专访《柏青哥》作者李敏金：新书《美式补习班》、教育神话与移民韧性

Min Jin Lee: I wanted to illustrate what it's like to educate a family and still believe that if you have a western education, then you're going to be safe. When actually there are economic shocks which happen to perfectly decent people every day. Terrible things happen to good people. And I wanted to show what that means if you only trust in a formal education.

Gilbert Cruz: I'm Gilbert Cruz and this is the book review from the New York Times. This week I'm very happy to be talking with Min Lee. Min was last on this podcast in summer 2024. Her book Pachinko had just been voted one of the best books of the 21st century by the hundreds of authors who participated in that project. Wonderfully, she is back here on the show and she's here because she has a new novel, her first since 2017's Pachinko. It's titled American Hagwan, and it's the result of almost a decade's worth of work. It is the third book in what Min says will eventually be a four-part thematic series exploring Korea and the Korean diaspora. American Hagwan tells the story of the Koh family, a middle-class family of five following the Asian financial crisis of the late '90s. They find themselves all eventually migrating to America. The book, of course, is about much more than that. It's about much more than that one family. It's a story about being a parent and about being a child. It's a story about upward mobility and downward mobility. And it's a story about education and its promises and tradeoffs, which is best exemplified by that word in the title, which refers to private tutoring centers. Min's going to get into this a little bit more, but first, Min, welcome back to the book review.

Min Jin Lee: Hi, Gilbert. How's it going, man?

Gilbert Cruz: It's going great. How are you? What a week for you. What a week. Oh my goodness.

Min Jin Lee: It's only day three and I'm kind of sleepy. [laughter]

Gilbert Cruz: Are you you?

Min Jin Lee: Well, I'm actually a little freaked out. I'm a little freaked out.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah. Say more about that.

Min Jin Lee: Well, there's a big tour and I've never done anything like this big before, so I'm a little scared.

Gilbert Cruz: When you say big, is it like 10 cities? What are you doing?

Min Jin Lee: I lost count. Like [laughter] I lost count because there countries involved.

Gilbert Cruz: Oh boy. Okay. Um, what so what what are you nervous about before we get into this book? What this this is a big deal for you then?

Min Jin Lee: See, this is a reason why see like I need to be media trained because I always just like say what's on my mind. Um,

Gilbert Cruz: but believe me, that's what I want. [laughter]

Min Jin Lee: Um, I think I'm scared because gosh, how should I say it? I don't want to let anybody down. You know, when I published my first two books, I didn't expect an audience. I didn't expect readers and this time I have readers because I I get correspondents from readers and this is a really controversial topic.

Gilbert Cruz: Well, tell me about the topic. Great segue. And why it's controversial.

Min Jin Lee: Well, I wrote about education and what it means for upward mobility and downward mobility as you put so aptly. And [sighs and gasps] it's a weird time to get education and also to buy education, especially in a country like America.

Gilbert Cruz: So, the title of your book, American Hagwan, I used a very short phrase to describe what a hagwan is, but um I'd love for you to unpack for our listeners what that is and why you thought that was a good nucleus around which to build this this story about education.

Min Jin Lee: So, a hagwan is the Korean word for learning center. And I think a lot of people think, if they think at all about hagwans, they think of it as something for kids. whether you're a fouryear-old or a 17y old, the educational kind of hagwans. But in Korea, adults go to hogwans to learn how to tap dance, to become an opera singer, for piano lessons, in order to learn how to speak better. There are all sorts of hogwans. And the reason why I chose hagwan as an organizing metaphor is because I wanted to kind of illustrate the real deep faith and education and self-improvement that Koreans have. And then they carry this idea in the diaspora.

Gilbert Cruz: When last we spoke, you talked about the idea of the social novel. We unpacked this a little bit and you, you know, very clearly stated that you were someone who worked in this tradition and wanted to be someone who worked in this tradition. I I was not to ask you to repeat yourself. Please everyone go listen to that that episode. But how do you see this new book continuing sort of that line that you're trying to to trace here?

Min Jin Lee: So thematically I'm writing about diaspora in all of my fiction. However, the mode of fiction that I want to write are social novels in which the writer looks at the society that she lives in today and figures out what are the things that trouble her and then tries to make a response in a narrative. So, the social ills that I witness right now is just a profound destruction of education. Mhm.

Gilbert Cruz: I think every parent right now in the face of AI is certainly aware that the learning process of our children has been deeply altered. You know, I have one child uh who's in the seventh grade and my wonderful child comes home with a a laptop and he's doing homework on the laptop and I'm like, "What what is this? When did even this, not even getting into AI or anything like that, when did this become the way that children were being made to learn in school? What happened to, not to sound like a fuddy duddy, you know, what happened to the sitting down at a table with a pen and a worksheet and a piece of paper and sort of working out your thought process in that way. It's hard to imagine taking that a step further as you say what the heck AI is going to do to the idea of like coming up with your own thoughts, figuring how to solve problems on your own. I mean, how old are your kids? You're I don't know your

Min Jin Lee: My son is 28.

Gilbert Cruz: Uhhuh.

Min Jin Lee: And even though my son is 28 and we're talking preai in terms of his educational formal educational process, I'm going to tell you right now that you're not a fddy duddy. All the neurologists and neuroscientists would agree with you. that the brain cannot handle infinite amounts of content. The internet is infinite. So when you give a laptop to a child, you're not saying, "I want you to learn 20 pages of text or even five pages of text or even one sheet of spelling words." You're saying, "I want you to have access to this." And it's an efficiency for the administrator, not for the child. It isn't. And it makes me really upset because I think that it has really taken an experiment and put it on families and on children in a time when more than any other time I can think of in history, children really actually do need critical thinking skills and recall and a sense of control.

Gilbert Cruz: So your child is 28 now. You started this book maybe right when he was about to graduate high school. Did [snorts] the way that you were thinking about education then as a parent, you started in one mindset and now you're in a different one. H how did that sort of personal journey trace its way through when you said you wanted to write a book about the crisis in education or whatever specific word you want to use? Was that something you started because you had a child in school and then it just continued to sort of enrage you in some way?

Min Jin Lee: No, it wasn't actually the crisis which caused me to write the novel. It was that I really noticed that education was a value that was the most important and common in all the Koreans that I had ever met. But then the problem that I see about education is that there's a crisis in learning. So it's actually two of those things. So the subject is education and it's about the love of education, the hatred of education that I saw in all the Koreans that I examined. But then the crisis and learning that we're experiencing in America and also globally is something that's been going on for a long time.

Gilbert Cruz: Your new book, it's sort of bookended by two events, two financial crises, the 1997 Asian financial crisis and then everything that happened here in America and around the world around 2007208. Why did you choose those, let's say, as like the poles that you were going to work within? And why did you think that was a particularly fruitful period to tell this story?

Min Jin Lee: The historical event that most modern Koreans are deeply affected by today is not the Korean War, and it's not colonization. It's actually the IMF crisis, which is the 1997 Asian financial crisis, but it's called the IMF crisis in Korea. And that was when the Korean currency was so devalued because it was pegged against the dollar that the national economy was basically in default. And as a consequence, people lost their jobs. Education was interrupted because they couldn't afford it anymore. Many people lost their homes. Many people committed suicide. Now people don't in the west don't know about this but if you ask the average person who's about actually your age what really affected you in Korea they will say oh the IMF was really horrible especially if they didn't come from money. So if you lack generational wealth you couldn't ride out the storm of your dad losing his job your mom losing her job you losing your house you having to move out as whole. So I thought, you know, I really need to address this because it affects the modern psyche because it caused a kind of hysterical anxiety about education because it made Korean people feel like, oh, we need to be even more global than we thought we had to be.

Gilbert Cruz: Mhm.

Min Jin Lee: And then also the neoliberal practices of the West, austerity and the elimination of lifetime employment, all those practices became accepted into South Korea. So then it became even more competitive. So not only did you as a young person have to become globally competitive, you had to realize that you didn't have any of these safety nets that you thought you had. And I thought I had to cover that. And then of course 2008 is a global financial crisis. So when my family, the family that I focus on, goes to California or eventually ends up in California, I wanted to illustrate what it's like to educate a family and still believe that if you have a western education, then you're going to be safe. [snorts] When actually there are economic shocks which happen to perfectly decent people every day. Terrible things happen to good people. And I wanted to show what that means if you'd only trust in education, in a formal education.

Gilbert Cruz: Uh, it's scary. [laughter] I say this to someone who is one of the only people in their family that went to college and that was always going to be, even though I never liked school much, that was always going to be the path, the way up. And when that is the path, you have to trust in the path because you don't know any other way. And the idea that you can do the right things, you could study your butt off, you can, you know, get into the right schools and [snorts] yet you still find yourself confronted with an economic system that maybe doesn't have room for you or that you are not prepared for. Maybe you were preparing for a different economic system. It's terrifying.

Min Jin Lee: It's terrifying. And yet, I think for me, in all of my research, I felt less terrified because I figured out some of the survival strategies of people who did the best when they didn't have generational wealth. And the ones who really fared were the ones who decided that I would have strong family bonds. I would have strong friendships. And then also, I will know who really loves me if I get sick or I lose my job and who I can count on. And then it was often the people who built communities.

Gilbert Cruz: So with your two previous books, I believe you focused on sort of one word for each of them. Your first novel, Free Food for Millionaires, the key word was uh choice. In Pachenko, your second novel, it was home. And as you just said, community seems to be the thing that sits at the center of this book or, you know, one of the centers of this book at least. No matter what happens in this diaspora for these people, its community, whether it's found at church, whether it's found at Hagwan or other places, that is the thing that's going to get them through.

Min Jin Lee: Well, that was what the survival strategy is for people who have very little. When you don't have any money, but you have friends, you're going to be okay. when you don't have a job and no one wants to take your calls and you still have community, you're going to be okay. And the reason why I keep talking about this is because we are living in a time of tremendous loneliness and greater and greater isolation. And we have shifted now from the attention economy to the attachment economy. Whether you're attached to a bot or whether you're attached to your phone, you're not attaching yourself to necessarily other people. Not in real life. So to choose community is actually a radical gesture, but it's actually a time-tested one.

Gilbert Cruz: You referenced interviews, and I want to ask you in a little bit about the process that you go through to write each of your novels that involves sort of going out into the real world and talking to people, but before we do that, I'd love if you could just talk a little bit more about this central family.

Min Jin Lee: So we have five characters. We have Helen and John. John's the dad, Helen's the mom, and they have three kids. The oldest is Bo. The middle child is DH and the youngest is Meato. Bo is the big scholar and DH is the athlete and the youngest is the little girl Meato. And she is a real thinker, but she's not much of a talker and the family really worries about her. And in [snorts] Asia, they don't they worry about her less because there for girls to talk less, it's not such a big deal. But when they live in Australia and in California and in New Jersey, it's more of a big deal. The father loses his job at first due to a betrayal of his best friend who's his boss. And the second time he loses his job because of the IMF crisis. I'm not giving that much away because that's the premise of the book. But in that trajectory, we find them moving from Seoul to Sydney and then to Orange County, California. And most of the book is set there.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah, John's situation is a real argument for not being friends with your boss. By the way, [laughter] tell me just so we can dig into some of the the characters specifically without, you know, giving anything away. Talk to me about some of the people in this book and how that idea of community sort of flows through them. As I as I said, you have this family at the core, five people, mother, father, three kids, um, who find themselves moving throughout the world almost before they end up in America in Southern California. Tell me about this family.

Min Jin Lee: So, for example, the youngest child, Meato, has tremendous problems speaking and she ends up in Seoul as a young person. and she's only 13 years old and she makes a really good friend with another little girl. The other little girl, Yan, moves to California first. And but for that friendship that she makes in age 13, her family wouldn't have actually had a landing spot in California. And I found those kinds of stories to be so interesting because very often when you think about migrating from let's say point A to point B or point C, whatever it is, you think, well, how did you get here? And very often it's my friend got me a job. My sister sponsored my immigration. My uncle gave me a loan. And it was those stories that kept on coming up over and over again in all of my interviews. And I thought, "Oh, this is what people do because they don't have trust funds. They don't have generational wealth. They don't have access to power." And I liked learning about what the 21st century strategies were going to be because they were different. And also what's really interesting to me about economic crisis is that when you have global economic crises, very often they're not really identifiable villains. Like you can't point to somebody and say, "Oh, you know what? It's because of this person." You're like, it's it's kind of like this faceless thing. Like the devaluation of currency, like how do you handle that? But you have to handle it because you have real consequences of, oh, there's no more money for me to go to school. There is no more job.

Gilbert Cruz: One of the things that really stood out to me most prominently when reading this is how much and how precisely you write about money in this book, which I think and I I I read a lot. Other people read more than me, but in my reading of fiction and literary fiction, it's just not not only is money not really ever addressed, but money is certainly not addressed with [clears throat] this kind of specificity. And furthermore, it's not addressed. You don't see a ton of characters who really are like, "We're working hard and we're working hard because we need to save this much every month in order to get to this point." And the detail through which you do that just seemed very rare to me. And I wanted to ask you about the deliberateness with which you did that.

Min Jin Lee: You know, most 19th century novels which are read by regular people or read to to regular people because workers were often read to when they're working, they address money all the time because people actually work for money. [laughter] It's nice to think that people work for fun or for meaning, but most people work for money. And I think that as a social novelist, I have to deal with it. So even though economics is not the easiest subject, I have taught myself a lot about interest rates. [laughter] And then once I and also how banks work or why we had a subprime mortgage crisis and the reason why I did that is because I thought well after I understand it really well, how do I make it really obvious for people who have no interest in this and yet our lives are being affected? If we don't understand inheritance law, you actually can't understand a lot of 19th century novels.

Gilbert Cruz: And I thought I better learn it.

Min Jin Lee: And I thought I better learn it.

Gilbert Cruz: Um, was that fun for you?

Min Jin Lee: It was fascinating. Like to understand like liar loans and defaults, to understand how you could walk away from a loan. When you realize that you could get 125% of the loan of the value of the house,

Gilbert Cruz: zero money down.

Min Jin Lee: Zero money down. And then they give you that money and then you buy the house.

Gilbert Cruz: Values are going up and then you refinance.

Min Jin Lee: Well, that kind of thing actually led to people buying and selling houses and also accumulating an enormous amount of debt, which actually caused enormous amount of bankruptcy. And when that happens in a family, you see how couples fight.

Gilbert Cruz: And greed.

Min Jin Lee: I I want to also just say it's not just greed, it's also just ambition, just the ambition. And I was really moved by some of the characters. They're not bad people, they just wanted better things for their kids.

Gilbert Cruz: Oftentimes the people the realtors, the people offering the loans also believed.

Min Jin Lee: No down payment, and you would buy a place, and then you get really attached to it, and then someone made that loan to you, so you thought they were an expert, so they thought you trusted them, and you trusted the system because if it's legally possible, then it must be okay.

Gilbert Cruz: It's institutional.

Min Jin Lee: It's hard to trust people.

Gilbert Cruz: It's hard to tell between institutional and scams. Talk to me a little bit about these interviews. You have an intense process of interviewing people for your novels. When you wrote Pachinko, you lived in Japan for four years and you spoke with many Zainichi Koreans, as they're known. With this book, obviously you can't go to 1997 Seoul.

Min Jin Lee: I cannot. But there's also you talking to people who live in America and are part of the Korean diaspora, people who live in Korea, you can say, "Well, what was that like for you?"

Gilbert Cruz: Tell me a little bit about that process. How long does it last? How many people did you speak to?

Min Jin Lee: I have no idea how many people I've interviewed, but it's in the hundreds. But the question is: How do you interview someone so that they will tell you things they wouldn't even tell their own spouse or their children? That takes a great deal of trust.

Gilbert Cruz: Got it. Got it.

Min Jin Lee: Um, so for example, like if I interviewed you, Gilbert, and said, "How is it that you decided to go into journalism?" If it's just the facts, then you'd give the facts. But if I watch how your face changes, how you hesitate, when you sigh, to find out the unsaid things—that is what a novelist needs to capture. So like the personality of Gilbert is different than let's say what you did today.

Gilbert Cruz: Mhm.

Min Jin Lee: Right. So what I did today is very different than what you you could predict. Let's say what would men say is very different than how I act.

Gilbert Cruz: I must admit to my own ignorance. I I wasn't overly familiar with the concept. I hadn't really heard of parachute kids.

Min Jin Lee: Your child actually might be going to school with these kids, but they wouldn't advertise it. Mhm. They could be as young as nine or eight and somebody else raises them in the hopes that they can go to the public school system in America and learn English, and then get into a good university. Korea is in a middle space because even though it is a globally important economy, it is not a superpower like China or the United States. And because of that, there's a vulnerability. And their idea of having global citizenship. To me, it makes sense why they go to these lengths.

Gilbert Cruz: It's very possible. It's very possible. When I first came across it in your book, my initial reaction was like, "What's going on here? This kid just like lives across the world from their parents?" At first it struck me as a terrible situation. It's like this child is completely alone.

Min Jin Lee: yeah,

Gilbert Cruz: But then of course you think of the it's this is all for a sacrifice. This is all about the parents going through the pain of not seeing their child and the child vice versa going through the pain of not seeing their parents all in the name of giving this kid a leg up.

Min Jin Lee: And think of all the women who work as child care givers in New York City who don't see their children. All the nurses who work in the hospitals in New York City whose children live abroad. It's the reverse situation of a family member moving abroad. Um, so then I want to just give a context for why people make these decisions.

Gilbert Cruz: Korean diaspora has been very united in this idea that education is a pathway like that they never seem to shake. Were you trying with American Hagwan to answer a question about what it means to be Korean in America? Were you trying to answer a question about what it means to believe in the value of education? Or was it about sort of the way those things intersected? And do you think you you achieved an answer of some sort?

Min Jin Lee: I think I started out by thinking about why does education mean so much to Koreans?

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah. Everywhere.

Min Jin Lee: Like why is this so important? What is this attachment to this idea that education equals greater social mobility? They really believe in merit. They really believe that if you take the test and you do well, then you have a chance. And they think of it as being really fair because then everybody has a shot.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah, that was one of the things that really drove me crazy. Not about the book, but just about the testing system, the test you described that one of the sons of the family takes three times before he says, "Forget it. I'm out of here." I think my note at one point is like, "What the hell is going on here?" like this seems like [laughter] the the most serious test I've ever come across. Why is this so important?

Min Jin Lee: What I think is so interesting is that in America even though I don't think a person's life is defined by one test, in Korea the college entrance exam is only given once a year and it's only given once a year out of fairness. It's to reduce cheating. So you have all these rightminded ideas but then in practice it turns into madness. And in America, if you are a great rower then you might have a greater chance of getting into an elite school.

Gilbert Cruz: Sure.

Min Jin Lee: Sure. I'm not going to put down any specialized sports or excessive testing. What's missing in all of this is education. What's missing in all of this is the soft skills and the big themes that allow us to handle tremendous disruptions in the world.

Gilbert Cruz: You talked a little bit about community. Another place that we see that community is the church. In contemporary fiction, you certainly don't see the church as a community really addressed or really presented all that often either. What can you do with that as a setting? What sort of dynamics can you start to to dig into that makes the church particularly fruitful for fiction? It's just not a place I see very often, which is weird to be honest.

Min Jin Lee: Well, every 19th century novel pretty much had a parson or a crazy bishop or a vicar. There was always a place of worship in almost all the 19th century novels because it was part of life. And I have to say this because I think it's true. In immigrant communities, places of worship are safe havens and essential safety nets. Most people in the world believe in something and I think that as a social novelist, if I ignore that, I'm ignoring a huge part of reality.

Gilbert Cruz: Um it also helps that you yourself are someone who is a person of faith. It's not just an element you're adding to deepen the layers of your fiction.

Min Jin Lee: I think that as a person of faith, I think I can represent the terrible parts about religious hypocrisy and religious communities, and also the parts about the church that make sense to me and to the people who find refuge there.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah. Yeah, there are many Christians out there doing terrible things and there are also people who find real solace and community.

Gilbert Cruz: So, you started working on American Hagwan around the time that Pachinko came out and in our last conversation a couple of years ago, Pachinko had become this huge bestseller and well-loved. What it was like to just say, "All right, I'm jumping into the next one here. I don't know what's going to happen, but what was that like? And what is it like to look back on the success of that book now?"

Min Jin Lee: Oh, of Pachinko. Um, [sighs] you know, I think the first year of Pachinko, it was not a success really. It became a success over time, and much in part thanks to the New York Times and becoming a National Book Award finalist. But as a writer, that doesn't write your next book for you. You still have to sit down every day and do the work.

Gilbert Cruz: That's rough.

Min Jin Lee: Yes. And I think that's the thing that I really hear about all the time from writers. It's a completely different project.

Gilbert Cruz: right now even with high school students about why you should do certain things because it'll look good on a resume. I think back to my own experience. I went to a very good school and I was around kids from wealthy families and had been to boarding schools and prep schools. And I remember at the time I was interested in politics and I realized all of these kids that I'm in college with are doing these unpaid internships and I couldn't afford to do that unpaid internship and therefore I wasn't going to be able to sort of walk the path that they are into in early years in government and stuff like that. Really it freaked me out for a while and actually that's why I made the swerve into journalism.

Min Jin Lee: If everybody's there for the same purpose, then the transaction is all that matters. But then that's not actually a relationship that's a true lasting bond and it's certainly not what a family or community is. And what happens if you get sick? What happens if you get unattractive to them? In an educational catastrophe or financial shock, who's really there for you? Those bonds survive disruption.

Gilbert Cruz: I would like to ask you a very direct, possibly sensitive question, but I think people would want to know. People think, "Oh, she wrote Pachinko, it was a massive hit, she's totally set." Is that true?

Min Jin Lee: Well, I I speak, I teach, I've written screenplays, I've done so many things. At no point have I felt like, "Oh, I'm completely set." No. I mean, for example, when I sell a book in England for Pachinko, the royalty is tiny. And actually, it's less for certain countries. That's not even enough for a bag of Smarties. [laughter]

Gilbert Cruz: What about your next book? You were working on another book that I think you've publicly said is the fourth in this series.

Min Jin Lee: I started it. It's called Marshall Plan. And it's about the Koreans who went to Germany to work as nurses and miners, and they sent remittances of Deutsch marks back to Korea to help rebuild the country. It's based on this idea of remittances and rebuilding.

Gilbert Cruz: Just go out on top.

Min Jin Lee: I hope so.

Gilbert Cruz: I think is the way to do it. This conversation we just had was wonderful and delightful. Minjin Lee, author of the new novel American Hagwan. This was great as always. Thank you for coming on.

Min Jin Lee: Thanks so much, Guilford. [music]

Gilbert Cruz: The book review is produced by Sarah Diamond, Amy Pearl, and Patricia Subaran. It's mixed by Pedro Rosado. Original music by Dan Powell and Alicia Etup. Special thanks to Dalia Hadad. We want to hear what you think about the show, so send us an email at the bookreview@nytimes.com. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.