Min Jin Lee with Aidan Flax-Clark: American Hagwon

Min Jin Lee’s first novel since the bestselling Pachinko follows one family across decades and continents as they search in schools, jobs, churches, and beyond for meaning and success. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and Mido—find their fortunes twisted and 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.

Lee speaks with Aidan Flax-Clark, the Director of LIVE from NYPL, about crafting the Kohs as well as their friends, relatives, and their foes as they move in and out of each other’s lives, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.