Min Jin Lee Returns with American Hagwon, Third Book in Diaspora Quartet

Min Jin Lee's new novel American Hagwon runs to 650 pages and spans nearly three decades, from Seoul to Sydney to California and back to Seoul again. The book is the third in what Lee has called her Diaspora Quartet, and it follows 2017's Pachinko, recently named one of the New York Times's top 100 books of the 21st century.

At the novel's centre stands the Koh family: John, Helen and their three children, Bo, DH and Mido. When the story opens in 1992, the family lives a comfortably middle-class life in Korea. John works as a senior manager at a multinational corporation. Helen is an upmarket saleswoman whose commissions cover the children's hagwon fees.

What are hagwons, and why do they matter?

Hagwons are private after-school academies. Korean parents pay hefty sums each year to send their children there, where evenings and weekends are spent drilling mathematics, reasoning and essay technique. One character in the novel states the stakes plainly: "An excellent hagwon is everything."

Lee presents the fierce competition for places at the best academies as symptomatic of Korea's scarcity mindset. In a country where university places and white-collar jobs are hard to come by, everyone is looking for an edge.

What happens to the Koh family?

The family's stability does not last. First a personal betrayal capsizes them. Then, in a brutal one-two, the financial crisis that clobbered Asia in the late 1990s strikes again. The family moves, then moves once more.

Sometimes they move together. More often they follow their own trajectories. They remain connected, supporting one another as opportunity and need ebb and flow between them across continents.

What does the novel mean beyond its plot?

Over the course of its 650 pages, the hagwons come to stand for more than cram schools. Lee lets them accumulate meanings: country and culture; failure and success; responsibility, or the lack of it; what it means to achieve; and what, in the final analysis, the purpose of our achievements might be.

The reviewer at the Guardian describes the book as "a gloriously immersive follow-up to Pachinko" — praise that will carry weight with readers of the earlier novel, which secured Lee's place on the NYT's landmark list of the century's best books.

What does this change for Lee's readers?

The Quartet now stands one book from completion. Readers who followed Pachinko into 20th-century Korean history now have a contemporary successor that turns from that novel's broad historical sweep toward the pressures of modern Korean life: education, migration and money. The remaining volume of the Diaspora Quartet will determine the shape of Lee's project as a whole.