Min Jin Lee Wants Us to Rethink Everything We Believe About Education - The New York Times

Min Jin Lee Wants Us to Rethink Everything We Believe About Education - The New York Times

Min Jin Lee Wants Us to Rethink Education

After almost a decade away, the author of “Pachinko” is back with her latest tale about the Korean diaspora, “American Hagwon.”

Hosted by Gilbert Cruz
Oct. 9, 2026


ImageCredit...Christopher Lee for The New York Times


Min Jin Lee Wants Us to Rethink EducationAfter almost a decade away, the author of “Pachinko” is back with her latest tale about the Korean diaspora, “American Hagwon.”


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Min Jin Lee Wants Us to Rethink Education
After almost a decade away, the author of “Pachinko” is back with her latest tale about the Korean diaspora, “American Hagwon.”min jin lee

I wanted to illustrate what it’s like to educate a family and still believe that if you have a Western education, then you’re going to be safe when actually there are economic shocks which happen to perfectly decent people every day, terrible things happen to good people. And I wanted to show what that means if you only trust in a formal education.gilbert cruz

I’m Gilbert Cruz, and this is “The Book Review” from “The New York Times.” This week, I’m very happy to be talking with Min Jin Lee. Min was last on this podcast in summer of 2024. Her book “Pachinko” had just been voted one of the best books of the 21st century by the hundreds of authors who participated in that project.

Wonderfully, she is back here on the show, and she’s here because she has a new novel, her first since 2017’s “Pachinko.” It’s titled “American Hagwon,” and it’s the result of almost a decade’s worth of work. It is the third book in what Min says will eventually be a four-part thematic series exploring Korea and the Korean diaspora.

“American Hagwon” tells the story of the Kohs, a middle-class family of five, following the Asian financial crisis of the late ‘90s. They find themselves all eventually migrating to America. The book, of course, is about much more than that. It’s about much more than that one family. It’s a story about being a parent and about being a child. It’s a story about upward mobility and downward mobility. And it’s a story about education and its promises and trade-offs, which is best exemplified by that word in the title, which refers to private tutoring centers. Min’s going to get into this a little bit more, but first, Min, welcome back to “The Book Review.”min jin lee

Hi, Gilbert. How’s it going, man?gilbert cruz

It’s going great. How are you? What a week for you.min jin lee

What a week. Oh, my goodness. It’s only day 3, and I’m kind of sleepy. [LAUGHS]gilbert cruz

Are you? I don’t know if —min jin lee

Well, I’m actually a little freaked out. I’m a little freaked out.gilbert cruz

Yeah, say more about that.min jin lee

Well, there’s a big tour. And I’ve never done anything this big before, so I’m a little scared.gilbert cruz

When you say big, is it like 10 cities? What are you doing?min jin lee

I lost count. [LAUGHS] I lost count because there’s countries involved.gilbert cruz

Oh, boy. OK. So what are you nervous about? Before we get into this book — this is a big deal for you, then.min jin lee

See, this is the reason why — see, I need to be media trained because I always just say what’s on my mind.gilbert cruz

But believe me, that’s what I want.min jin lee

[LAUGHS] I think I’m scared because — oh, gosh, how should I say it? I don’t want to let anybody down. And when I published my first two books, I didn’t expect an audience. I didn’t expect readers. And this time, I have readers because I get correspondence from readers. And this is a really controversial topic.gilbert cruz

Well, tell me about the topic — great segue — and why it’s controversial.min jin lee

[CHUCKLES] Well, I wrote about education and what it means for upward mobility and downward mobility, as you put so aptly. And [SIGHS]: it’s a weird time to get education and also to buy education, especially in a country like America.gilbert cruz

So the title of your book, “American Hagwon,” I used a very short phrase to describe what a hagwon is, but I’d love for you to unpack for our listeners what that is and why you thought that was a good nucleus around which to build this story about education.min jin lee

So a hagwon is the Korean word for learning center. And I think a lot of people think, if they think at all about hagwons, they think of it as something for kids, whether you’re a four-year-old or a 17-year-old, the educational kind of hagwons. But in Korea, adults go to hagwons to learn how to tap dance, to become an opera singer —gilbert cruz

Oh, wow.min jin lee

— for piano lessons, in order to learn how to speak better. There are all sorts of hagwons. And the reason why I chose hagwon as an organizing metaphor is because I wanted to illustrate the real deep faith in education and self-improvement that Koreans have. And then they carry this idea in the diaspora.gilbert cruz

When last we spoke, you talked about the idea of the social novel. We unpack this a little bit. And you very clearly stated that you were someone who worked in this tradition and wanted to be someone who worked in this tradition. Not to ask you to repeat yourself — please, everyone, go listen to that episode — but how do you see this new book continuing that line that you’re trying to trace here?min jin lee

So thematically, I’m writing about diaspora in all of my fiction. However, the mode of fiction that I want to write are social novels in which the writer looks at the society that she lives in today and figures out what are the things that trouble her, and then tries to make a response in a narrative. So the social ills that I witness right now is just a profound destruction of education. I think every parent right now, in the face of AI, is certainly aware that the learning process of our children has been deeply altered.gilbert cruz

I have one child who’s in the seventh grade, and my wonderful child comes home with a laptop, and he’s doing homework on the laptop. And I’m like, what? What is this? Not even getting into AI or anything like that, when did this become the way that children were being made to learn in school?

Not to sound like a fuddy duddy, what happened to the sitting down at a table with a pen and a worksheet and a piece of paper and working out your thought process in that way? It’s hard to imagine taking that a step further, as you say, what the heck AI is going to do to the idea of coming up with your own thoughts, figuring out how to solve problems on your own. I mean, how old are your kids? I don’t know what your situation is.min jin lee

Oh, my son is 28. And even though my son is 28 and we’re talking pre-AI in terms of his formal educational process, I’m going to tell you right now that you’re not a fuddy duddy. All the neurologists and neuroscientists would agree with you that the brain cannot handle infinite amounts of content. The internet is infinite. [LAUGHS]

So when you give a laptop to a child, you’re not saying, I want you to learn 20 pages of text, or even five pages of text, or even one sheet of spelling words. You’re saying, I want you to have access to this. And it’s an efficiency for the administrator, not for the child. It isn’t. And it makes me really upset because I think that it has really taken an experiment and put it on families and on children in a time when more than any other time I can think of in history, children really actually do need critical thinking skills and recall and a sense of control.gilbert cruz

So your child is 28 now. You started this book maybe right when he was about to graduate high school. Did the way that you were thinking about education then as a parent — you started in one mindset, and now you’re in a different one — how did that personal journey trace its way through? When you said you wanted to write a book about the crisis in education or whatever specific word you want to use, was that something you started because you had a child in school, and then it just continued to enrage you, in some way?min jin lee

No, it wasn’t actually the crisis which caused me to write the novel. It was that I really noticed that education was a value that was the most important and common in all the Koreans that I had ever met. But then the problem that I see about education is that there’s a crisis in learning. So it’s actually two of those things. So the subject is education, and it’s about the love of education, the hatred of education that I saw in all the Koreans that I examined. But then the crisis in learning that we’re experiencing in America, and also globally, is something that’s been going on for a long time.gilbert cruz

Your new book, it’s bookended by two events, two financial crises, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and then everything that happened here in America and around the world around 2007, 2008. Why did you choose those, let’s say, as the poles that you were going to work within? And why did you think that was a particularly fruitful period to tell this story?min jin lee

The historical event that most modern Koreans are deeply affected by today is not the Korean War, and it’s not colonization. It’s actually the IMF crisis, which is the 1997 Asian financial crisis, but it’s called the IMF crisis in Korea. And that was when the Korean currency was so devalued because it was pegged against the dollar that the national economy was basically in default.

And as a consequence, people lost their jobs. Education was interrupted because they couldn’t afford it anymore. Many people lost their homes. Many people committed suicide. Now, people in the West don’t know about this, but if you ask the average person, who’s about actually your age, what really affected you in Korea, they will say, oh, the IMF was really horrible, especially if they didn’t come from money. So if you lack generational wealth, you couldn’t ride out the storm of your dad losing his job, your mom losing her job, you losing your house, you having to move out as whole.

So I thought, I really need to address this because it affects the modern psyche, because it caused a kind of hysterical anxiety about education. Because it made Korean people feel like, oh, we need to be even more global than we thought we had to be. And then, also, the neoliberal practices of the West, austerity and the elimination of lifetime employment, all those practices became accepted into South Korea. So then it became even more competitive.

So not only did you, as a young person, have to become globally competitive had to realize that you didn’t have any of these safety nets that you thought you had. And I thought I had to cover that. And then, of course, 2008 is a global financial crisis.

So when my family, the family that I focus on, goes to California or eventually ends up in California, I wanted to illustrate what it’s like to educate a family and still believe that if you have a Western education, then you’re going to be safe when, actually, there are economic shocks which happen to perfectly decent people every day, terrible things happen to good people, and I wanted to show what that means if you only trust in education, in a formal education.gilbert cruz

It’s scary.

I say this as someone who is one of the only people in their family that went to college, and even though I never liked school much, that was always going to be the path, the way up. And when that is the path, you have to trust in the path because you don’t know any other way. And the idea that you can do the right things — you could study your butt off, you can get into the right schools — and yet, you still find yourself confronted with an economic system that maybe doesn’t have room for you or that you are not prepared for. Maybe you were preparing for a different economic system. It’s terrifying.min jin lee

It’s terrifying. And yet, I think, for me, in all of my research, I felt less terrified because I figured out some of the survival strategies of people who did the best when they didn’t have generational wealth. And the ones who really fared were the ones who decided that I would have strong family bonds, I would have strong friendships, and then, also, I will know who really loves me if I get sick or I lose my job and who I can count on. And then it was often the people who built communities.gilbert cruz

So with your two previous books, I believe you focused on one word for each of them. Your first novel, “Free Food for Millionaires,” the key word was “choice.” In “Pachinko,” your second novel, it was “home.” And as you just said, community seems to be the thing that sits at the center of this book, or one of the centers of this book, at least. No matter what happens in this diaspora, for these people, it’s community. Whether it’s around a church, whether it’s found at a hagwon or other places, that is the thing that’s going to get them through.min jin lee

Well, that was what the survival strategy is for people who have very little. When you don’t have any money but you have friends, you’re going to be OK.

When you don’t have a job and no one wants to take your calls and you still have community, you’re going to be OK. And the reason why I keep talking about this is because we are living in a time of tremendous loneliness and greater and greater isolation. And we have shifted now from the attention economy to the attachment economy. Whether you’re attached to a bot or whether you’re attached to your phone, you’re not attaching yourself to necessarily other people, not in real life. So to choose community is actually a radical gesture, but it’s actually a time-tested one.gilbert cruz

You referenced interviews, and I want to ask you in a little bit about the process that you go through to write each of your novels that involves going out into the real world and talking to people. But before we do that, I’d love if you could just talk a little bit more about the central family.min jin lee

So we have five characters. We have Helen and John. John’s a dad. Helen’s the mom. And they have three kids. The oldest is Beau, the middle child is DH, and the youngest is Mido. Bo is the big scholar, and DH is the athlete, and the youngest is the little girl, Mido. And she is a real thinker, but she’s not much of a talker. [LAUGHS] And the family really worries about her. And in Asia, they worry about her less because there, for girls to talk less, it’s not such a big deal. But when they live in Australia and in California and in New Jersey, it’s more of a big deal.

The father loses his job, at first, due to a betrayal of his best friend, who’s his boss. And the second time, he loses his job because of the IMF crisis. I’m not giving that much away because that’s the premise of the book. But in that trajectory, we find them moving from Seoul to Sydney and then to Orange County, California. And most of the book is set there.gilbert cruz

Yeah, John’s situation is a real argument for not being friends with your boss, by the way.

Tell me, just so we can dig into some of the characters specifically without giving anything away, talk to me about some of the people in this book and how that idea of community flows through them. As I said, you have this family at the core of five people, mother, father, three kids, who find themselves moving throughout the world, almost, before they end up in America, in Southern California. Tell me about this family.min jin lee

So, for example, the youngest child, Mido, has tremendous problems speaking, and she ends up in Seoul as a young person. She’s only 13 years old. And she makes a really good friend with another little girl. The other little girl, Yun, moves to California first. And but for that friendship that she makes in age 13, her family wouldn’t have actually had a landing spot in California.

And I found those kinds of stories to be so interesting, because very often, when you think about migrating from, let’s say, point A to point B or point C, whatever it is, you think, well, how did you get here? And very often, it’s my friend got me a job, my sister sponsored my immigration, my uncle gave me a loan. And it was those stories that kept on coming up over and over again in all my interviews, and I thought, oh, this is what people do because they don’t have trust funds, they don’t have generational wealth, they don’t have access to power.

And I liked learning about what the 21st century strategies were going to be because they were different. And also, what’s really interesting to me about economic crises is that when you have global economic crises, very often, they’re not really identifiable villains. Like, you can’t point to somebody and say, oh, you know what? It’s because of this person. You’re like, it’s kind of this faceless thing, the devaluation of currency. How do you handle that? But you have to handle it because you have real consequences of, oh, there’s no more money for me to go to school. There is no more job.gilbert cruz

One of the things that really stood out to me most prominently, when reading this, is how much and how precisely you write about money in this book, which, I think — and I read a lot. Other people read more than me, but in my reading of fiction and literary fiction, it’s just not only is money not really ever addressed, but money is certainly not addressed with this kind of specificity.

And furthermore, you don’t see a ton of characters who really are like, we’re working hard, and we’re working hard because we need to save this much every month in order to get to this point. And the detail through which you do that just seemed very rare to me. And I wanted to ask you about the deliberateness with which you did that.min jin lee

Most 19th century novels, which are read by regular people, or read to, to regular people — because workers were often read to when they were working — they addressed money all the time because people actually work for money. [LAUGHS] It’s nice to think that people work for fun or for meaning, but most people work for money. And I think that as a social novelist, I have to deal with it. So even though economics is not the easiest subject, I have taught myself a lot about interest rates [LAUGHS] and also how banks work or why we had a subprime mortgage crisis.

And the reason why I did that is because I thought, well, after I understand it really well, how do I make it really obvious for people who have no interest in this, and yet, our lives are being affected? If we don’t understand inheritance law, you actually can’t understand a lot of 19th century novels. And I thought, I’d better learn it.gilbert cruz

Was that fun for you?min jin lee

Some of it was fun, but it really depends on how you apply it. I think the subprime mortgage crisis was really shocking for me in terms of how it worked.gilbert cruz

What do you feel like you learned about that?min jin lee

Well, I remember, when I was younger, watching television late at night, and they would explain how you flip houses and make money. And you have these people at night selling courses, basically television hagwons, [LAUGHS] teaching the average person, hey, if you have $50,000, you, too, can become a real estate mogul — that kind of thing.

Well, that kind of thing actually led to people buying and selling houses and also accumulating an enormous amount of debt. And when the subprime mortgage crisis happened, they were part of it. And many people who took a lot of money from that system of — it was so greed-driven. It was so interesting to see the greed factoring into all the different actors, whether it was the banks, the mortgage lenders, and also, just the average person saying, you know what? If I own a house and rent it out — a lot of immigrants did this.

A lot of immigrants, their dream is to not just own their house, but to own another building in which they can actually become landlords. So looking into that, I started to see that the face of greed is actually so much more commonplace. I want to also just say, it’s not just greed. It’s also just ambition — just the ambition. And I was really moved by some of the immigrants that I spoke to, all the dreams they had attached to saving just enough to get a down payment for something.

It wasn’t that different from one of my favorite books, “A House for Mr. Biswas,” this idea that I just want to have my little place that no one can kick me out of. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s actually really human to want those things. What I found really interesting is this idea of you knew you didn’t have a job, that no money was going to come in, but then you would buy a place. [LAUGHS] No income, right?gilbert cruz

Mm-hmm.min jin lee

No down payment. And you would buy a place, and then you get really attached to it. And then someone made that loan to you. And the person who made the loan to you made a profit, those mortgage brokers.

[MUSIC PLAYING]gilbert cruz

After the break, Min Jin Lee talks about how she takes her deep, real-life research and turns it into fiction.

I hope you’re enjoying this conversation with Min Jin Lee. A quick note, if you’re not already a subscriber, it’s totally fine. You can now explore “The Times” for free without a paywall during your first month in the “New York Times” app. I think you should go check it out. Now, back to the show.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I believe this has been part of your process on previous novels, but I’d love for you to talk about this thing that you do. You go out, you interview real people. And in getting that information, you are able to thread it throughout the book. Why do you do that? And how did you go about doing that with “American Hagwon“?min jin lee

Well, I want to write about people. I want to write about society. And I usually start out by having these bigger questions about, what is education? What is wisdom? What is ambition? What are the things that you should agree to do in order to get to where you want to go? So I start with these big things, and then I go talk to people, because I have an answer in mind. And then when I go talk to people, I realize, oh, I wasn’t right about this, or, oh, I was right about this. And then, usually, it’s a distance between my question and their answers in which I usually find the drama.gilbert cruz

Who are you talking to? How are you finding these people?min jin lee

Well, and the beginning was really hard because nobody believed that I was working on a novel. [LAUGHS]gilbert cruz

It’s hard to trust people.min jin lee

It’s very hard to trust people, especially when they say they’re working on a book. So in the beginning, it was really hard. Now it’s very easy. I can pick up the phone and say, hey, I need to talk to a white collar defense lawyer, and I can usually find five or six. And then when I speak to them or I want to go visit them, then I learn quite a lot because all the different arcane processes of, let’s say, law, it’s very important to figure that out before you start plotting, I think.

I mean, there are people who don’t do those things, and I don’t how they pull it off. But I’m writing about real people, and I can be checked. And people do write to me about things and go, oh, how did you know that? It’s like, well, it’s because I spoke to a sheriff.[laughs]

And I did. I spoke to a sheriff about a jail, for example.gilbert cruz

So that sort of “I need to speak to experts in order to make sure that the details in my book have that verisimilitude,” but you’re also just talking to —min jin lee

I can never say that word.gilbert cruz

I think it’s possible I just botched it.min jin lee

No, no, you did really well. I can spell it.gilbert cruz

I cannot, but there’s also you talking to people who live in America and are part of the Korean diaspora, people who live in Korea and work at hagwons. There’s that part of it that I’m also curious about. How are you finding those people? And then how are you using that information to spark situations, or otherwise, in your novel?min jin lee

Well, when you speak to a Korean person from Brazil — and I have spoken to many Koreans from Brazil — they’re really different than Koreans from California [LAUGHS] or Koreans from Canada. And I find them because if I find one or two, usually, I can find the rest of them, because they will start referring me to people. So I’ve often noticed that I just need to have one or two. And if they enjoy the experience of sharing their stories with me, then, usually, I get the referral. And at this point, it’s not that difficult. And thus far, everyone has said they enjoyed it. [LAUGHS]gilbert cruz

So first question, how are Koreans in Brazil different from Koreans elsewhere? And two, are you asking them about their experiences in hagwons? Are you asking them about their experiences during the IMF crisis? What sort of details are you looking for? Not necessarily to use one for one in the book, but just to inform the way you’re thinking about this.min jin lee

Well, I’m a very indirect and probably a foolish interviewer, because even though I have a couple of questions ready, I often find that the gold that I need is not the gold that I wanted. G-O-L-D, [LAUGHS] not G-A-L-L.gilbert cruz

Got it, got it.min jin lee

So, for example, if I interviewed you, Gilbert, and said, how is it that you decided to go to college, like what made you want to go to college, who told you to go to college, I wouldn’t ask you that, actually. Most likely, I would ask you where you were born, which hospital, where you went to kindergarten. I know. It’s really odd. Almost all of my questions are incredibly softball questions.

And then, gradually — this never fails — we’ll end up talking about your parents. Never fails. And then you will also describe yourself, invariably, in relation to your best friend or to your sibling. That’s how people talk, at least to me. And then gradually, I’ll start to understand why you went to the college that you went to. Does that make sense?gilbert cruz

It does. So then, at what point do those stories, those details, that color, when does that start to coalesce into situation or character on the actual page?min jin lee

Oh. Well, you know what’s really important is that you can get the facts, and you can get the accuracy of something. That’s important, all the details. But you know what takes a really long time — for me, anyway — is to have the true embodiment of character through personality. So the personality of Gilbert is different than, let’s say, what you did today.

So what I did today is very different than what you — you could predict, let’s say, what would Minjin say is very different than what I might have eaten for breakfast today. And I think that for me, in order to create this entire world, I have to get all the personalities dead-on. And once I know somebody’s personality, then all the other things are really easy to figure out. Because if you really say that you are a progressive person, then I can think, and if you are a truthful person, [LAUGHS] and then your actions and your behavior match, then I’ll know exactly what you’ll do as a character.gilbert cruz

I really do want to know, though, how are Koreans in Brazil different from Koreans?min jin lee

Oh, pardon me. I’m sorry. No, I got carried away, and I digressed. So there’s a term called habitus, H-A-B-I-T-U-S. It’s a sociology term by, I think his name is Bourdieu. And I bring it up because it shows where you live and who you live with determine the way you behave and the way you speak and the decisions that you make. And I’ve always really liked this word.

And that’s my answer for why Koreans in Brazil are different because they’re basically more Brazilian. So they have these ethnic aspects of Koreans, but they act more like Brazilians. And even a small introduction to a country or a place, it’s kind like, New Yorkers from the Bronx are different than New Yorkers from Queens. And you know that.gilbert cruz

I do. I do. You and I, we’re very different.min jin lee

That’s you and me. You and I can be different in terms of the Bronx and the Queens thing, but we can be really similar in our shared enmity of people from Brooklyn. [LAUGHS]gilbert cruz

No comment. [LAUGHS]min jin lee

And I think what I really want to understand is — because people are always asking me in Korea. It’s very funny. In Korea, I get asked this question all the time. It’s like, what makes it a Korean problem or a Korean situation? And it’s funny that they’re asking me because I’m going like, you actually live in the peninsula.

And it’s so — [SIGHS] how should I say this? Korea is constantly changing every single day, but very often, immigrants are stuck in a certain point in which they left Korea, and they’re no longer in touch with that home country. But it’s very funny to me that Koreans around the world who haven’t actually been back to the country are saying things that this is the way Koreans are.

So in my experience of having met — I don’t know — let’s say, five Brazilians who are Korean — well, and many other Koreans from Brazil — that my little data set is really for me stuck on those people. So it’s really difficult for me to make generalizations, but in my experience, they were in affect, mood, and the way they discussed things in terms of time, for example, like time, or about work, very different. However, everybody so far has been very united in this idea that education is a pathway. That, they never seem to shake.gilbert cruz

Were you trying, with “American Hagwon,” to answer a question about what it means to be Korean in America? Were you trying to answer a question about what it means to believe in the value of education? Or was it about the way those things intersected? And do you think you achieved an answer of some sort?min jin lee

I think I started out by thinking about why does education mean so much to Koreans everywhere? Why is this so important? What is this attachment to this idea that education equals greater social mobility?

And then I started to think that it was really about powerlessness, how this tiny country that’s stuck in the middle of all these other superpowers were always getting beaten up. [LAUGHS] And then they were incredibly attached to the idea, this very Confucian idea, that if they educated themselves, and they were tested, then somehow they could reach power. Because the Confucian examination system is really based on if you test well, you can serve the emperor. That’s the examination system from Confucius. And it’s still prevalent today.

And even today, in South Korea, when I talk to South Koreans who have never left or who have only left a little bit, they really believe in merit. They really believe that if you take the test and you get the score, you deserve this. And it’s not the idea that we have in America. Not entirely. I think Americans really believe that you should have merit, but we don’t believe entirely that it’s only based on a test.gilbert cruz

Yeah, that was one of the things that really drove me crazy not about the book, but just about the testing system, the way you traced out in Korea. I took an SAT. I took my share of practice college admissions test and whatever, decades ago.

But the weight that is put testing, and this one particular test that you described that one of the sons of the family takes three times before he says, forget it, I’m out of here, I think my note at one point is like, what the hell is going on here? This seems like the most serious test I’ve ever come across. Why is this so important? So it’s interesting to hear you trace out how it’s not only about the test. It’s the way they think about — it suffuses itself throughout the culture.min jin lee

And they think of it as being really fair because then everybody has a shot. And the reason why hagwons disrupt this idea — and actually, hagwons were made illegal at one point in Korean history because they thought, oh, that’s not fair that other people get tutoring, and other people do, of other people don’t get it, and people do.

What I think is so interesting is that in America, even though I don’t think a person should just get anything based on a test — I don’t, just because you meet people, and you’re like, that’s just silly. You could have had a bad day. And also, in Korea, that Suneung, that one college examination is only given once a year. And it’s only given once a year out of fairness [LAUGHS] in the sense that we all have access to it, and also, that way, you wouldn’t have cheating. It’s to reduce cheating. So you have all these right-minded ideas, but then, in practice, of course, there’s all these distortions.

And in the same way, in the American system, if you don’t have a lot of money, you can’t have your kid become a great rower. And if you are a great rower, then you might have a greater chance of getting into the kinds of schools in which rowing is a sport.gilbert cruz

Sure.min jin lee

Sure. I’m not going to put down any specialized sports or excessive testing. What I really think is more interesting to me as a social novelist is that why do we deeply believe in fairness? And how do you practice it in your life? And at what point do you make accommodations because you’re a parent? Because that’s the other thing that I saw. Like, for example, I attended the Varsity Blues sentencing because of this book. It’s not in the book, but what I wanted to understand is, what makes a parent pay $100,000 for another person to take a test for the kid?gilbert cruz

All right, so —min jin lee

That’s in America. [LAUGHS]gilbert cruz

You’re a parent. You understand some of it.min jin lee

I understand some of it.gilbert cruz

You understand that the concept of — God, it would be great if the system was completely fair. And I would love for everyone to have the same opportunity. But at the end of the day, I’m responsible for this child. And it is my responsibility to give them a leg up if I can. And how does that start to push up against one’s beliefs in fairness and the idea that everyone should have the same opportunities? Is that overly idealistic? Is it naive? And when you come down to it, you can only be responsible for the child that’s in front of you.min jin lee

Well, what you just said is exactly the kinds of things that hagwon teachers see because they’re at the front line, because they’re the intermediaries of parents and students and desire and status mobility. But what’s missing in all of this is education. What’s missing in all of this is the wisdom that you want and the child actually needs.gilbert cruz

All right, that stuff.min jin lee

Oh, yeah, that stuff.gilbert cruz

Yeah, that stuff.min jin lee

The soft stuff.

And these alleged soft skills or these big themes are the things that allow us to handle tremendous disruptions in the world and also in our personal lives, like if somebody gets really sick in your family or if somebody loses a job or you have to move. And there are so many things that happen that you can’t control. Then that’s when you really have to ask yourself, well, who do you turn to, for those questions. Who do you decide to marry? When do you decide to divorce? These are really hard questions. And ideally, you want to be a wise person to handle it. And you would want those skills for your kid, too.gilbert cruz

After the break, Min talks about the sacrifices required for a good education and why the church has a prominent place in her new novel.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Do you feel like you used the various characters, maybe even intergenerationally, to tease out different philosophies about education, the way that John and Helen think about it, the way that their various kids think about it, and how their paths demonstrate different roads that you can take or different approaches to education?min jin lee

I wish I could be that good and that I could have things under control, but characters don’t always behave according to my wishes. [LAUGHS] And I know a lot of writers say this, and I think all of us would probably agree that we have this idea and things change. The only thing that I can say that does work is I have certain concepts that I really wanted to cover in this book. I wanted to cover the concept of, let’s say, the parachute child.

So the parachute kid, for those of you who may not know it — and some of you may know what this is. And they are actually all around us. These are little children who are dropped off in the United States or in English-speaking countries by, usually, East Asian or South Asian parents, and they grow up without their families under the care of guardians and homestay parents. They could be as young as nine or eight. And somebody else raises them in the hopes that they can go to the public school or the private school of that area and, more or less, have native proficiency in English and have a Western education.

And what’s interesting is that very often, these are middle-class parents. They’re not always wealthy people. But they’re doing it because they see that there’s so little opportunity back home, or they want their child to have a global — they want them to be global citizens. And I think that even though Americans, they have native fluency and they have a kind of global dominance, in many ways, as the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world, I don’t think we’re thinking that our global status is being challenged. Most other countries that are poor really would like to be in that space.

Korea is in a middle space because even though it is a globally important economy, it’s a very small country. It only has 50 million people in South Korea and 25 million in North Korea. And those who are in North Korea actually have no mobility. And it has the highest rate of slavery in the world. And they’re currently still at war. So it’s a very unstable situation. And their idea of having global citizenship, to me, it makes sense why they go through things like this, even though it may seem completely shocking to send a child abroad and pay somebody else to care for them.gilbert cruz

I must admit, to my own ignorance, I wasn’t overly familiar with the concept. I don’t know any parachute children. When you encountered the first —min jin lee

Your child actually might be going to school with these kids, but they wouldn’t talk about it. They might just say, oh, this is my grandmother.gilbert cruz

It’s very possible. It’s very possible. When I first came across it in your book, I was like, what’s going on here? This kid just lives across the world from their parents. And at first, it struck me as a terrible situation. It’s like, this kid maybe doesn’t see their parents more than once a year, if that.min jin lee

If that.gilbert cruz

And then, of course, you think of the, this is all for a sacrifice. This is all the parents going through the pain of not seeing their child, and the child vice versa going through the pain of not seeing their parents in order for the greater good. You’re playing the long game, or you’re hoping that you’re playing the long game right.min jin lee

And think of all the women who work as childcare givers in New York City, who don’t see their own children back home, all the nurses who work in the hospitals in New York City whose children live abroad.gilbert cruz

It’s the reverse situation of a family member moving to another country to send money back home. That’s —min jin lee

Right. So then I wanted to just give a context for why people make these decisions before we make judgments.gilbert cruz

You talked a little bit about community. Another place that we see that community is prominently in this book is in the church. And in the same way that I don’t necessarily feel like I see the details of money addressed all that often in fiction, I certainly don’t see the church as a community really addressed or really presented all that often either. What can you do with that as a setting? What sort of dynamics can you start to dig into that makes the church particularly fruitful for fiction? It’s just not a place I see very often, which is weird, to be honest.min jin lee

Well, every 19th century novel pretty much had a parson or a crazy bishop or a vicar. [LAUGHS] There was always a place of worship in almost all the 19th century novels because it was a third place or a fourth place for a community. And I have to say this because I think it’s true. In immigrant communities, places of worship are really important institutions and where people have their own separate world, a parallel track.

You could work as a janitor at a school and be seen as Janitor Tom, let’s say. But at a church, you might be a deeply respected person, as an elder. And your status could literally be exactly the opposite. And because of that, there’s a kind of comfort to knowing you may think I’m nothing at this school, but then this other place, I might be seen as somebody who’s a moral pillar.

And that’s actually quite common, and even though, I think, among artists and intelligentsia and academics, often, being a person of faith is considered almost regressive. But most people in the world believe in something. And I think that as a social novelist, I have to cover that.gilbert cruz

It also helps that you yourself are someone who is a person of faith.min jin lee

I am a person of faith, but it’s also —gilbert cruz

It’s not just something you’re adding as an element to deepen the layers of your social novel. It is something that you feel.min jin lee

I think that as a person of faith, I think I can represent the terrible parts about church and the parts about the church that make sense to me and also to the people who believe. There are many Christians out there doing terrible things, and there are many Christians out there doing great things, in the same way there are great New Yorkers, and there are New Yorkers who are not so great.gilbert cruz

So you started working on “American Hagwon” around the time that “Pachinko” came out. And in our last conversation a couple of years ago, when we were talking about “Pachinko,” you said that book wasn’t an immediate success. There was a bit of uncertainty in your life at the time. There’s a book that you started then. I’m wondering what it was like feeling that about “Pachinko,” which has since become a bestseller and well-loved, what it was like to just say, all right, I’m jumping into the next one here? I don’t know what’s going to happen. But what was that like? And what is it like to look back on the success of that book now?min jin lee

Oh, of “Pachinko.”

I think, the first year of “Pachinko,” it was not a success, really. It became a success in December, and much, in part, thanks to “The New York Times” and becoming a National Book Award finalist. But the first 10 months when my husband had lost his job — he lost his job on the day of my publication. It was February 7.gilbert cruz

That’s rough.min jin lee

So Meg Wolitzer, an hour at Barnes & Noble in the green room, right before the event took place at the launch, and my husband called me and said, I lost my job. And it was really, really shocking. And the only reason why I bring it up is because it took him about 10 months to find another job. And in that time, I felt this incredible economic pressure of trying to figure out how are we going to pay for college, because we hadn’t applied for financial aid. If you don’t apply before, then you can’t apply in the middle, just like that.

And I just started going out there, talking about the book. And anybody who would have, let’s say, 10 hardcovers at their house in New York, I would just go to their house, if they asked me, to talk about the book. And it never hit the lists of anything. But that experience was so helpful for me now, I see, because it gave me the ability to have, one, privacy and to think about what readers were thinking.

And I don’t expect success right away. I mean, I just have never had that. So, in a way, it teaches you about not expecting things. I don’t expect a lot of things. I just think, if it happens, great. But yeah, I’m actually used to not being invited to things. It’s nice.gilbert cruz

Well, certainly, that’s changed and will continue to change. The question is whether or not you’ll go to stuff.min jin lee

Yes, and I think maybe I won’t go to things because I realized that — if I want to go, I’ll go. But it’s not because I think it’s going to do something. And I think that’s the thing that I really hear about all the time from younger people. Like, networking. Oh, my god, the word “networking” just makes me want to — it makes me sick inside because it’s so cynical. There’s such a cynicism right now, even with high school students, about why you should do certain things, because it’ll look good.

And I realize it’s not the children’s fault. People have said this stuff to them. They’re drinking it. They’re in the ocean of cynicism. And when you think about 16-year-old Gilbert, you are really innocent because we didn’t know a lot of these things. I didn’t know hardly any of these things. And maybe I would have had a better college outcome if I had known, but I don’t know if it would have made me a better person.gilbert cruz

Yeah, I’m trying to think back. I went to a very good school, and I got there and discovered I was surrounded by people who came from wealthy families and had been to boarding schools and prep schools and other such places. And I was like, ooh, do I even know what I’m doing? I remember, at the time, I was interested in politics, and I realized all of these kids that I’m in college with are doing these unpaid internships, and I can’t afford to do that unpaid internship, and therefore, I’m not going to be able to maybe walk the path that they are in early years in government and stuff like that. It freaked me out for a while. And actually, that’s why I made the swerve into journalism, thank God.

What would you say, however — just to draw two strands together here, what is the difference between networking, as you describe it, and community, as you trace it out in your book and as you think of it? Because let’s say, they’re in the church, and the sermon is done. Everyone’s filing out. And you make sure that you walk over to this person and shake their hand because you want to be able to make that connection, because maybe there’s something that that person can help you with. Are those two different things? You used the word “cynicism.”min jin lee

Yeah. I mean, if everybody’s there for the same purpose, then the transactions are transparent. So I’m not against just meeting people. And then you’re saying, well, you have a cow, and I have a pasture. We could exchange what we — mutual needs are. That’s a different thing. However —gilbert cruz

That’s definitely the situation I’m talking about.min jin lee

I know that’s what you’re talking about.

Cows versus pasture. But the cynicism that I’m concerned with is that if you think of somebody as, oh, I need to know that person because that person can do something for me, or maybe I could do something for them, that exchange is something that you may want in business.

But as a regular human being, if all your relationships are conducted in that way, what happens if you can’t offer anything anymore, or it’s not visible to other people? Then that’s not actually a relationship that’s a true, lasting bond. And it’s certainly not what any of us really want to be loved for or known for. Like, if somebody married you on that basis — and what happens if you get sick? What happens if you get unattractive to them? What happens if you age, heaven forbid? [LAUGHS] Right?gilbert cruz

Not familiar with that concept.min jin lee

No, of course not. [LAUGHS] The ageless comfort.

So for me, I wanted to know, well, how do you survive catastrophe, economic catastrophe, educational catastrophe? Who’s really there for you? And those bonds survive disaster.gilbert cruz

I’d like to ask you a very direct, possibly sensitive question, but I think given the topic of this book, it’s not, which is, you took about 10 years to write this book. How do you support yourself while you’re doing that?min jin lee

Well, I speak. I teach. I’ve written screenplays. I’ve done so many things. At one point, I had four or five jobs.gilbert cruz

Really?min jin lee

Yeah. [LAUGHS] I have.gilbert cruz

It’s not just, oh, I’m riding high on the money I made from the last book, or anything like that?min jin lee

No, no. I mean, for example, when I sell a book in England for “Pachinko” and for “Free Food for Millionaires,” it’s about 60 pence per book that I sell, that I make. Those are my royalties. And actually, it’s less for certain countries.gilbert cruz

That’s not even enough for a bag of Smarties.min jin lee

[LAUGHS]: Oh, my gosh, Smarties. I forgot about Smarties.gilbert cruz

You were working on another book that I think you have publicly said is related to your three previous novels. What are you telling us about this book?min jin lee

I started it. I started it.gilbert cruz

Good job.min jin lee

Yeah, thank you. It’s called “Marshall Plan.” And it’s about the Koreans from Korea who went to Germany to work as nurses and miners. There are about 20,000 of them. And it was based on a treaty that the South Korean government and the West German government had. And it’s about those folks. And they sent remittances of deutschmarks back to South Korea when South Korea was an unbelievably poor country, because this was right after the war. I mean, about 15 years. And it’s a very, very nascent democracy, but not really. It’s really more of an authoritarian government.

And I’m also writing about the Koreans who are more middle class, who sent their children to Europe to become artists, where they learned how to become musicians and singers and filmmakers and photographers. And some of them were quite wealthy. And I’m also writing about the women who come to America, specifically Texas and the Maryland area, who married GIs. And they sponsored a whole path of immigration to other Koreans.gilbert cruz

You’re writing about a lot, Min. Those all for one book?min jin lee

I know. I know. Well, it’s based on this one idea, remittances and rebuilding. Because the Marshall Plan, to me, was the greatest thing that America did in the 20th century. Post-war, we did not punish a country that did a terrible, evil thing. Instead, we said we were going to reinvest. And it helped all of Europe, and it also helped America.

And the word “Marshall Plan” is often used. I mean, the words “Marshall Plan,” or the term, is often used as anything that is an act of generosity, that rebuilds something. But what we don’t focus on is how immigrants or migrants go to a place, and those remittances rebuild their home country, and how they don’t get credit. So I wanted to write about that. That’s my fourth book. And then I’m done, Gilbert. I will not [LAUGHS] bother my readers anymore.gilbert cruz

Just go out on top —min jin lee

I hope so.gilbert cruz

— I think is the way to do it. This conversation we just had was wonderful and delightful. Min Jin Lee, author of the new novel “American Hagwon,” this was great, as always. Thank you for coming on.min jin lee

Thanks so much, Gilbert.

[MUSIC PLAYING]gilbert cruz

“The Book Review” is produced by Sarah Diamond, Amy Pearl, and Patricia Sulbarán. It’s mixed by Pedro Rosado. Original music by Dan Powell and Elisheba Ittoop. Special thanks to Dahlia Haddad. We want to hear what you think about the show. So send us an email at thebookreview@nytimes.com. I’m Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.




For Min Jin Lee, the process of writing fiction usually begins with a deep dive into reality. She spends years researching, traveling and interviewing people.

That process underscored her belief that education was a common and central value for Koreans in diaspora. But it was also a complicated value, one that often resulted in extreme competitiveness and impossible expectations.

In her new novel, “American Hagwon,” she tells the story of the Kohs, a middle-class family of five. The parents are fixated on attaining the best possible education for their children, thinking it will guarantee success and upward mobility. But when the 1997 Asian financial crisis hits, they find themselves having to start over as immigrants in America.

Image
Credit...Cardinal Publishing, via Associated Press

This week, Lee returns to “The Book Review” podcast to talk about how education and community play out across her sprawling new novel, which our critic Alexandra Jacobs said “demands to be pressed into friends’” hands.



Below is a transcript of the conversation. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Cruz: The title of your book is “American Hagwon.” I’d love for you to unpack what is a hagwon, and why you thought it was a good nucleus around which to build this story about education.

Lee: “Hagwon” is the Korean word for learning center. A lot of people think of it as something for kids. But in Korea, adults go to hagwons to learn how to tap dance, to become an opera singer, for piano lessons, in order to learn how to speak better. There are all sorts of hagwons. I wanted to illustrate the real deep faith in education and self-improvement that Koreans have.

Cruz: It’s bookended by two financial crises, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and then everything that happened in America and around the world around 2007, 2008. Why did you think that was a particularly fruitful period to tell?

Lee: The historical event that most modern Koreans are deeply affected by today is not the Korean War. And it’s not colonization. It’s actually the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The Korean currency was so devalued that the national economy was basically in default. And, as a consequence, people lost their jobs. Many people lost their homes. Many people committed suicide. If you lacked generational wealth, you couldn’t ride out the storm of your dad losing his job or mom losing her job. You’re losing your house, you are having to move out.



So I thought, I really need to address this because it affects the modern psyche. It caused a kind of hysterical anxiety about education and it made Korean people feel like, “Ooh, we need to be even more global than we thought we had to be.” The neoliberal practices of the West, austerity and the elimination of lifetime employment all became accepted into South Korea. So not only did you, as a young person, have to become globally competitive, you had to realize that you didn’t have any of these safety nets that you thought you had. And then, of course, 2008 is a global financial crisis.

I wanted to illustrate what it’s like to educate a family and still believe that if you have a Western education, then you’re going to be safe, when actually there are economic shocks which happen to perfectly decent people every day. Terrible things happen to good people. And I wanted to show what that means if you only trust in a formal education.

Video


Behind South Korea’s Competitive Education System



1:23
On “The Book Review” podcast, Min Jin Lee, the author of “Pachinko” and “American Hagwon,” explains how losing social safety nets after 1997 reshaped Korean culture into an intense educational race.


Cruz: It’s scary. I say this as someone who is one of the only people in their family that went to college. And when that is the path, you have to trust in it, because you don’t know any other way.

Lee: It’s terrifying, and yet in all of my research, I felt less terrified because I figured out some of the survival strategies of people who did the best when they didn’t have generational wealth. It was often the people who built communities. When you don’t have any money, but you have friends, you’re going to be OK. When you don’t have a job and no one wants to take your calls and you still have community, you are going to be OK. To choose community is actually a radical gesture. But it’s actually a time-tested one.



Cruz: Talk to me about how that idea of community flows in this book.

Lee: When you think about migrating from point A to point B or point C, you think, “How did you get here?” And very often it’s, “My friend got me a job. My sister sponsored my immigration. My uncle gave me a loan.” And I thought, this is what people do because they don’t have trust funds, they don’t have generational wealth, they don’t have access to power. What’s really interesting to me about economic crises is that they’re not really identifiable villains. You can’t point to somebody; it’s this faceless thing, like the devaluation of currency. How do you handle that? But you have to handle it.

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Ms. Lee at the The New York Public Library’s 2021 Library Lions Gala.Credit...Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times


Cruz: You go out, you interview real people, and in getting that information, you’re able to sort of thread it throughout the book. Why do you do that?

Lee: I want to write about people. I want to write about society. And I usually start out by having these bigger questions, like, “What is education? What is wisdom? What is ambition?” Usually it’s the distance between my question and their answers in which I find the drama.

Cruz: Were you trying to answer a question about what it means to be Korean in America? Or what it means to believe in the value of education?



Lee: I started out by thinking about why education means so much to Koreans. And then I started to think that it was really about powerlessness. This tiny country that’s stuck in the middle of all these other superpowers, always getting sort of beaten up. And then they were attached to the idea, this very Confucian idea, that if they educated themselves and they were tested, then somehow they could reach power. Because the Confucius examination system is really based on, if you test well, you can serve the emperor. That’s the examination system from Confucius. And it’s still prevalent today.

When I talk to South Koreans who have never left or who have only left a little bit, they really believe in merit. They really believe that if you take the test and you get the score, you deserve this. It’s not the idea that we have in America, not entirely. I think Americans believe that you should have merit, but we don’t believe entirely that it’s only based on a test.

What I really think is interesting to me as a social novelist is, why do we deeply believe in fairness? How do you practice it in your life? And at what point do you make accommodations because you’re a parent? For example, I attended the Varsity Blues sentencing because I wanted to understand what makes a parent pay $100,000 for another person to take a test for the kid? That’s in America!

Video


Min Jin Lee Says Choosing Community Is Radical



0:38
Min Jin Lee, the author of “American Hagwon,” joined “The Book Review” podcast to talk about how building bonds and community can be a strategy for survival.


Cruz: Do you feel like you used the various characters to tease out different philosophies about education?



Lee: I have certain concepts that I wanted to cover, like the concept of the “parachute” child. These are little children who are dropped off in the United States or in English-speaking countries and grow up without their families and under the care of guardians and home stay parents. They can be as young as 8 or 9. And somebody else raises them in the hopes that they can have a Western education.

Korea is in a middle space. It only has 50 million people in South Korea, and 25 million in North Korea, and those who are in North Korea actually have no mobility. It has the highest rate of slavery in the world, and they’re currently still at war. So it’s a very unstable situation. It makes sense to me why they go through things like this, even though it may seem completely shocking to send a child abroad and pay somebody else to care for them.

Cruz: Another place that we see community prominently in this book is in the church. What sort of dynamics can you start to dig into that makes the church particularly fruitful for fiction?

Lee: In immigrant communities, places of worship are really important institutions and where people have their own separate world, a parallel track. Like, you could work as a janitor at a school. And be seen as janitor Tom, let’s say, but at a church, you might be a deeply respected person as an elder, and your status could be exactly the opposite. And even though I think among artists and academics very often, being a person of faith is considered almost regressive, most people in the world believe in something.

Cruz: You’re working on another book that I think you have publicly said is related to your three previous novels.



Lee: It’s called “Marshall Plan,” and it’s about Koreans who went to Germany to work as nurses and miners on a treaty. Those folks sent remittances of Deutsche marks back to South Korea when South Korea was an unbelievably poor country. And I’m also writing about the women who come to America, specifically Texas and the Maryland area, who marry G.I.s. And they sponsored a whole path of immigration to other Koreans.

We don’t focus on how immigrants or migrants go to a place and those remittances rebuild their home country, and they don’t get credit. So I wanted to write about that. That’s my fourth book. And then I’m done. (Laughs)
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