Lee averages a book a decade. It took 11 years of writing before Free Food for Millionaires, about the children of Korean immigrants in New York in the 90s, was published. She worked on Pachinko, which spans nearly a century, and ranges from a fishing village in Japanese-occupied Korea to Wall Street in the 1980s, for 20 years. It was voted one of the New York Times 100 best books of the century and has sold more than 5m globally. American Hagwon, which follows one family from Seoul to Sydney to California in the years leading up to and after the Asian financial crisis of 1997, was bought in a 12-way publishing auction. She has\u00a0recently returned from Germany on a research trip\u00a0for her next book, her \u201cEuropean novel\u201d, which already has a title: Marshall Plan. Its starting point is the 1963 bilateral agreement when thousands of Koreans were sent to West Germany to work as miners or nurses to boost the economy back home. The only thing all four novels have in common is the Korean\u00a0diaspora.<\/p>\n
Sungkyu Kim, Eunchae Jung and Minha Kim in Pachinko. Photograph: Apple TV<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve had to have lessons to do this, to talk to you,\u201d Lee confesses, smiling into the screen. A once desperately shy and poor girl from Seoul, she is both modest about her success \u2013 \u201cI\u2019m used to feeling unwanted\u201d \u2013 and proud that she has pulled it off. \u201cWow, I have done this. I have fucking done this. I would love to know how many Asian American women have been published in the New York Review of Books,\u201d Lee told the Believer Magazine. Her NYRB essay was an indepth appraisal of the work of fellow novelist Han Kang, who became the first Korean Nobel prize for literature laureate in 2024. While Lee\u2019s sprawling multi\u00adgenerational epics couldn\u2019t be more different from Han\u2019s slim, poetic novels, they both tackle periods of their country\u2019s troubled history that the world has chosen to forget. Ironically, they have come to prominence on the crest of hallyu, the Korean Wave, the government-sponsored cultural push<\/a> that has given the west K-pop bands and Squid Game.<\/p>\n double quotation mark\u2018I would love to write a short novel,\u00a0but I don\u2019t know how with these subjects\u2019<\/p>\n Each weighing in at more than 500 pages, Lee\u2019s novels take up as much space on a bookshelf as the life\u2019s work of other writers. \u201cI would love to write a short novel, but I don\u2019t know how with these subjects,\u201d she says. \u201cI always think: \u2018God, pick something easier. What is the matter with you? How about two people having feelings at a kitchen table?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n As big-hearted as they are physically hefty, her books have the immersive narrative drive, social conscience and moral purpose of the Victorian classics, on which she trained herself as a writer. \u201cAlmost all the people that I admire the most in terms of writers are old dead British writers,\u201d she says. \u201cAusten and Eliot, they have enormous hearts, they\u2019re so romantic in terms of what they think human beings can be.\u201d<\/p>\n If her first two novels dealt with assimilation and colonisation, respectively, American Hagwon takes on one of the most important things to Koreans around the world: education. \u201cHagwon\u201d is the term for private cram schools that are ubiquitous in South Korea<\/a>. \u201cIf there was one word that I wanted you to know, that it\u2019s so important for you to understand any Korean person you\u2019ll ever meet, it\u2019s \u2018hagwon\u2019,\u201d Lee says. \u201cIn Korea that word is almost like the word water.\u201d Some publishers were uneasy with Pachinko as a title, because it was unfamiliar to western readers. But this noisy pinball machine found in pachinko parlours across Korea was the perfect metaphor for the unpredictability of success, especially when the odds are stacked against you, as they were for the Korean-Japanese immigrants.<\/p>\n In American Hagwon, John and Helen Koh are forced to uproot their family after a business betrayal: John swaps a well-paid job in insurance to manage a nail bar in LA, and their three children \u2013 Bo, DH and Mido \u2013 have to learn harder lessons than those taught in any classroom. More than 600 pages devoted to studying, tutoring and the establishment of a hagwon business, a concept unfamiliar to most readers outside Korea, might be a tough sell. But American Hagwon is about much more than swotting for exams. Lee wants to show the true cost of the overachieving Asian stereotype, the sacrifices of the \u201ctiger mom\u201d and the inequities of the elite education system. \u201cHow do you live a wise life?\u201d the novel asks. It is a story of \u201cpower and ambition and getting to your goals\u201d, she says. \u201cIn America, we really worship work but we also really worship success. We don\u2019t always worship how people get there. In Korea, people really do examine how you get there.\u201d<\/p>\n She likes to set out her thesis in the opening line of each of her novels: \u201cCompetence can be a curse\u201d in Free Food for Millionaires; \u201cHistory has failed us, but no matter\u201d in Pachinko. \u201cThe rules of engagement have changed already,\u201d she declares at the start of American Hagwon. \u201cThere was a time when we felt we could sort of predict things,\u201d she says now. \u201cBut right now most people are feeling: \u2018I have no idea what just happened, no idea what will happen. I don\u2019t know how to raise my children or plan my career because shit just keeps happening. And the people who are changing the rules aren\u2019t sending us memos.\u2019 I think that is where advanced economies are right now. Of course,\u201d she adds, \u201cpeople who are not from advanced economies have always felt this way.\u201d<\/p>\n Lee in New York. Photograph: The Guardian<\/p>\n All her novels take the Asian immigrant experience from the margins to the mainstream. \u201cIn my pages, I want to be the centre,\u201d as she puts it. But she is also reflecting our global contemporary predicament. Diaspora \u201cis a permanent condition for every single person in the world,\u201d she says. \u201cNow we have economic diaspora and we also have environmental diaspora. The people that I focus on are obviously Koreans, but what I\u2019m really writing about is when you have to leave because you\u2019re no longer useful or you\u2019re no longer wanted, what do you do? You have to adapt.\u201d<\/p>\n Lee\u2019s own story has the epic sweep of her novels. Her father was a war refugee who fled North Korea when he was 16, never to see his family again. He met her mother, a piano teacher, in Seoul. The family moved to the US when Min was seven, where they lived in an apartment in Elmhurst, Queens. The middle of three sisters, she remembers it as an \u201cugly little hovel\u201d, with mice and bugs. Her father bought a newsstand, where\u00a0the young Min would sit on the weekends. After a year, they bought a wholesale jewellers, not much bigger than the newspaper kiosk, selling costume jewellery to street pedlars. Both her parents worked in the shop six days a week. Her father is now 91, her mother 86, and she visits them in New Jersey after church each Sunday.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t have any friends and I really couldn\u2019t get on,\u201d she says of her own school days. Things improved when she got into Bronx High School of Science (also attended by NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani). But she felt out of her depth once again at Yale, where \u201cthere were so few Asians and everybody was so much wealthier\u201d. Her two years as a lawyer, condensing boxes of documents into 20-page memos, proved a perfect training for a novelist intent on taking on huge hunks of Korean history. She married her husband, Christopher Duffy, who is half Japanese and half European, when she was 24, and their son was born when she was 29. \u201cI really did think I was going to die,\u201d she says. \u201cI thought I had to get everything done.\u201d<\/p>\n Walking home from the subway one day after reading VS Naipaul\u2019s A House for Mr Biswas<\/a>, she realised that here was her subject. \u201cI had to write about the disgraced, the poor and the earnest strivers of Queens,\u201d she wrote in an essay in the New York Times. She took classes at Harvard Business School and a whole semester in millinery at a fashion college as research for Free Food for Millionaires.<\/p>\n
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