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.
“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.
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 Korea 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.”
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.
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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 – Pachniko came to life. “Literary fiction must incorporate those stories,” she says. “Writing about work is something that social novelists must do.”
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.
