Travel Bug Book Group • American Hagwon • Min Jin Lee
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American Hagwon
by Min Jin Lee
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“…It had that Brothers Karamazov feel that everything is incredibly intense and everything is at stake all of the time. And that these are remarkable individual characters who have these remarkable relationships. But at the same time your writing is obviously very different. There’s a humility and there’s a distance and there’s a willingness to let things happen on their own. So an epic in disguise is sort of how I felt about this book. And when I say Brothers Karamazov I am being completely serious because Brothers Karamazov is one of the few novels that when I read it and I felt, ok it’s hitting me, I’m being hit in the gut, I’m literally crying, things are happening to me inside, psysiologically in this novel, and I felt this same way about your book.”
—Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” in conversation with Min Jin Lee.
“American Hagwon is striking in that it counters the old "show, don't tell" writing adage: Instead, there's plenty of exposition in this novel and, yet, not a page is workmanlike. In fact, Lee is so deft that she conjures epiphanies out of the simplest material.”
—Maureen Corrigan, Book Critic, Fresh Air
From the author of the critically lauded modern classic Pachinko comes a kaleidoscopic epic set across Korea, Australia and the United States as the Koh family strive to live worthwhile lives amidst tumult and uncertainty.
John and Helen Koh and their three children – Bo, DH, and Mido – are building new lives in Korea when they find their worlds upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, and then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Striving to regain their footing, the Koh’s set their sights on doing whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. They leave Seoul for Sydney and then eventually settle in California, where new opportunities open for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, adjust to a new existence in which their qualifications mean little. The Kohs, their friends, relatives and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate love, work, fortune and fulfilment across the years.
Through masterfully controlled storytelling, Lee patiently explores how her characters' fortunes are shaped by forces from without and within: the powerful lure of sex, the sucking vacuum of greed, the insidiousness of racism, the obligations between parents and children. In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted a transcendent novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions.
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Discussion group is hosted in Travel Bug the first Wednesday of the month by Aimee Gwynne Franklyn, an independent curator, art historian and producer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.