Min Jin Lee Spent a Decade on 'American Hagwon' — and Says Education Is No Guarantee

Min Jin Lee's new novel "American Hagwon" arrived nearly a decade after her 2017 bestseller "Pachinko," a National Book Award finalist that has sold more than 5 million copies and became an Apple TV series. Lee, the New York state author laureate, spoke to guest interviewer Aarti Shahani, host of the podcast Art of Power, on NPR's Fresh Air.

"American Hagwon" follows the Koh family from South Korea to Australia and the United States across the early 1990s, the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the start of the global financial crisis in 2007. The novel's premise: the family's faith that education will save the next generation, and the steady erosion of that faith.

A hagwon, Lee explained, is "the Korean word for learning center in which you pay money to learn a skill" — from ballroom dancing to English classes for four-year-olds. "Wherever you have Koreans, you're going to find hagwons."

Why does South Korea lead the world in graduates?

Shahani cited a figure of 71% of young South Korean adults holding college degrees — the highest rate in the developed world, against roughly a third in the U.S. Lee attributed it to the post-IMF-crisis push away from working-class life and to education's long role in social mobility. The upside, she said, is South Korea's economic and cultural ascendancy; the downside is a structural mismatch.

"Our economies today, especially advanced economies, don't generate as many jobs as we have college graduates," Lee said. "And, of course, that's going to cause a lot of social problems."

She also drew a direct line between this culture of self-improvement and K-pop. Hallyu — Korean soft power — is, she noted, "a government construction from the '60s and '70s," backed today by tax breaks, licensing negotiations and institutional support.

What does the novel say about playing by the rules?

The Kohs follow the received wisdom — school, degree, job, house — and it keeps failing them. "I think getting an education is terrific," Lee said. "But in terms of a guarantee, well, I know that's not true."

The family is deliberately functional. Over ten years of research, Lee said, the people without generational wealth who survived economic storms "were the ones who had the strongest family bonds," relying on two strategies: sacrifice and sequencing — one family member educates first, then supports the others.

The novel also gives voice to Asian American resentment over admissions. Lee, a former lawyer, rejected the framing of an unfair hand: "What I really don't like is the lying." She criticized the term "overrepresented" and schools that won't say plainly that they don't want an entirely Asian American class. "Don't tell a child they have a bad personality," she said.

One plot choice has already drawn attention: the antagonist makes a false MeToo claim. Lee said she had met a woman who admitted doing exactly that, and felt compassion for her even so — "both sides were absolutely wrong here." She began the book before #MeToo entered public discourse.

What does Australia offer that America doesn't?

Lee chose Australia deliberately. Its HECS loan scheme, she said, lets students repay nominal debts automatically only once employed: "Nobody complains about HECS. I think we should have something like that in America." She added nationalized healthcare and compulsory voting — with its election-day "sausage sizzle" — as models.

Lee, born in South Korea and raised in Elmhurst, Queens, from 1976, commuted four hours round-trip to the Bronx High School of Science. She traced her resilience to that working-class, polyglot borough.

Her decade-long method is research-heavy — interviews across South Korea, Australia and the U.S., spanning "everything from national bankruptcy to female sexuality to the restaurant profit margins on frying shrimp" — followed by a full rewrite from page one. The ruler scene in the novel happened to her at age six in Korea; decades later her mother revealed the teacher had come to the house asking for money. "It was a shakedown," Lee said.

She counts two books left: a novel, "Marshall Plan," about Korean miners and nurses in West Germany, Korean artists in Europe and Korean women who married GIs; and a memoir, "Name Recognition," on why the people we love most are rarely famous.