“Smell that?” The novelist Min Jin Lee closed her eyes and drew in a breath. Garlic, ginger, turmeric, old floor polish, stale sweat, rat poison, glass cleaner, oregano. “It doesn’t smell like that on the Upper East Side,” she said with a laugh.
We were standing in the foyer of the apartment building on Van Kleeck Street, in Queens, where Lee lived with her parents and two sisters after they arrived from Korea in 1976. Everything looked the same: the dull metal mailboxes, the checkered linoleum in the hallway, the dusty glass wall facing the street. Only the names marking the buzzers had changed. In Lee’s childhood, they were mostly Irish, Greek and Eastern European. Now they were mostly Latino, Korean and Chinese.
The first thing that struck Lee about her new home was its ugliness. In Seoul, her mother kept their home impeccable. In Queens, their first rental was a one-bedroom furnished with grimy rugs, roaches and mice. Even at 7 years old, she understood that her family’s move to New York meant that they’d come down in the world.
In Seoul, they lived in a comfortable house in a middle-class neighborhood. Her father worked as a marketing executive. Her mother, who had studied music at Korea’s prestigious Yonsei University, taught children piano. But her father, who lost his home and most of his family as a teenager during the Korean War of the 1950s, feared that the violence of the Vietnam War might spread to South Korea and hurt his children. A relative in New York sponsored the family for visas, and they decamped for America, where her parents eventually found work in a wholesale jewelry shop in Midtown Manhattan. Every morning except Sunday they left the apartment at 6 to catch the subway, while the girls readied themselves for school alone.
For Lee, the move proved a social nightmare. In Korea, she’d been a peaceful introvert, the kind of child who often sat alone daydreaming. In America, she became a target. Tall, shy, not yet fluent in English, dressed in hand-me-downs, she was bullied ruthlessly for five years, starting in second grade.
“I was like a mark,” Lee recalled. “It was just like, You want to pick the big, goofy, quiet one.” Terrified, she turned nearly mute in public.
At home, though she was loved, she also felt there was something wrong with her. Her two sisters immediately tested into top academic classes, while she was tracked into the lowest classes for two years. Her father nicknamed her Turtle.
She had one superpower. At the age of 3, Lee taught herself to read. And in Queens, she discovered America’s great, humble treasure: the public library system. For an immigrant girl with no money, nowhere to go and no friends besides her sisters, the existence of a place that would lend her as many books as she wanted — for free! — was paradise. She read endlessly, rolling volumes home in a collapsible shopping cart. “A book only gives,” she explained to me. As a girl reading, she felt “infinite.” She became especially well versed in the classics of American and European literature, because those were the books the librarians recommended.
Now 57, Lee is considered one of the most important novelists of her generation — and a torch bearer for the great 19th-century tradition of social realism. Like George Eliot, she has a gift for combining intimate character portraits with sweeping macroeconomic narratives. Like Charles Dickens, she seems determined to expose the indignities of poverty and the resilience needed to survive them.
But even as she inherited her tools from these social realists, she uses them in modern ways to chronicle the lives of Koreans around the world. She set her first novel, “Free Food for Millionaires” (2007), among the Korean diaspora in New York City. The book’s central character, Casey Han, lives on Van Kleeck Street, until she escapes to Princeton and Manhattan. Lee’s second novel, “Pachinko” (2017), is a saga about four generations of Koreans. Set in colonial and post-colonial Japan, the novel is grounded in interviews that Lee conducted with elderly Koreans around Osaka and Tokyo. For her, “Pachinko” was a passion project; she never believed that it would find a big readership. After it was published, however, the novel became a global best seller and a critical sensation. In 2024, The New York Times Book Review ranked “Pachinko” No. 15 on its “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.”
“The fact that I can make that interesting to a general audience is really just a testament to what all those dead writers have taught me,” Lee told me. Her third novel, “American Hagwon,” debuted this month. Set in Korea, Australia and California during the years surrounding the Asian financial crisis of 1997, it contains more than a dozen characters from several interconnected families. The word “hagwon” means “private tutoring center” in Korean, and the novel examines how an unbridled obsession with gaining admission to name-brand universities may damage both parents and children. Among the book’s characters are parents who erase their savings paying for hagwons, teachers who coach SAT prep at hagwons and a young girl whose parents abandon her in California with the expectation that she will study hard, get accepted to U.C.L.A. and become a doctor — so that she can save her family in Korea from poverty.
For Lee, fiction has always been a way to wrestle with big social and historical dilemmas. Unlike many novelists, she begins her books with ideas and issues, not characters and scenes. Her chosen medium — the class-crossing realist narrative — has a long history as a weapon of social critique. Edith Wharton used it to savage the hypocrisies of old-money New York. Upton Sinclair used it to provoke reform in the slaughterhouses of Chicago. In “American Hagwon,” Lee herself is trying to shift the way we understand the purpose of higher education and to demonstrate how seemingly crazy behavior, like dropping off a 9-year-old in a foreign country, may be driven by a tremendous sense of fear and economic impotence.
When I asked Lee about the possibility of writing as a form of self-expression, she winced. “That’s not even interesting to me,” she said. “It sounds sort of corny, but if I didn’t think that these stories had value to my reader, I would never share it. Never.”
“History has failed us, but no matter.” The first line of “Pachinko” is a declaration of resilience and defiance, the pronouncement of someone who knows the score yet still forges ahead. The sentence is often interpreted as an indictment of the way historians tend to ignore the less-documented lives of the poor and the defeated. It may also be read as a wry summary of Lee’s own journey to “Pachinko.”
In college, she never planned on becoming a novelist. Her great intellectual romance, discovered at the Bronx High School of Science, was with history. For her, history was a way of trying to understand how the world worked, and how the circumstances of the present day were created by decisions made in the past. At Yale, she was mesmerized by the lectures given in the department’s survey courses, and she fantasized about getting a doctorate in the subject.
Inspired by classes that she took in African American studies and women’s studies, Lee spearheaded a campaign to persuade Yale to offer courses in Korean language and history. She had the ingenious idea of asking students to petition their parents for the changes rather than plead with the administration directly. One of these parents, she said, ultimately raised $100,000 for a pilot program. More than 20 years later, Yale still teaches Korean language as a result of these efforts.
Despite this triumph, Lee’s affair with history ended badly. During her junior year, the university finally offered the class on Korean history that she’d longed for. But when the professor returned her midterm exam, she felt socked. Lee’s blue book, she told me, contained no guiding corrections or annotations. On its last page, there was only one handwritten line — “Ah, me, what’s to say?” — next to the letter F.
Most of the students crying near her in class that day were Asian. So Lee asked the professor, a white man who specialized in Japanese history, for a demographic breakdown of the grades. When he presented it at the following class, it was clear that most of the students he’d failed were, in fact, Asian. The reason, he said, was that they were STEM majors. Outraged by his assumptions, Lee published an article in a campus newspaper detailing the incident. It raised a furor at Yale. A white student labeled her a politically correct “terrorist.” After that, she told me, students and professors in the history department regarded her as a troublemaker.
“I think my heartbreak was proportionate with how much I really wanted the class, which sounds so dorky,” Lee told me. She wasn’t worried about her grades. What she wanted was to be treated with respect. She passed the class, but after the scandal she couldn’t stomach approaching any professor in the department for a recommendation to a doctoral program.
Instead, Lee pivoted to a practical future: She went to law school at Georgetown. There she fell in love with a bank salesman, Christopher Duffy. For a year, she hid the relationship from her parents because Duffy is half-Japanese. “If you marry him, you are not my daughter,” her father said, when she told him that they were engaged. But Duffy was the kindest man that Lee had ever met, and ultimately he won over her father as well.
Lee married Duffy after her graduation and began working as a corporate lawyer in Manhattan, specializing in mergers and acquisitions. As a junior member of a firm, she read thousands of pre-existing contracts, combing them for liabilities that might hurt clients after they closed a deal. “I was really good at this,” she said, “because once you tell me to turn every page, I’m like, Yes, I’ll turn every page.” She wore suits, earned more than $80,000 a year and worked seven days a week. In theory, she was living the American dream. In practice, she was growing seriously ill.
In high school, after donating blood, Lee learned that she was an inactive chronic carrier for the liver disease hepatitis B. Though she never smoked or drank alcohol, the condition flared acutely during her sophomore year of college. A doctor at Yale New Haven Hospital told her that she would probably develop liver cancer by her early 30s. With luck, he said, she might get a transplant and be cured. After that consult, Lee feared that she might die young. Then, at 26, the long hours of corporate law were leaving her wrecked with exhaustion. She decided that she’d rather try writing fiction.
At Yale, Lee had won two literary prizes: one for short fiction, the other for an essay. When she initially submitted the same essay to a history professor, he gave it a C and suggested that she needed remedial English tutoring. But the literary contests were hosted by the university’s English department, which scrubbed students’ names from their entries before judging. Her wins surprised her and came with such ease that they misled her into believing that writing a great novel would be less challenging than practicing law. She thought it might take her a year to finish a book and start earning roughly the same as she had reading contracts. Instead, completing the manuscript for “Free Food for Millionaires” took 11 years.
During that time, Lee’s writing earned her approximately nothing. She and Duffy, meanwhile, accumulated the joyous responsibility of caring for their first child and the unexpected necessity of supporting his parents through catastrophic debt. Her acute hepatitis recurred, making her wrists so weak that she had trouble lifting coffee cups. In a prologue to the 10th-anniversary edition of “Free Food for Millionaires,” she remembers her apprenticeship as an extended humiliation. “It is never a financially prudent idea to be a fiction writer,” she explains. “After six years, I had not yet written a published novel, and I was broke from the choices I had made.”
Because she was young and liver transplants were hard to obtain, a gastroenterologist suggested that she try an experimental drug: Interferon alfa. The treatment made her hair fall out and provoked unpredictable vomiting and diarrhea. But less than a year after starting it, she was miraculously cured.
At the same time, she kept trying to compose the kind of juicy, realist book that enthralled her as a child. Lee often names “dead writers” as her teachers, including Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot, Edith Wharton, the Bröntes, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Baldwin. She read, reread and reverse-engineered their books. But in her prologue to “Free Food for Millionaires,” Lee recognizes that a host of contemporary authors taught her, as well. She took classes at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the 92nd Street Y in New York City, and participated in a private workshop with several aspiring writers, including the novelist Sharon Pomerantz, who remains a close friend. “You could look back on it with nostalgia,” Pomerantz said of this period in their lives, “but I think we were both filled with terror.”
From her legal experience, Lee carried over two unfashionable traits. The first was an attitude of advocacy. “This is the one part about being a lawyer I didn’t mind,” she told me. “I was arguing for somebody else.” All her novels are composed in defense of the overlooked, the tormented, the powerless. Though she published “Pachinko” a decade after “Free Food for Millionaires,” she worked on both books simultaneously. In one, Lee exposed the pressures and hypocrisies that Korean professionals faced in New York City. In the other, she laid bare an entire history of discrimination against Koreans in Japan. She felt as if she needed to write these stories for the sake of other Koreans, and this sense of responsibility kept her researching and revising even when the tasks she set for herself seemed absurdly hard.
“I would love to have that sort of freedom of saying, Oh, I don’t care what I stand for, but whether I like it or not, I do represent a group,” she said. “People still see you as the envelope that you’re in, whether you like it or not.”
The other practice Lee carried over from her legal work was due diligence. Her research for every novel involves reading dozens of books, interviewing scores of people and scouting opportunities for anthropological observation and immersion. To build the character Casey Han in “Free Food for Millionaires,” Lee took a class in hat making. To add nuance to the character who marries Casey’s closest friend, Lee interviewed Koreans who worked on Wall Street.
For “American Hagwon,” Lee brought this process to a new level. Not only did she read scholarly works, she also interviewed nearly 100 college students of Korean descent and attended parts of the Varsity Blues trial about bribery in college admissions and of the federal trial leading to the Supreme Court case about affirmative action at Harvard. She visited hagwons in Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, New Jersey, California and Massachusetts, interviewing students, parents and teachers.
When Lee’s not traveling, she does most of her work on the sunny top floor of a Harlem brownstone that she and Duffy purchased in 2012. When I visited, her office was crowded with photographs, awards, maps, mementos and two computers: one for writing, one for emails. Along one wall, books were sorted into verticals. One set of floor-to-ceiling shelves was filled with volumes she’d read while researching “Pachinko.” Another held books related to “American Hagwon.”
“I wish I could be more efficient,” Lee said, lamenting that her third novel had taken nine years to complete. Behind her, I could see the signs she’d put in her office to encourage herself along the way. One read: “Time Is Your Friend.” It was something her old therapist once said that made her weep. Even after her liver had been saved, Lee couldn’t shake the feeling of imminent mortality.
I remember reading “Middlemarch” when I was in my 20s and wanting to hurl it against a wall. The novel was a masterpiece, I knew, but the premise of its central plot — that the happiness of a woman depended on serving the right husband — irritated my young, single heart. When people discuss Lee’s novels, they often kneel before the dead social realists. But by and large, those authors no longer speak to the values and realities of our age. What makes Lee’s work so satisfying is its anachronism. She honed a Victorian technique and applies it with the sensibilities of a woman who loves reading bell hooks.
Take, for example, Lee’s attitude toward the marriage plot, a favorite trope of the 19th century. Though Lee’s novels always contain romance, they never revolve around marriage. Instead her suspense hangs on questions of economic survival and individual self-actualization. The challenge for Lee’s characters is that, like real people, they often need many things at once: food, respect, shelter and love. Chapter by chapter, these dilemmas get dramatized through nuclear families. How will a son weigh his needs against his mother’s? Will a daughter sacrifice her dreams for the sake of her family? What more will parents endure to feed their children?
In “Pachinko” and “American Hagwon,” these family dramas get woven into examinations of the harms inflicted by bigger systems and calamities. First, colonialism and World War II. Now, neoliberalism and the currency crisis of 1997. In each case, it’s like watching the characters get hit by a natural disaster. The tsunami is upon them. It’s not their fault; yet they must swim or drown.
Lee operates so deftly that casual readers may not notice the architecture for these ideas being erected as they read.Consider a seven-page chapter that Lee delivers early in “American Hagwon” which establishes the novel’s theme while linking together a dozen characters.
The setting is an influential Presbyterian megachurch in Seoul’s fashionable Gangnam neighborhood. Its main pastor, an affable, 50-something man, is preaching on the sin of idolatry. His sermon opens with Leviticus: the Israelites who disobeyed God by sacrificing their children to a pagan deity. “What do you love more than your child?” the pastor asks his rich congregants. “What do you love more than God?”
His questions resonate throughout “American Hagwon,” but in this chapter, Lee treats them lightly, directing our attention mostly away from the pulpit and toward the pews.
A pair of sisters, Helen and Sonya, sit near each other with their two husbands, their five children and a father-in-law. Lee establishes their back story in two tight paragraphs. As girls, they “lived at subsistence level.” Their parents were gamblers, and they survived on charity from the Catholic Church. After they graduated from a prestigious women’s college, the gorgeous Sonya went to work for a real estate baron, who married her to his nephew. At the church, Sonya sports an elegant cashmere suit with “a thick rope of rare Tahitian pearls.” Helen wears a fancy wool suit that’s getting a little tight; Sonya bought it for her years earlier. Another woman, Nari, appears near the end of the chapter with her daughter. When Nari stands next to the sisters, she realizes that her expensive red dress with “dramatic black sequin flowers” looks tacky in church. She introduces Helen to the idea of sending her children to a budget-breaking hagwon.
These scenes don’t feel especially significant the first time you read them. But within a few hundred pages, two of these characters will be broke and working at a fried-fish joint in California. Another pair will be entangled in an eye-popping affair. Two acquaintances will have turned into best friends. And the six children will have attended five different universities on three different continents. One of them will drop out.
These are the techniques that Lee gleaned from the old social realists: intricately braided story lines, characters who cross social classes, an emphasis on plots that expose true morals. Many also deployed a nearly invisible third-person narrator. In “American Hagwon,” this device is so neutral as to be disconcerting. Flaubert eyed his characters — even those based on himself — with sly condescension. Dickens regarded his with sticky sentimentality. Lee’s vision is like bright, afternoon light; it casts no shadows. The rhythm of her sentences is conversational, and their diction is deliberately plain, barely adorned. It’s as if she wants to make reading her long, complicated novel as easy as possible, knowing that its most moving effects are felt not in the paragraphs but across the arc of chapters.
In college, Lee spent her most meaningful hours hanging out in the basement of Durfee Hall, where students of color held gatherings at the women’s center. The legacy of those sustaining female friendships appears in her work, where women are often rescued from hardship and despair by other women. In this sense, Lee’s books have more in common with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels than with anything by Eliot or Wharton.
“There’s a lot of different ways to circumvent patriarchy, because it’s such a heavy machinery,” Lee told me. “Whatever oppressive system you have, we get around it through other interpersonal relationships.”
Lee’s next novel is likely to push this theme even further. In our conversations, she referred to it as her “Marshall Plan book.” It would explore, she said, how the post-World War II rise of South Korea in the 1960s was underwritten by remittances sent home by Koreans living abroad, including culture-crossing wives. “When we think about all the glamour and beauty of South Korea today, we don’t think about all the bar girls who married G.I.s, who lived in Texas, and people called them hookers,” Lee said. “But if it weren’t for them, they wouldn’t have sponsored citizenship for their cousins and their brothers and sent money back for their education.”
It was hard for Lee to think about these women because it was so upsetting how they were mistreated. They sacrificed so much and, in return, they were slurred by other Koreans. It was too outrageous. She’d already begun filling a set of floor-to-ceiling shelves in her office with volumes of research.
One afternoon, Lee and I stood on Queens Boulevard staring at the Gothic face of the First Presbyterian Church of Newtown in Elmhurst. “This is the church I grew up in,” Lee said. “I remember thinking it was so much bigger.”
The bell tower seemed to waver in the July heat. In front, a wrought-iron gate was padlocked but a side door was cracked open. We slipped in.
“Nothing has changed,” Lee said, as she took a seat. Rib-like ceiling trusses graced a soaring ceiling; the stained-glass windows shimmered. The nave held no more than 20 pews. It smelled of wood polish and old velvet.
You could call this sanctuary Lee’s most important school. Together with her family, she attended services and youth groups, ate coffee cake and doughnut holes. Back then, the congregation was mostly Anglo American, but at Sunday school, unlike elementary school, people were nice to her.
Churches have always played a central function in Lee’s fiction. Her halls of worship allow characters to swap information, forge friendships, rustle up business, preserve their traditions and repair the damage done to their dignity by the turbulence of emigration. But sitting next her in the silence of First Presbyterian — seeing how her shoulders relaxed and her nervous energy dissipated as she stared at the pulpit and the lilac-colored organ chamber — I realized that underneath all her anthropological accuracy lay genuine faith.
“You believe it all, right?” I asked. “Heaven. Hell. Souls.”
“Yeah, I do,” she answered softly, adding a moment later: “It makes things harder and easier.”
Life is easier with faith, she explained in a whisper, because if you truly believe in the gospel, then you understand that you’re already saved. “It’s like: ‘It’s done. So you’re good.’” But then, she added, if you sincerely believe that you’re saved, then why aren’t you doing all the good that you can as a saved person in this world?
“It means this responsibility. That’s why it’s so hard, but at the same time it’s so easy,” she said. “It’s actually walking as if you are fully loved.”
“By God?”
“Yeah, by God.” She glanced at my face, raised her eyebrows and smiled. “I know. I can see why people don’t believe it.”
I had known for a long time that Lee reads the Bible every morning before she writes — a habit inspired by Willa Cather — but in other interviews she’d explained it as an interest in biblical sentence structure and tone.
“That’s how it began,” Lee clarified now, suggesting that over time the purpose changed.
In America, there’s a tendency to see nonwhite novelists as ethnographers, and to overlook the more philosophical ambitions of their work. Yet Lee, like many of the 19th-century novelists, is also a moralist, and to think of her only as a Korean chronicler of the Korean diaspora is to misread her deeper project. “American Hagwon” contains clear indictments of education and materialism in America and Korea. Those bold plot lines, however, also lure readers into a more subtle consideration of the place that power, status, love, sacrifice, God and family hold in modern society. I had been puzzled at Lee’s home in Harlem when she told me that what she wanted to communicate to readers in her new novel was “the love that you need to feel a sense of sacrifice.”
Sitting in the pew with her in Queens, it clicked into place. Sacrifice has been a concern in all of Lee’s fiction. Some of her characters rebel against the expectation of it. Others are destroyed by it. A few find their purpose through grueling acts of selflessness. Lee told me that she thought about sacrifice more while writing “American Hagwon” than she had with any other book. All its most appealing characters forsake some desire or ambition for those they love. Its end hardly makes sense without the concepts of sacrifice and grace.
“Sacrifice always gets a bad rap, and it isn’t always bad,” Lee said to me in Queens. Her first novel suggests that children may ditch their parents’ expectations and pursue their own dreams. But that book was set in a Wall Street boom. The heroes of “American Hagwon” must survive a global meltdown. To carry their families through calamity, they shed pride and personal ambition.
“A man with your education should not be in the kitchen frying shrimp and making fish sandwiches,” one character scolds another. “Do you know how terrible you can smell?” Yet the father insists on taking the job. The next day he puts on the apron, the hairnet, the knee-high rubber boots, and starts work without complaint. There’s no time for self-pity. He has children to feed and rent to pay.
Marcela Valdes is a staff writer who has been covering immigration issues for more than a decade.
The post Min Jin Lee Was Underestimated for Half Her Life. Then She Started to Write. appeared first on New York Times.
