Pachinko author Min Jin Lee returns with an epic about education and aspiration

“I’m so unproductive,” laughs Min Jin Lee down the line from New York. “I’ve only published three novels in basically 30 years. I don’t think I’m doing it right.” It is a startling admission from the author of Pachinko, the National Book Award-shortlisted multigenerational saga that became a global phenomenon. But the reason the Korean- American’s books take so long is her process, which marries a novelist’s imagination with a sociologist’s methods to create a remarkable literary portrait of her homeland – its diaspora, history and national psyche.

Her third book, American Hagwon, an effortlessly immersive epic of education, aspiration and migration, has cost her a decade. It began life as the conclusion to the trilogy that opened with her debut, Free Food for Millionaires, but will now be a tetralogy. The first book was about Koreans in 20th-century America; the second, Pachinko, was about understanding how Koreans are shaped by their history. For the third, she wanted to pinpoint the most important value for Koreans around the world. She conducted thousands of interviews, not just in Korea and the US, but everywhere – Britain, Brazil, Australia – and the same answer kept surfacing.

So, she set out to write a “really compact” novel about education, which her subjects often saw as the answer to everything. The resulting 640 pages roam across Australia, Korea and the US, and somewhere in the writing her subject shifted beneath her.

“What really made me stay with the book for a decade is this idea of education and wisdom, and how do you live a wise life? Because it’s not about where you went to school or who you know, but how you make choices when things are complex.”

No recipe for democracy can work if we literally do not educate a large chunk of the population and only focus on our own precious children

That conviction springs from a youth experiencing the highs and lows of life as an immigrant. Born in Seoul in 1968 – her father a refugee from North Korea who lost his family at 16, her mother from Busan – Lee’s family emigrated to Queens, New York in 1976 when she was seven, “principally because [her] father didn’t want another war”. He went from marketing executive to a newspaper seller, then to a costume-jewellery wholesaler where Lee worked weekends and holidays. She barely spoke until middle school. The Bronx High School of Science gave her confidence; Yale followed, then law school and two years practising law.

We might never have had her novels, if not for a death sentence averted by medicine. Diagnosed as a chronic Hepatitis B carrier in her teens, Lee was told she would likely get liver cancer in her late 20s or early 30s – the impetus she needed to quit law and “learn how to write a novel”. She did develop cirrhosis after her son’s birth but an experimental drug produced a miraculous recovery. She is now 57.

Her teachers were dead and mostly British. She writes social novels in the tradition of George Eliot, Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope, working only in omniscient narration, a 19th-century construct, with episodic chapters. She turns to Middlemarch time and again. To write about society you must explore community, she says: not just one person, but her neighbours and how they affect her.

American Hagwon is built that way, following John and Helen Koh and their three children, Bo, DH and Mido, as they traverse the globe between 1992 and 2007, buffeted by the winds of capitalism, including the 1997 Asian financial crisis. It also focuses in on other characters whose lives intersect with theirs in Seoul, Sydney and Orange County, where they settle.

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