The Education of Min Jin Lee

The first indication that Min Jin Lee needn't be hurried to interview me came when she, the bestselling author, descended the creaky stairs of her five-story Harlem townhouse and correctly pronounced my name. On a Friday afternoon in August, Lee's pronunciation resonated with the way my parents spoke the name to me. The next notable moment was when Lee, dressed in a gray vest and jeans with delicate drop earrings, shared her personal experiences with a vivacious vocabulary.

She recounted her role in the landmark case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, as she conducted nearly a decade of research for her latest novel, American Hagwon. As a supporter of affirmative action, Lee witnessed testimony filled with stereotypical portrayals of Asian American students, including the dehumanizing phrase "machines."

"I sat there in the press box, and I remember thinking, this whole idea that Asian Americans have shitty personalities—that’s really shitty," Lee recalled, her voice intensifying. "It’s a really shitty thing to say. Also, we’re talking about children." Her passionate condemnation of racial stereotyping, including the derogatory term "tiger parenting," was deeply satisfying. Lee's warm laughter echoed in the sumptuously adorned living room as I shared the memory with her.

American Hagwon, Lee's third novel, follows her previous work, Pachinko, a sweeping historical narrative that earned her a National Book Award finalist. Pachinko traced four generations of a Korean family through war, discrimination, and cruelty in Japanese-occupied Korea and Japan. In contrast, American Hagwon focuses on contemporary times, exploring a multigenerational family drama and broader themes of the human costs of unyielding ambition.

Lee's decision to explore education as the central theme in her latest novel stemmed from a desire to address what she deemed most important to Koreans worldwide. Hagwons, Korean for-profit tutoring academies, serve as a central motif in American Hagwon. These academies provide classes from elementary school through high school, with a focus on courses aimed at boosting test scores for college entrance exams.

Lee's research led her to recognize both the positive and negative aspects of hagwons. On one hand, they can resemble cutthroat environments where relentless ambition leads to personal misery for students and their parents. On the other hand, hagwons also function as community centers and de facto daycare centers for Korean American families in the United States, offering support in a country lacking adequate childcare.

Lee's empathetic storytelling and thorough research paint a nuanced picture of hagwons, emphasizing their role as an ethnic solution to a state problem in a society that lacks proper childcare infrastructure.