Min Jin Lee in conversation with Mitchell S. Jackson

Literary Arts and The Reser are thrilled to present Min Jin Lee, author of the beloved novels Pachinko (an international bestseller and National Book Award finalist) and Free Food for Millionaires, for a conversation about her new book, American Hagwon.  
 American Hagwon is both “a classic in the making and a novel distinctly of our moment, one that helps us find firmer ground in a world unmoored from a most basic concern: how do we care for one another?” 
Min Jin Lee will be joined in conversation by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Mitchell S. Jackson.

About the book:
In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and Mido—find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California—where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.
In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice—for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers—is a kind of prayer.
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
To create access for our wider community, we need the support of event sponsors.
If you or your company is interested in sponsorship, please email development@literary-arts.org.