AMERICAN HAGWON, by Min Jin Lee
We’ve all heard about the Bechdel test. I’d like to propose a BookTell test. That’s when, as a critic, you not only admire a book — a frequent, if detached, position — but also want to tell all those people who ask, “So, what should I read next?” to buy, borrow or make like Abbie Hoffman and steal it.
The third volume in Min Jin Lee’s planned quartet about the Korean diaspora, “American Hagwon,” would get top marks on this brand-new BookTell test. So would the second, “Pachinko,” a 2017 best seller that was No. 15 on The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list.
The new novel is accessible but complex; noble without being highfalutin; and, at almost 650 pages, tremendous bang for the buck.
“American Hagwon” also easily passes the Bechdel test, featuring many female characters who have conversations with one another about something besides men. Plus extra credit for male characters talking about women — with respect, even. And funnily enough, it’s about … tests.
“Hagwons” are a type of institute meant to supplement regular school; a large majority of Korean students attend them, to learn a foreign language or to prepare for standardized exams. As admission to top colleges has become more like “The Hunger Games,” so hagwons have proliferated to feed the beast. Some are mere cram schools, but this novel zooms in on one that actually nourishes enrollees’ emotions and intellects: a fictional center for expats in Cypress, Calif., called Exodus Academy, and its profitable spinoff, Fortress.
Exodus and Fortress are operated by Lion Han (nicknamed the Oracle of Orange County by his fellow church congregants), who zipped through Princeton in three years after his father cut him off for the sin of wanting to be a musician. “Exodus,” he explains to a curious charge, refers to how teaching freed him from money worries and also from the vise of status. Though parents flock to Lion for his success rates at elite schools, he and his colleagues subversively believe that the admissions race has gotten out of hand and that there should be more love of learning for learning’s sake. His signature catchphrase, and one of life’s better mantras, is “Why not?” (“His students loved it when he’d say this. The two words had the power to make resistance disappear.”)
Lion gives a lecture called “Our Children’s Heavy Burden: Education in America” and then, with a whiff of Hoffman, tells the incredulous parents in attendance, who are hoping to elbow their offspring into Fortress: “We have to be almost countercultural if we want our children to truly thrive.”
“American Hagwon” opens in Seoul, where the Koh family of five has resettled after stints in Paramus, N.J., and Sydney, Australia. John Koh works at a trading company for his university friend Taehun Shin, and moves wherever he’s ordered to. The married Shin is himself being led around as if on a leash by a sexy, manipulative and ruthless young trainee from a farming village named Danbi Jung.
There are far too many characters in this novel to describe in depth here, but the Kohs are its home base. John is a man of consummate integrity who gets framed as an office harasser and slips a couple of rungs down the economic ladder, eventually taking a menial job at Shrimp Castle. His wife, Helen, works in retail to supplement the family income.
Both are involved parents to their three children, who all — in the course of pursuing various careers and romances — come to teach at Lion’s hagwon. Bo, the eldest, studies psychology, inspired by Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. DH, the affable, athletic middle child, hits the more conventional academic marks and then goes into law. And Mido, whose early case of selective mutism begins the plot, dreams of being a playwright and defers her own college degree.
The big ideas here are buried like treasure in the sandy bureaucracy of everyday life. Several characters enjoy watching TV dramas, and Lion, noting in these shows the frequent presence of a Hong Gildong-type character who resembles a Korean Robin Hood and represents meritocracy, develops a lecture around dismantling this myth. “Our children cannot know everything,” he tells parents, “create doubles, summon magic, fight better than everyone and fly through the air.”
“American Hagwon” has its own soapy elements: heaving seduction scenes with lingerie particulars worthy of Danielle Steel; secret affairs; slaps to the face. Set between 1992 and 2007, against the backdrop of the Asian financial crisis and early social media, and skillfully eliding the narrative challenges of 9/11, the Great Recession and iPhones, it has the wonderful muchness of a 19th-century novel — and as much paperwork as, if less fog than, “Bleak House.” Marriages are maintained until they become financially imprudent; elders are respected, and even if he or she is sent far away, no child is left behind.
Indeed, perhaps the most surprising pleasure here is the depiction of pragmatism. Almost a decade in the making, deeply researched and replete with details of bills, contracts, deals, salaries, settlements, wills and arrangements, “American Hagwon” might be the first epic novel of estate planning.
Some books are very worthy but held at arm’s length. This one demands to be pressed into friends’ hands.
AMERICAN HAGWON | By Min Jin Lee | Cardinal | 644 pp. | $36
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