The difficulty with writing a book as beloved as Pachinko is that following it is almost impossible. With her new novel, American Hagwon (2026), Min Jin Lee has done her best. The underlying strength of this third installment in a planned quartet about the Korean diaspora is Lee’s ambition. While the novel’s core theme is the obsession with education in Korean culture, it is also, in many ways, an immigration novel. The two are intertwined — Koreans have long viewed education, and specifically English education, as a vehicle to a better life both here and abroad.
American Hagwon opens in the early ’90s, just as the Koh family has returned to South Korea from Australia. John has once again been relocated by his trading company. Not long after, the dual, destructive forces of the 1997 Asian financial crisis and a personal betrayal throw John’s middle-class life into chaos.
The novel spans the years 1992 to 2007 and travels from Korea to the United States and Australia as the characters chase economic opportunity and pursue better lives. Over the course of 656 pages, Lee tracks the arcs of five main characters, with many more minor figures dotted throughout. The characters play out the drama of their lives in nail salons, churches, hotel rooms, small apartments, and luxurious houses, but the main thrust of the story happens in the private academies.
Pachinko is also partially set during a time of global upheaval — the Japanese occupation of Korea, World War II, and the Korean War — but the power dynamics between the characters feel sharper against that extreme backdrop. The characters of Sunja, Koh Hansu, and Noah in Pachinko effectively contrast with each other because their own places in the world are so different. The time period of American Hagwon is much less dramatic in Lee’s rendering. The IMF financial crisis doesn’t put the same pressure on the characters as an occupation by an imperialist power that uproots people and forces them to leave their homeland, or a war fought by the largest countries in the world.
I was tempted to open this review with an anecdote about my hagwon teaching experience, but working at an academy in a second-tier Korean city in one of the provinces 20 years ago isn’t exactly analogous to what the characters in this novel are doing. Teaching well-off kids in Orange County, California, how to pass the SAT and get into UCLA or Harvard is not the same as teaching kindergartners and elementary students.
I don’t love the practice of adding “American” to titles, but I can see the logic here. The word “hagwon” in Korean can be translated to mean private academy, which sounds more exclusive or elite than it actually is. Hagwons are part of every Korean child’s upbringing. It seems as though there’s a hagwon for every skill or hobby. Common ones include math and English, but there are also piano, art, and taekwondo academies. Yellow hagwon vans buzz around the apartment complex in my Seoul suburb well into the evening, picking up and dropping off students for science, swimming, dance — all manner of subjects. In the book, hagwons are the institution through which Lee explores the anxieties and compromises of the Korean diaspora.
Lee renders all of this with believable scenes and storytelling. She knows the tricks and techniques of a master fiction writer. The plotlines of her characters intersect and split apart deftly, with major points of conflict carrying their fates in different directions. Romance, betrayal, sex, money, friendship, pride, shame, ambition, honor — they all play their parts.
As I read, I thought of another family saga, East of Eden, particularly when Lee introduces the character of Danbi, who has a similar impact on the story as does Steinbeck’s Cathy, though Danbi is not as evil. Lee gives her more humanity and clearer motivations for some of her destructive behavior, but both characters are catalysts for major shifts in the plot.
Lee proves herself worthy of a Steinbeck comparison when it comes to character development and pacing, but I would have liked to see more descriptions of the places where her characters live. The U.S. sections felt the most visual, but I had trouble seeing Seoul and Sydney. To be fair, at more than 650 pages, the novel didn’t need to be any longer.
As with Pachinko, this book can feel soapy and melodramatic at times. The Danbi plotline veers toward “makjang,” a Korean word for a specific genre that relies on contrived plotlines. But Dickens’ novels can be that way, and so too the Russian epics. Anna Karenina is the best soap opera ever written. Novels are allowed to be entertaining as long as the conflict and contrivance aren’t over the top. Lee doesn’t quite go too far.
That’s all to say this is a good book. Ambitious. Grand. The kind of multi-generational family novel that Lee is adept at.
There are a few parts where Lee lays bare her themes and viewpoints on the Korean obsession with education in a way that feels too didactic, even to an average reader. In one scene, she allows a character, Lion, to give a lengthy speech to a gymnasium full of Korean parents about the pressure they put on their children.
Lee’s focus on this is warranted: Korea’s suicide rate is still the highest among OECD nations. For young people, suicide is the main cause of death, partially driven by the pressure to pass the Suneung, get into a top university, and work at a conglomerate. So yes, Lee is correct in the message she gets across about the ills of pushing children too hard, even if it is handled heavy-handedly.
I’ll recognize that I have more prior knowledge of this issue than your average American reader, but I still think she goes too far in laying all of this so bare. Anyone who had a misspent reading period in their youth is permanently scarred by the speeches in Ayn Rand’s novels, and though we’re nowhere near John Galt territory, the preaching here taints the magic. Lee has already effectively used the tools of fiction to show us how hard Korean kids study, the stress they’re under to succeed at school, and how the hagwon system is both a symptom and a cause of this fixation on education. To have a character who has profited nicely off of this speak so baldly about the ills of the schooling obsession rings excessive. Lee has already done a lot of work to show her ideas to the reader. She undermines that by having the characters state it outright. A touch more confidence would have gone a long way.
Bart Schaneman lives in Seoul, where he works as a journalist. He has a Substack, Life Reports. He’s also the author of the novel The Pot Job (Trident Press).