The first hint that I needn’t be so anxious to interview Min Jin Lee came as the bestselling author descended the creaky stairs of her five-story Harlem townhouse and pronounced my name. Not in the way my brain has articulated it for decades, smoothed over by an anglicized version that made it easy for teachers to call out from an attendance roll. Which is to say, Lee, on a Friday afternoon in August, pronounced my name the way the people who brought me into this world had intended. The next came when Lee, smartly dressed in a gray vest and jeans, with a pair of delicate drop earrings, doled out lively profanities. She was recalling her time attending Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the landmark case that would later reach the Supreme Court and dismantle race-based affirmative action, as part of her nearly decade-long research process for American Hagwon, the much-anticipated third installment of a planned quartet dedicated to Korean diasporas. As a supporter of affirmative action, she witnessed testimony teeming with stereotypical portrayals of Asian American students, including, as Lee puts it, making them out to be like “machines.” “I sat there in the press box, and I remember thinking, this whole idea that Asian Americans have shitty personalities—that’s really shitty. It’s a really shitty thing to say.” “Also, we’re talking about children,” she continued, her voice intensifying. “How dare you insult the children of my community?” To hear Lee condemn the racial stereotyping of Asian Americans, including the “stupid, horrible racial epithet called ‘tiger parenting,’” with such blunt rigor, in a living room sumptuously bedecked with books, was deeply satisfying. My own fondness for profanity, my Korean-born mother used to warn, was a sign “of an uneducated person.” “I think your mom was right,” Lee said, warmly laughing as I shared the memory with her. American Hagwon is Lee’s third novel and follows Pachinko, the vast 2017 saga that traces four generations of a Korean family as they weather war, discrimination, and cruelty in Japanese-occupied Korea and in Japan. A finalist for the National Book Award, Pachinko established Lee as a master of sweeping historical narrative. American Hagwon, on the other hand, takes place in more contemporary times, with Lee’s aperture shifting between a multigenerational family drama and broader meditations on the human costs of heedless ambition. What are the human costs of endless ambition? Would… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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