American Hagwon

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic: a masterpiece by turns sweeping and intimate, that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty.

Min Jin Lee brings grand ambition, fierce heart, and the tenderest hope to a novel I didn't want to end." --Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger

In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children--Bo, DH, and Mido--find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John's oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California--where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children's futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other's lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.

In American Hagwon , Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice--for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers--is a kind of prayer.

An immersive, engrossing novel ... this is panorama told in brilliant detail." --Colm Tóibín, bestselling author of Long Island and Brooklyn

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In her third "Diaspora Quartet" novel, the much-anticipated follow-up to New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist Pachinko, Lee delivers a masterpiece of contemporary intergenerational storytelling. The book follows the Koh family from 1992 to 2007, through the 1997 IMF financial crisis and across continents. From Seoul to Sydney to Southern California, the storyline explores the intimate, familial, and cultural changes that affect a family and its communities. John and Helen Koh endure upheaval after John suffers a devastating personal and professional betrayal. Financially comfortable until this blow and the ensuing financial crisis, the Koh family struggles to find its footing in Southern California until the successful launch of an American version of a hagwon, a private tutoring center for students seeking to excel in extremely competitive educational landscapes. In the U.S, the Kohs find a niche for educational preparation tailored to Korean students adapting to local requirements. Tensions between perceptions of success in education, business, and life, and the ethos behind a system that's meant to level the playing field come to the surface. VERDICT Intensely compelling with lovingly crafted character arcs, Lee's latest cements her place in the literary pantheon. For fans of Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half and Jacqueline Woodson's Red at the Bone.--Julie Kane

Publishers Weekly Review

Lee returns nine years after Pachinko with an illuminating saga of ambition, education, and familial duty. In 1992 Seoul, John Koh loses his job at a prestigious trading firm after a woman he fired at the behest of his boss wrongly accuses him of attempted rape. He finagles a new post in Sydney with the same firm but for lower pay, and his wife, Helen, works in retail to help keep up with tuition costs for their younger son, DH, at Yale and their daughter, Mido, at the University of Sydney. Meanwhile, their older son, Bo, has become a tutor in California at a hagwon after-school academy for students with their sights set on top high schools and colleges. After the Asian financial crisis hits in 1997, eliminating John's and Helen's jobs, they start over in California, where they take menial jobs and Mido, pausing her education, joins Bo at the hagwon. Hardworking and sharp Mido helps the hagwon expand, but she's dismayed by her students' single-minded focus on achievement over learning. Lee's exposition-heavy style feels a bit flat compared to her previous novel, but she writes with precision and keen insights into her characters' obsession with education and the cost of their sacrifices. Patient readers will find much to ponder. (Sept.)

Booklist Review

The third title in Lee's Diaspora Quartet arrives almost a decade after the international phenomenon Pachinko (2017), preceded by Free Food for Millionaires (2007). The final installment, Marshall Plan, is in the works as well as a memoir, Name Recognition. In this immersive masterpiece, Lee takes on Korea's all-consuming obsession with education. At the core of her intricate epic is the Koh family: Korean-born parents John and Helen, their New Jersey-born sons Bo and DH, and daughter Mido. The novel opens in 1992 when the Kohs have recently moved from Australia to Seoul, where getting into the right hagwon, or after-school cram school, irrevocably determines the direction of each of their lives. Bo struggles alone in Seoul far too long; DH returns to elite U.S. institutions through the generosity of a new friend's family; and Mido, with the least schooling, likely has the clearest understanding of what a genuine education should be. Betrayal scatters the family to Australia, then to southern California, and back again to Korea. In between, John and Helen suffer and sacrifice; Helen's sister, Sonya, succumbs to decades of longing; payback topples John's former boss and his philandering lover; and Mido falls in love with the man she'll likely never marry. Beyond irresistible storytelling, Lee expertly confronts broken systems, familial expectations, and peripatetic identities with empathy and brilliance. HIGH-DEMAND

Kirkus Book Review

A sweeping tale of family and fortune in the Korean diaspora, 1992-2007. From the author of National Book Award finalistPachinko (2017) comes a generational saga set in Seoul, Sydney, and California's Orange County, more than 650 pages of majestically plotted, show-don't-tell storytelling, proceeding scene by scene through the lives of its vividly drawn characters. At its center is the Koh family--parents Helen and John, sons Bo and DH, daughter Mido. When we first meet them, they have just moved back to Seoul from Australia at the behest of John's employers. Helen is worried that her youngest child's excessively quiet manner is a sign of trouble; John's biggest problem is that Shin, his superior at work and longtime best friend, is having an affair with one of their employees, which has begun to cloud his judgment. When quiet Mido makes a friend at school who will change her luck, when John is forced into a grave error by Shin's shortsightedness, stories are set in motion that will unfold for years to come. The struggle for security looms large as the fallout from John's mistake is compounded by the 1997 Asian financial crisis, resulting in a lasting and severe change in the family's status. The destinies of the Koh children and their peers revolve around the institution of the hagwon, private tutoring schools that are the cornerstone of the Korean obsession with academic excellence. Bo, DH, and Mido will eventually work together at the American hagwon of the title, but they struggle with the outlandish pressure placed on students to succeed. Through masterfully controlled storytelling, Lee patiently explores how her large group of characters' fortunes are shaped by forces from without and within: the powerful lure of sex, the sucking vacuum of greed, the insidiousness of racism, the obligations between parents and children. What makes a good life? The author's wisdom is a gift to her readers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.