she adds, “people who are not from advanced economies have always felt this way.”
View image in fullscreenLee in New York. Photograph: Benedict Evans/The Guardian
All her novels take the Asian immigrant experience from the margins to the mainstream. “In my pages, I want to be the centre,” as she puts it. But she is also reflecting our global contemporary predicament. Diaspora “is a permanent condition for every single person in the world,” she says. “Now we have economic diaspora and we also have environmental diaspora. The people that I focus on are obviously Koreans, but what I’m really writing about is when you have to leave because you’re no longer useful or you’re no longer wanted, what do you do? You have to adapt.”
Lee’s own story has the epic sweep of her novels. Her father was a war refugee who fled North Korea when he was 16, never to see his family again. He met her mother, a piano teacher, in Seoul. The family moved to the US when Min was seven, where they lived in an apartment in Elmhurst, Queens. The middle of three sisters, she remembers it as an “ugly little hovel”, with mice and bugs. Her father bought a newsstand, where the young Min would sit on the weekends. After a year, they bought a wholesale jewellers, not much bigger than the newspaper kiosk, selling costume jewellery to street pedlars. Both her parents worked in the shop six days a week. Her father is now 91, her mother 86, and she visits them in New Jersey after church each Sunday.
“I didn’t have any friends and I really couldn’t get on,” she says of her own school days. Things improved when she got into Bronx High School of Science (also attended by NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani). But she felt out of her depth once again at Yale, where “there were so few Asians and everybody was so much wealthier”. Her two years as a lawyer, condensing boxes of documents into 20-page memos, proved a perfect training for a novelist intent on taking on huge hunks of Korean history. She married her husband, Christopher Duffy, who is half Japanese and half European, when she was 24, and their son was born when she was 29. “I really did think I was going to die,” she says. “I thought I had to get everything done.”
Walking home from the subway one day after reading VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, she realised that here was her subject. “I had to write about the disgraced, the poor and the earnest strivers of Queens,” she wrote in an essay in the New York Times. She took classes at Harvard Business School and a whole semester in millinery at a fashion college as research for Free Food for Millionaires.skip past newsletter promotion
In 2007, the year it was finally published, Duffy was relocated to Tokyo. The seed for Pachinko had been sown 20 years earlier at Yale, when she attended a lecture by a visiting Japanese missionary about a Korean immigrant boy in Japan who killed himself because he was bullied. She had a draft of a novel, entitled Motherland, but it was too “dry” and “angry”. Living in Tokyo and talking to hundreds of Korean immigrants – street sellers, security guards, Uber drivers – Pachinko came to life. “Literary fiction must incorporate those stories,” she says. “Writing about work is something that social novelists must do.”
‘Humans have a kind of buoyancy – because we adapt and we have humour’
It is no surprise that these epic novels about ordinary people at the mercy of cataclysmic social and economic changes have struck a chord right now. “The thing that I’ve always been able to do is to listen. And I’m willing to listen if someone will tell me how difficult their lives are,” she says. But she also wants to capture the resilience and joy of the people she speaks to. “There’s a wish for more love and recognition that regular human beings have and also a kind of buoyancy,” she says. “You read the dismal horrible stuff, but then we still have sex and have children. How do I connect that? The way I see it is because we adapt and we have humour.”
She has no truck with the vogue for autofiction – “It’s for a certain reader. I’m probably not her” – which she feels has no place for the people she writes about. Having been on judging panels for many book prizes in the US, she has come to the conclusion that she doesn’t fit in with other contemporary writers. “My peers are writing wonderful, incredibly moving things, but I don’t know how to write like that.”
She survived her wilderness years by following American author Grace Paley’s advice to writers to “keep a low overhead”, and also by having “a low overhead for expectations of recognition”. Today, she still leads a very quiet life. “I’m not a cool literary It person,” she says. “But I get to do what I want to do.” Her working day begins by reading and making notes on a chapter of the Bible, which Willa Cather used to do before writing. She diagrams everything – character outlines, plot – and looks for gaps. When she has a first draft she is happy with, she throws it away. Her manuscripts push 200,000 words. “I’ll just start all over,” she says, breezily. “It’s so much cleaner when you do it that way.”
It is only since the success of the Pachinko TV series (on which she is remaining tight-lipped, after withdrawing as an executive producer) that she feels part of the publishing scene. “It’s like I’m visiting. I feel like, they’re letting me come and I’ll behave myself and I’ll be on time, but if I’m not asked again, I will just be grateful for the opportunity.” But there is nothing modest about her literary ambitions. “I want to build a palace,” she says of her novels. “I want to build a palace that stands.”
In return for the commitment of their time, she wants the reader to feel changed by the experience, just as she has been by reading 19th-century novels. “I probably feel more British than anything because I’ve read so much British literature, over and over again,” she says. “That is what I am trying to do, in some ways. I’m trying to make you Korean.”
American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee is published by 4th Estate. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
This article was amended on 5 October 2026. An earlier version referred to pachinko bars “across Korea”. This meant to refer to Japan.
Interview
‘I thought, if I’m going to die, I’m going to write a book first’: Pachinko author Min Jin Lee
This article is more than 1 month old
Lisa Allardice
Her last novel sold 5m copies and was adapted into a hit series. Nearly 10 years on, the Korean-American author has written another epic. She discusses ambition and the diagnosis that inspired her to leave work and write
Sat 3 Oct 2026 18.00 AEST
Back in 1995, when she was in her mid-20s, Min Jin Lee quit her job as a corporate lawyer. As a teenager she had been diagnosed as a hepatitis B carrier and doctors told her she was highly likely to develop liver cancer in her 20s or 30s. “I thought, if I’m going to die, I’m going to write a book first,” the now 57-year-old Korean-American author says of her decision to turn her back on a regular pay cheque and healthcare. “I was told so many times that I was going to get sicker and sicker, that I’ve always felt that if I can get a really good book out then I’m done.”
Lee, looking very much alive and well, is on a video call from her home in Harlem, New York, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves behind her. We are meeting to discuss the publication of her third novel, American Hagwon, the final part in what she calls her “Korean trilogy”, following Free Food for Millionaires in 2007 and her 2017 international bestseller, Pachinko, stylishly adapted for Apple TV in 2022. “Korean quartet!” she corrects me now. Thanks to experimental drugs, she is now so healthy she can commit to another book. “Before I turn 70, I should turn in my manuscript,” she jokes. “I’m writing the four books that I wanted to write and after that I’m going to take a long nap.”
Lee averages a book a decade. It took 11 years of writing before Free Food for Millionaires, about the children of Korean immigrants in New York in the 90s, was published. She worked on Pachinko, which spans nearly a century, and ranges from a fishing village in Japanese-occupied Korea to Wall Street in the 1980s, for 20 years. It was voted one of the New York Times 100 best books of the century and has sold more than 5m globally. American Hagwon, which follows one family from Seoul to Sydney to California in the years leading up to and after the Asian financial crisis of 1997, was bought in a 12-way publishing auction. She has recently returned from Germany on a research trip for her next book, her “European novel”, which already has a title: Marshall Plan. Its starting point is the 1963 bilateral agreement when thousands of Koreans were sent to West Germany to work as miners or nurses to boost the economy back home. The only thing all four novels have in common is the Korean diaspora.
View image in fullscreenSungkyu Kim, Eunchae Jung and Minha Kim in Pachinko. Photograph: Apple TV“I’ve had to have lessons to do this, to talk to you,” Lee confesses, smiling into the screen. A once desperately shy and poor girl from Seoul, she is both modest about her success – “I’m used to feeling unwanted” – and proud that she has pulled it off. “Wow, I have done this. I have fucking done this. I would love to know how many Asian American women have been published in the New York Review of Books,” Lee told the Believer Magazine. Her NYRB essay was an indepth appraisal of the work of fellow novelist Han Kang, who became the first Korean Nobel prize for literature laureate in 2024. While Lee’s sprawling multigenerational epics couldn’t be more different from Han’s slim, poetic novels, they both tackle periods of their country’s troubled history that the world has chosen to forget. Ironically, they have come to prominence on the crest of hallyu, the Korean Wave, the government-sponsored cultural push that has given the west K-pop bands and Squid Game.
‘I would love to write a short novel, but I don’t know how with these subjects’
Each weighing in at more than 500 pages, Lee’s novels take up as much space on a bookshelf as the life’s work of other writers. “I would love to write a short novel, but I don’t know how with these subjects,” she says. “I always think: ‘God, pick something easier. What is the matter with you? How about two people having feelings at a kitchen table?’”
As big-hearted as they are physically hefty, her books have the immersive narrative drive, social conscience and moral purpose of the Victorian classics, on which she trained herself as a writer. “Almost all the people that I admire the most in terms of writers are old dead British writers,” she says. “Austen and Eliot, they have enormous hearts, they’re so romantic in terms of what they think human beings can be.”
If her first two novels dealt with assimilation and colonisation, respectively, American Hagwon takes on one of the most important things to Koreans around the world: education. “Hagwon” is the term for private cram schools that are ubiquitous in South Korea. “If there was one word that I wanted you to know, that it’s so important for you to understand any Korean person you’ll ever meet, it’s ‘hagwon’,” Lee says. “In Korea that word is almost like the word water.” Some publishers were uneasy with Pachinko as a title, because it was unfamiliar to western readers. But this noisy pinball machine found in pachinko parlours across Japan was the perfect metaphor for the unpredictability of success, especially when the odds are stacked against you, as they were for the Korean-Japanese immigrants.
In American Hagwon, John and Helen Koh are forced to uproot their family after a business betrayal: John swaps a well-paid job in insurance to manage a nail bar in LA, and their three children – Bo, DH and Mido – have to learn harder lessons than those taught in any classroom. More than 600 pages devoted to studying, tutoring and the establishment of a hagwon business, a concept unfamiliar to most readers outside Korea, might be a tough sell. But American Hagwon is about much more than swotting for exams. Lee wants to show the true cost of the overachieving Asian stereotype, the sacrifices of the “tiger mom” and the inequities of the elite education system. “How do you live a wise life?” the novel asks. It is a story of “power and ambition and getting to your goals”, she says. “In America, we really worship work but we also really worship success. We don’t always worship how people get there. In Korea, people really do examine how you get there.”
She likes to set out her thesis in the opening line of each of her novels: “Competence can be a curse” in Free Food for Millionaires; “History has failed us, but no matter” in Pachinko. “The rules of engagement have changed already,” she declares at the start of American Hagwon. “There was a time when we felt we could sort of predict things,” she says now. “But right now most people are feeling: ‘I have no idea what just happened, no idea what will happen. I don’t know how to raise my children or plan my career because shit just keeps happening. And the people who are changing the rules aren’t sending us memos.’ I think that is where advanced economies are right now. Of course,” she adds, “people who are not from advanced economies have always felt this way.”
View image in fullscreenLee in New York. Photograph: Benedict Evans/The GuardianAll her novels take the Asian immigrant experience from the margins to the mainstream. “In my pages, I want to be the centre,” as she puts it. But she is also reflecting our global contemporary predicament. Diaspora “is a permanent condition for every single person in the world,” she says. “Now we have economic diaspora and we also have environmental diaspora. The people that I focus on are obviously Koreans, but what I’m really writing about is when you have to leave because you’re no longer useful or you’re no longer wanted, what do you do? You have to adapt.”
Lee’s own story has the epic sweep of her novels. Her father was a war refugee who fled North Korea when he was 16, never to see his family again. He met her mother, a piano teacher, in Seoul. The family moved to the US when Min was seven, where they lived in an apartment in Elmhurst, Queens. The middle of three sisters, she remembers it as an “ugly little hovel”, with mice and bugs. Her father bought a newsstand, where the young Min would sit on the weekends. After a year, they bought a wholesale jewellers, not much bigger than the newspaper kiosk, selling costume jewellery to street pedlars. Both her parents worked in the shop six days a week. Her father is now 91, her mother 86, and she visits them in New Jersey after church each Sunday.
“I didn’t have any friends and I really couldn’t get on,” she says of her own school days. Things improved when she got into Bronx High School of Science (also attended by NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani). But she felt out of her depth once again at Yale, where “there were so few Asians and everybody was so much wealthier”. Her two years as a lawyer, condensing boxes of documents into 20-page memos, proved a perfect training for a novelist intent on taking on huge hunks of Korean history. She married her husband, Christopher Duffy, who is half Japanese and half European, when she was 24, and their son was born when she was 29. “I really did think I was going to die,” she says. “I thought I had to get everything done.”
Walking home from the subway one day after reading VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, she realised that here was her subject. “I had to write about the disgraced, the poor and the earnest strivers of Queens,” she wrote in an essay in the New York Times. She took classes at Harvard Business School and a whole semester in millinery at a fashion college as research for Free Food for Millionaires.skip past newsletter promotion
In 2007, the year it was finally published, Duffy was relocated to Tokyo. The seed for Pachinko had been sown 20 years earlier at Yale, when she attended a lecture by a visiting Japanese missionary about a Korean immigrant boy in Japan who killed himself because he was bullied. She had a draft of a novel, entitled Motherland, but it was too “dry” and “angry”. Living in Tokyo and talking to hundreds of Korean immigrants – street sellers, security guards, Uber drivers – Pachinko came to life. “Literary fiction must incorporate those stories,” she says. “Writing about work is something that social novelists must do.”
‘Humans have a kind of buoyancy – because we adapt and we have humour’
It is no surprise that these epic novels about ordinary people at the mercy of cataclysmic social and economic changes have struck a chord right now. “The thing that I’ve always been able to do is to listen. And I’m willing to listen if someone will tell me how difficult their lives are,” she says. But she also wants to capture the resilience and joy of the people she speaks to. “There’s a wish for more love and recognition that regular human beings have and also a kind of buoyancy,” she says. “You read the dismal horrible stuff, but then we still have sex and have children. How do I connect that? The way I see it is because we adapt and we have humour.”
She has no truck with the vogue for autofiction – “It’s for a certain reader. I’m probably not her” – which she feels has no place for the people she writes about. Having been on judging panels for many book prizes in the US, she has come to the conclusion that she doesn’t fit in with other contemporary writers. “My peers are writing wonderful, incredibly moving things, but I don’t know how to write like that.”
She survived her wilderness years by following American author Grace Paley’s advice to writers to “keep a low overhead”, and also by having “a low overhead for expectations of recognition”. Today, she still leads a very quiet life. “I’m not a cool literary It person,” she says. “But I get to do what I want to do.” Her working day begins by reading and making notes on a chapter of the Bible, which Willa Cather used to do before writing. She diagrams everything – character outlines, plot – and looks for gaps. When she has a first draft she is happy with, she throws it away. Her manuscripts push 200,000 words. “I’ll just start all over,” she says, breezily. “It’s so much cleaner when you do it that way.”
It is only since the success of the Pachinko TV series (on which she is remaining tight-lipped, after withdrawing as an executive producer) that she feels part of the publishing scene. “It’s like I’m visiting. I feel like, they’re letting me come and I’ll behave myself and I’ll be on time, but if I’m not asked again, I will just be grateful for the opportunity.” But there is nothing modest about her literary ambitions. “I want to build a palace,” she says of her novels. “I want to build a palace that stands.”
In return for the commitment of their time, she wants the reader to feel changed by the experience, just as she has been by reading 19th-century novels. “I probably feel more British than anything because I’ve read so much British literature, over and over again,” she says. “That is what I am trying to do, in some ways. I’m trying to make you Korean.”
American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee is published by 4th Estate. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
This article was amended on 5 October 2026. An earlier version referred to pachinko bars “across Korea”. This meant to refer to Japan.
American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee review – a gloriously immersive follow-up to Pachinko | Fiction | The Guardian
American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee review – a gloriously immersive follow-up to Pachinko | Fiction | The Guardian
Review
American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee review – a gloriously immersive follow-up to Pachinko
A Korean family is willing to sacrifice everything for their children’s education, in the third book in Lee’s Diaspora Quartet
Sarah CrownThu 5 Nov 2026 18.00 AEDT
“An excellent hagwon,” according to one of the characters in Min Jin Lee’s new novel, “is everything.” Every year, Korean parents pay hefty sums to send their children to these private after-school academies designed to turbocharge academic performance, where they spend evenings and weekends being drilled in mathematics, reasoning and essay technique. In the third book in what she has called her Diaspora Quartet – a follow-up to 2017’s Pachinko, recently named one of the New York Times’s top 100 books of the 21st century – she presents the fierce competition to snag a spot at those hagwons deemed the best as symptomatic of Korea’s scarcity mindset: in a country where university places and white-collar jobs are hard to come by, everyone’s looking for an edge. But over the course of the novel’s 650 pages, they also come to stand as symbols of pretty much everything you can think of: of country and culture; of failure and success; of responsibility, or the lack of it; of what it means to achieve, and of what, in the final analysis, the purpose of our achievements might be.
The action in American Hagwon unspools over nearly three decades, and crisscrosses from Seoul to Sydney to California and back to Seoul again. At its centre is the Koh family: John, Helen and their three children, Bo, DH and Mido. When the novel opens in 1992, their life in Korea appears comfortably middle-class – John is a senior manager at a multinational corporation; Helen is an upmarket saleswoman, her commissions covering the children’s hagwon fees. But they are dramatically capsized: first by a personal betrayal and then again, in a brutal one-two, by the financial crisis that clobbered Asia in the late 90s. The family move, then later move once more: sometimes together, more often following their own trajectories; but always connected, and supporting one another as opportunity and need ebb and flow between them.
At every point, John and Helen put their children’s futures above their present comfort: education – seen as the surest route to security and self-worth – is prioritised above all else. In California, John fries fish and sluices the floors of the grandly named Shrimp Castle; Helen sells “imported face cream and handbags in a makeshift Korean department store that looked like a warehouse”. Every spare penny goes towards the astronomical expense of the trio’s academic careers: the essential which cannot be ducked.
This is the novel as luxurious full-body experience: it feels like stepping into a longstanding family gathering
This is, then, a family affair – but it soon becomes clear that, for Lee, the definition of family is elastic. The novel’s canvas is global, but the intertwined, intricate expat community it presents has the feel of a village. Friends, relatives and rivals move in close orbit, defined and bound together by their shared roots, their roles evolving as the years pass: sometimes bolstering one another with jobs and advice and connections, sometimes renewing decades-old feuds.
The novel’s expansiveness means that the people on the page come to appear as living, breathing beings – complex, contradictory, known intimately to each other but often unknowable themselves – to the point where being in their company feels like stepping into a longstanding family gathering. This is the novel as luxurious full-body experience: both in its patient tracking of the highs and lows of its characters’ lives, and in the compassionate realism with which it observes them, it reminded me of nothing so much as George Eliot’s Middlemarch – and, as with Eliot’s masterpiece, the effect of reading it is both immersive and transformative.
‘I thought, if I’m going to die, I’m going to write a book first’: Pachinko author Min Jin Lee
Read more
But it’s also, like Pachinko before it, a treatise on the Korean diaspora, and specifically on the role of the hagwon within it. When youngest child Mido finds work in the portentously named Fortress, a hagwon catering to the children of their southern California expat community, the novel tilts on its axis. Suddenly, we’re seeing the hagwon from the other side: not as supplicants at the fortress’s gate, but rather as its gatekeepers; guardians of the bright future it promises. Fortress was set up by Yun, Mido’s childhood friend from Seoul, and her husband Lion. Mido initially sees her work there as a stopgap, before she goes on to finish her own degree. But when she discovers that she loves the work, loves the children, and makes more than enough money to support herself she begins to wonder why she needs to return to university at all.
Lion, meanwhile, was a prodigy who graduated from Princeton in three years: exactly the sort of child hagwons are intended to produce. But rather than using his education as a springboard into the wider world, he has found himself running a hagwon of his own; drawn back to the system that launched him. And the trajectory of his own life, the experience of the children in his care, and the inherent injustices, of wealth and background, which the hagwon system perpetuates, leads him to question whether its ends justify its means. “There is a crisis … in our education and what it is meant to do,” he says to the parents of his students towards the novel’s end. “We cannot treat our students as objects to shape and bring to the market.” American Hagwon is a patient, humane, occasionally devastating book about what we ask our children to carry, and why.
American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee is published by 4th Estate (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Review
American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee review – a gloriously immersive follow-up to Pachinko
A Korean family is willing to sacrifice everything for their children’s education, in the third book in Lee’s Diaspora Quartet
Sarah CrownThu 5 Nov 2026 18.00 AEDT
“An excellent hagwon,” according to one of the characters in Min Jin Lee’s new novel, “is everything.” Every year, Korean parents pay hefty sums to send their children to these private after-school academies designed to turbocharge academic performance, where they spend evenings and weekends being drilled in mathematics, reasoning and essay technique. In the third book in what she has called her Diaspora Quartet – a follow-up to 2017’s Pachinko, recently named one of the New York Times’s top 100 books of the 21st century – she presents the fierce competition to snag a spot at those hagwons deemed the best as symptomatic of Korea’s scarcity mindset: in a country where university places and white-collar jobs are hard to come by, everyone’s looking for an edge. But over the course of the novel’s 650 pages, they also come to stand as symbols of pretty much everything you can think of: of country and culture; of failure and success; of responsibility, or the lack of it; of what it means to achieve, and of what, in the final analysis, the purpose of our achievements might be.
The action in American Hagwon unspools over nearly three decades, and crisscrosses from Seoul to Sydney to California and back to Seoul again. At its centre is the Koh family: John, Helen and their three children, Bo, DH and Mido. When the novel opens in 1992, their life in Korea appears comfortably middle-class – John is a senior manager at a multinational corporation; Helen is an upmarket saleswoman, her commissions covering the children’s hagwon fees. But they are dramatically capsized: first by a personal betrayal and then again, in a brutal one-two, by the financial crisis that clobbered Asia in the late 90s. The family move, then later move once more: sometimes together, more often following their own trajectories; but always connected, and supporting one another as opportunity and need ebb and flow between them.
At every point, John and Helen put their children’s futures above their present comfort: education – seen as the surest route to security and self-worth – is prioritised above all else. In California, John fries fish and sluices the floors of the grandly named Shrimp Castle; Helen sells “imported face cream and handbags in a makeshift Korean department store that looked like a warehouse”. Every spare penny goes towards the astronomical expense of the trio’s academic careers: the essential which cannot be ducked.
This is the novel as luxurious full-body experience: it feels like stepping into a longstanding family gathering
This is, then, a family affair – but it soon becomes clear that, for Lee, the definition of family is elastic. The novel’s canvas is global, but the intertwined, intricate expat community it presents has the feel of a village. Friends, relatives and rivals move in close orbit, defined and bound together by their shared roots, their roles evolving as the years pass: sometimes bolstering one another with jobs and advice and connections, sometimes renewing decades-old feuds.
The novel’s expansiveness means that the people on the page come to appear as living, breathing beings – complex, contradictory, known intimately to each other but often unknowable themselves – to the point where being in their company feels like stepping into a longstanding family gathering. This is the novel as luxurious full-body experience: both in its patient tracking of the highs and lows of its characters’ lives, and in the compassionate realism with which it observes them, it reminded me of nothing so much as George Eliot’s Middlemarch – and, as with Eliot’s masterpiece, the effect of reading it is both immersive and transformative.
‘I thought, if I’m going to die, I’m going to write a book first’: Pachinko author Min Jin Lee
Read more
But it’s also, like Pachinko before it, a treatise on the Korean diaspora, and specifically on the role of the hagwon within it. When youngest child Mido finds work in the portentously named Fortress, a hagwon catering to the children of their southern California expat community, the novel tilts on its axis. Suddenly, we’re seeing the hagwon from the other side: not as supplicants at the fortress’s gate, but rather as its gatekeepers; guardians of the bright future it promises. Fortress was set up by Yun, Mido’s childhood friend from Seoul, and her husband Lion. Mido initially sees her work there as a stopgap, before she goes on to finish her own degree. But when she discovers that she loves the work, loves the children, and makes more than enough money to support herself she begins to wonder why she needs to return to university at all.
Lion, meanwhile, was a prodigy who graduated from Princeton in three years: exactly the sort of child hagwons are intended to produce. But rather than using his education as a springboard into the wider world, he has found himself running a hagwon of his own; drawn back to the system that launched him. And the trajectory of his own life, the experience of the children in his care, and the inherent injustices, of wealth and background, which the hagwon system perpetuates, leads him to question whether its ends justify its means. “There is a crisis … in our education and what it is meant to do,” he says to the parents of his students towards the novel’s end. “We cannot treat our students as objects to shape and bring to the market.” American Hagwon is a patient, humane, occasionally devastating book about what we ask our children to carry, and why.
American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee is published by 4th Estate (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Min Jin Lee는 한국어 능력 다국어 인터뷰 취재 방식 --창작과정
미국식 학원 요약 평론 - Google Gemini
Min Jin Lee는 한국어 책을 읽을 수 있는가요?
===
이민진 작가는 한국어로 된 책을 온전하게 읽지 못한다.
작가는 1968년 서울에서 태어나 만 7세이던 1976년에 가족과 함께 미국 뉴욕으로 이민을 갔다. 가정 내에서 부모님과 일상적인 대화를 나누는 기초적인 수준의 구어(생활 한국어)는 구사하지만, 복잡한 인문·사회과학 서적이나 고유의 문학적 표현이 담긴 한국어 책을 독해하는 문해력(literacy)은 갖추고 있지 않다.
작가 본인 역시 인터뷰와 공개 강연을 통해 자신의 한국어 읽기 및 쓰기 실력이 초등학교 저학년 수준에 머물러 있다고 솔직하게 밝힌 바 있다. 이 때문에 한국 역사나 재일동포 사회, 대치동 교육열 등을 취재하고 집필할 때 영문 학술 자료와 번역본을 기본 텍스트로 삼으며, 한국어 원문 자료나 현장 구술 인터뷰는 전문 통역사와 연구 조사원들의 도움을 받아 영어로 재가공해 작업하는 방식을 취한다.
[새로운 목소리의 미국 민주당의 기독교인 의회 지도자들]
Sung-Deuk Oak - [새로운 목소리의 미국 민주당의 기독교인 의회 지도자들] 기독교 본연의 메시지를 가지고... | Facebook
Sung-Deuk Oak
[새로운 목소리의 미국 민주당의 기독교인 의회 지도자들]
기독교 본연의 메시지를 가지고 등장
미국 최대 연합감리교회 회중인 부활교회(United Methodist Church of the Resurrection)의 개척 목사 애덤 해밀턴(Adam Hamilton)이 캔자스주 연방 상원의원에 당선되었다. 공화당의 로저 마셜(Roger Marshall)을 꺾은 그의 승리는 캔자스주에서 94년 만에 민주당 후보가 연방 상원의원에 당선된 사건이었다. 해밀턴은 수십 년간 화해와 은혜, 예수의 가르침을 일상에서 실천하는 일을 강조하며, 사려 깊고 포용적인 기독교를 가르쳐 왔다.
공립학교 교사 출신으로 텍사스주 하원의원이자 장로교 신학생인 제임스 탤러리코(James Talarico)는 공화당의 켄 팩스턴(Ken Paxton)을 누르고 텍사스주 연방 상원의원에 당선되었다. 탤러리코는 기독교 민족주의에 맞서는 미국의 가장 널리 알려진 인물 가운데 한 명으로 부상했다. 그는 예수의 가르침과 타인을 돌보아야 할 도덕적 책임, 종교적 신앙을 정치적 지배와 혼동하는 데 따르는 위험을 공개적으로 이야기해 왔다.
댈러스의 프렌드십웨스트 침례교회(Friendship-West Baptist Church) 담임목사인 프레더릭 더글러스 헤인스 3세(Frederick Douglass Haynes III) 목사·박사는 텍사스주 연방 하원의원에 당선되었다. 흑인교회 전통을 대표하는 주요 인사인 헤인스는 오랫동안 기독교 신앙을 시민권, 경제 정의, 교육, 소외된 공동체의 존엄성과 연결해 왔다.
루터교 목사인 세라 트론 개리엇(Sarah Trone Garriott)은 아이오와주 제3선거구에서 연방 하원의원에 당선되었다. 그의 목회와 공직 활동에는 공동체와 인간의 존엄성을 중시하고, 일하는 가정들이 직면한 어려움에 실질적인 해결책을 마련하려는 헌신이 담겨 있다.
장로교 목사인 린지 제임스(Lindsay James)는 아이오와주 제2선거구에서 연방 하원의원에 당선되었다. 그의 당선으로 민주당 연방의원 대열에 안수받은 기독교 지도자가 한 명 더 합류했으며, 공적 봉사에 목회자의 시각을 더하게 되었다.
아이오와주의 새 민주당 주지사로 당선된 롭 샌드(Rob Sand)는 자신의 기독교 신앙이 서민에 대한 관심, 공직의 청렴성, 공적 책무성에 어떤 영향을 미치는지 공개적으로 밝혀 왔다. 그는 정교분리의 중요성도 강조해 왔다.
아프리카감리교시온교회(African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church)에서 안수받은 라키샤 워맥(LaKesha Womack) 목사는 노스캐롤라이나주 제14선거구에서 공화당 현역 의원인 팀 무어(Tim Moore)를 꺾고 연방 하원의원에 당선되었다. 지역사회 개발과 창업, 목회 분야에서 쌓은 그의 경험은 신앙에 바탕을 둔 공적 봉사의 또 다른 모습을 연방의회에 더하게 되었다.
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‘Pachinko’ Is a Gorgeous Epic of Love and Struggle - The New York Times
‘Pachinko’ Is a Gorgeous Epic of Love and Struggle - The New York Times
‘Pachinko’ Is a Gorgeous Epic of Love and Struggle
Based on the novel by Min Jin Lee, this thoughtful series about a Korean family across generations returns to Apple TV+ for a second season.
Listen · 2:26 min
Share full article
Minha Kim as the younger version of Sunja in the generational epic “Pachinko.”Credit...Apple TV+
By Esther Zuckerman
Aug. 22, 2024
You’re reading the Watching newsletter. TV and movie recommendations delivered to your inbox. Get it sent to your inbox.
Adapted from the acclaimed novel by Min Jin Lee, the Apple TV+ drama “Pachinko” spans decades in the life of a Korean family, beginning first in 1915 under Japanese colonial rule in Korea and later in Japan, where the family’s ambitions bump up against ingrained prejudice.
“Pachinko,” Season 2 of which premieres on Friday, hits on multiple emotional levels. The high drama of the many romantic entanglements melds with the thoughtful historical fiction about how a strange mixture of trauma and love reverberates through generations. It makes for a gem of a show about a family’s will not only to survive but also to thrive.
At the center of the sprawling epic is Sunja, played as a young woman by Minha Kim and as a grandmother by Yuh-jung Youn, an Oscar winner for “Minari.” Season 1 charts Sunja’s childhood, her first romance and betrayal, and then her move to Osaka, Japan, with Isak (Steve Sanghyun Noh), a young pastor who marries her while she is already pregnant. In the later timeline, which begins in New York City in 1989, Sunja’s American-educated grandson, Solomon (Jin Ha), heads to Tokyo with aims of ascending in the business world. He assumes at first that he can use his Koreanness to an advantage.
Season 2 continues the 1989 story line, but jumps ahead in the other timeline to 1945, as the American bombing of Osaka looms. Sunja is now keeping herself afloat selling kimchi, though supplies are scarce. Her eldest son (Kang Hoon Kim) is studious but tormented by his classmates, while her youngest (Eunseong Kwon) is an adorable firecracker, whose presence enlivens the otherwise grim circumstances. (The wonderful opening credits sequence, which has the cast dancing to the 1969 Grass Roots tune “Wait a Million Years,” is also a burst of joy.)
‘Pachinko’ Is a Gorgeous Epic of Love and Struggle
Based on the novel by Min Jin Lee, this thoughtful series about a Korean family across generations returns to Apple TV+ for a second season.
Listen · 2:26 min
Share full article
Minha Kim as the younger version of Sunja in the generational epic “Pachinko.”Credit...Apple TV+By Esther Zuckerman
Aug. 22, 2024
You’re reading the Watching newsletter. TV and movie recommendations delivered to your inbox. Get it sent to your inbox.
Adapted from the acclaimed novel by Min Jin Lee, the Apple TV+ drama “Pachinko” spans decades in the life of a Korean family, beginning first in 1915 under Japanese colonial rule in Korea and later in Japan, where the family’s ambitions bump up against ingrained prejudice.
“Pachinko,” Season 2 of which premieres on Friday, hits on multiple emotional levels. The high drama of the many romantic entanglements melds with the thoughtful historical fiction about how a strange mixture of trauma and love reverberates through generations. It makes for a gem of a show about a family’s will not only to survive but also to thrive.
At the center of the sprawling epic is Sunja, played as a young woman by Minha Kim and as a grandmother by Yuh-jung Youn, an Oscar winner for “Minari.” Season 1 charts Sunja’s childhood, her first romance and betrayal, and then her move to Osaka, Japan, with Isak (Steve Sanghyun Noh), a young pastor who marries her while she is already pregnant. In the later timeline, which begins in New York City in 1989, Sunja’s American-educated grandson, Solomon (Jin Ha), heads to Tokyo with aims of ascending in the business world. He assumes at first that he can use his Koreanness to an advantage.
Season 2 continues the 1989 story line, but jumps ahead in the other timeline to 1945, as the American bombing of Osaka looms. Sunja is now keeping herself afloat selling kimchi, though supplies are scarce. Her eldest son (Kang Hoon Kim) is studious but tormented by his classmates, while her youngest (Eunseong Kwon) is an adorable firecracker, whose presence enlivens the otherwise grim circumstances. (The wonderful opening credits sequence, which has the cast dancing to the 1969 Grass Roots tune “Wait a Million Years,” is also a burst of joy.)
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