A grey-haired woman who manages a video-rental shop comes into the luxury goods store three doors down, embarrassed to be there at all. Her only son is getting married. She has been putting money aside for his bride since before he had a girlfriend. The saleswoman shows her pearl studs first, then diamonds, and quietly steers her away from the larger stones that would swallow the whole envelope. The customer asks, barely audibly, whether there might be a discount. She pays in cash the next day. It is a few pages in a very long novel, and it holds the method of American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee entire: ordinary people, exactly priced, treated with unembarrassed seriousness.
Fifteen Years, Four Countries, One Ledger
The Kohs are a Korean family who keep landing in the wrong place at the wrong time. The novel opens in 1992, when the father’s employer recalls him from Sydney to Seoul and three American-born children are dropped into a school system that has moved years ahead of them in mathematics. It closes in 2007, by which point the family has been remade twice by forces none of them chose: a corporate betrayal, and then a currency crisis that arrives in Book Two and hollows out everything the parents have built.
What holds the fifteen years of American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee together is not plot so much as accounting. Lee is interested in the actual price of things, and she keeps the figures on the page. A teacher’s envelope. Hagwon fees that would swallow a mother’s entire salary. A weekly wage paid in cash because immigration paperwork is pending. A son who orders the cheapest pasta on the menu because his mother taught him what to do when someone else is paying. Few contemporary novelists write money this well, and none write work better. The Koh parents are not defined by their suffering; they are defined by what they do at eight o’clock in the morning, six days a week, for fifteen years.
The Exam That Eats a Young Man
The finest sustained passage in American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee belongs to the eldest son. Bo wants a place at a particular Seoul university and sits the national entrance exam three times to get it. He lives in a pay-by-the-week motel among transient students and day workers, eats instant noodles in a shared kitchen, and is coached by a celebrated tutor who hands him a coin for luck and tells him to sit in cafés near the campus so he can inhabit the mind of an admitted student.
Min Jin Lee is careful to make the thing that derails him not laziness or nerves but decency, and equally careful to show the arithmetic of the years he has spent. What she is dramatising is a system that converts a good student’s stubbornness into waste, and the last touch, what he does with the lucky coin afterwards, is the single best gesture in the novel. The eventual answer to his three failed attempts arrives much later, through a psychology class and a fifty-year-old paper on human motivation, and readers who like watching a character acquire the vocabulary for his own life will find it enormously satisfying.
The Trouble with Min Jin Lee’s Villain
Set against all that patience is a figure who seems to have walked in from a different book. The young woman who destroys the father’s career is brilliant, beautiful, insatiable and essentially without interior weather. Where every other character in American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee receives the courtesy of being understood, including a housekeeper who appears for three pages and a nail technician with a name tag, she is rendered from outside as appetite and strategy. Her scenes carry a great deal of sexual content that quickly stops being informative, and a late storyline built around her resolves through newspaper reports rather than through anyone’s heart.
It is a real flaw in a book this ambitious, and worth naming plainly, because the rest of the novel is so scrupulous about refusing easy judgements. The same author who cannot resist making this woman a monster also writes a philandering husband, an absent father who runs to Brazil, and a wife who will not grant a divorce, all three with genuine sympathy.
A few other reservations for a group choosing it:
It is enormous, and large stretches advance nothing but the ledger.
Several threads resolve in summary in the final hundred pages.
The hagwon owner’s speeches, which carry the novel’s thesis, occasionally slip into lecture.
There is a great deal of sex, most of it joyless by design, which will not suit every reader.
What Min Jin Lee Is Actually Arguing
The clearest statement in American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee comes from a hagwon owner who faces a hall of five hundred parents and tries to talk them out of the story they have all been raised on: the folk hero who is cleverer, braver and more gifted than everyone else, and who saves his family through sheer exceptionalism. His point is that a legend makes a terrible target for a real child. Lee lets him say it well, then shows us the parents listening, understanding perfectly and remaining unconvinced, because their children still have to compete for a fixed number of seats.
That refusal to resolve is the integrity of the whole book. It never claims education is a scam, and it never claims it is salvation. It claims something harder: that a system can be unfair, that individual people inside it can be decent, and that both facts can be true on the same afternoon.
Readers who want more in this key should look at Flashlight by Susan Choi, where a household’s refusal to speak about one night stretches over three generations and two continents, or Happiness Falls by Angie Kim, which puts a Korean American household under pressure and listens hard to the child everyone underestimates. Groups wanting something shorter and much darker on contemporary Korea could try Molka by Monika Kim. Lee’s own earlier novels, Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, share this one’s long view and its moral patience.
Final Thoughts
There are more than two hundred thousand words in American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee, and a reader will feel every one of them in the middle third. There are also perhaps a dozen scenes of the kind most novelists manage once a career: a mother counting sugar cubes for a patient who no longer knows her, a father putting on a borrowed uniform with another man’s name stitched on the pocket, a child who has taught herself not to need anything.
American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee is flawed in ways that matter and generous in ways that matter more. It closes on an ordinary weeknight, two people at a kitchen table with a newspaper and an ice cream, and after everything that has come before, that quiet is the argument.