SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
John and Helen Koh are comfortably upwardly middle-class family, with their three children, Bo, DH and Mido. John's corporate job takes them to America, Australia, then back home to the South Korea of the early 1990s. But then John's working life takes a turn. The 1997 Asian financial crisis strikes. They leave Seoul for Southern California, a different culture with dazzling possibilities. But how do they place their children into the American dream? "American Hagwon" is the highly anticipated novel from the author of "Free Food For Millionaires" and "Pachinko." And Min Jin Lee joins us now from our studios in New York. Thank you so much for being with us.
MIN JIN LEE: Hi, Scott. Thank you so much for having me.
SIMON: And I guess we should explain what a Hagwon is and what they mean to the Kohs.
LEE: A hagwon is the Korean word for a learning center. So although it can be a cram school for an entrance exam for a school, it's also a place where you could learn how to be a gourmet cook or to tap dance or to learn how to play piano. It is a very important part of Korean culture. And most people think that if they need to learn anything and not go to a traditional school or grad school, you go to a hagwon.
SIMON: John and Helen have to start over in Southern California, and it's - well, it's painful to read about that - in the small apartment with linoleum floors that I think they say were possibly once yellow. What does that do to their confidence in themselves?
LEE: Well, I think the experience of coming down in the world - it's very common, actually, in the world today. Because the children had been protected for such a long time by having experienced being solidly middle class, it is really shocking for them to see their parents become working-class people, having been very solidly white-collar professionals.
SIMON: They look around, and Mido says, we won't be here long.
LEE: (Laughter) Well, it's really hopeful, isn't it? I think that children feel really - well, it makes them grow up really fast.
SIMON: I have read - maybe against expectation - growing up in New York, you did not go to a hagwon.
LEE: No. I didn't go to a hagwon in any kind of Korean formal sense. However, when I was in high school, I went to the Bronx High School of Science in New York, which is a specialized high school. You have to test into it.
SIMON: Yeah.
LEE: And it was actually much easier to get into it back then. I was accepted in 1982. And I'm not being modest. It was actually much easier. You can look at the data (laughter). But I did want to go to a college of my dreams because my favorite writer went there, and I knew that I had to have a good score. And then some of my friends were a bit well off. They were attending something called Princeton Review, which still exists today.
So I asked my parents if I could have - I think it was something like 300 or $500, which was a lot of money for us. And they said, sure. And they found me the money, and I went. So in that sense, I went to the Hagwon of America. And most Americans who take these specialized courses for things like law school or MCATs - like Stanley Kaplan or Kumon - those are hagwons.
SIMON: Mido ends up working at a hagwon in Southern California. With such dedication, the family worries a bit. How does she begin to see the focus of her students?
LEE: Well, I think she gets really concerned because these kids seem a bit distorted about what all this means. And I think that I am actually making a commentary about what I saw when I interviewed and did all this research about high school and college students today. The environment has become so competitive. And the children who want to go to the highly competitive schools have to become so professional very early on. So it is a Korean issue, but it's also, now, an American issue for middle-class families. Parents really think they have to get into a name-brand school.
SIMON: Well, parents - all kinds of parents - believe if their youngsters don't get into a name-brand school, they'll be behind in that race we call life.
LEE: Exactly. And I think we all want to believe that somehow we can make our children safe. So I think that the wish for your kid to go to a name-brand school is not necessarily without the fact that you love your kid, and you want to protect your kid. So I think that to criticize people who want those things is a bit unkind. It decontextualizes why they want to protect their kids.
SIMON: Did you find yourself, as you wrote this novel, writing out of Mido's kind of exhaustion, from personal observation?
LEE: I don't think I felt Mido's exhaustion. What I really felt was this real sense of heartbreak. I felt so sad for all these people who were spending so much of their very hard-earned money - money they really didn't have - to help their kids. It's not true. Like, you could go to a fancy school and not have things work out. Every single person that you and I know can find five examples - not, like, one example - five examples, maybe 10 examples, maybe 20 examples of people who went to these schools, and these people did not have the life that you thought they would have, or they thought they would have, as a result of having gone to a name-brand school. And also, it's not necessarily the best thing for the kid if the kid doesn't want to go there.
SIMON: And is it fair to raise the question about what they really learn?
LEE: You know, the popular stance about hagwons in Korean education is that it's stupid, and it's evil, and it's wrong to make kids study this way. And that argument has been made. It will continue to be made, and I completely support believing this.
That said, the general competence and the abilities of Korean children are really high. This kind of push - it did lead to this incredible development of a very, very poor country in a tiny amount of time. However, many other children and families are broken by this kind of stress. And one of the things that you really see is the negative birth rate. People don't want to have kids because they can't afford to have kids. And one of the main reasons that you will hear is that they cannot afford the hagwon bills.
SIMON: Yeah. This book ranges all around the world with Korean families - South Korea, Australia, Brazil, the U.S. Does having family around the world carry some burden for Korean families to make themselves known and successful?
LEE: I think one of the things that really kind of affected me was seeing this need of many young Koreans in Korea to become globally successful. It wasn't like I want to be the best student in my small hometown, or even Seoul or even in the northeast of Seoul or the southwest of Seoul. They said - no - I need to be globally competitive, almost like Olympic medalist-level of everything. And I found that to be really hard because the entire competition for that kind of race is not entirely fair. And there's so few people who can make it. And I thought, I don't know if that can yield a great deal of enjoyment.
SIMON: Well, when do you enjoy it, too?
LEE: Exactly. When do you enjoy it? Because even if you get there, then don't you have to go to the next thing?
SIMON: Much of your novel seems to be about willful self-sacrifice.
LEE: Yeah. It's so interesting to me. Thank you so much for recognizing that. I think this whole idea of willful self-sacrifice is something that's really demanded in the culture of Korea. And you see it in the initial story of Sim Cheong (ph). It's a fairy tale of a girl. It's called a "Blind Man's Daughter." And the young daughter decides to sacrifice her entire life, and she sells herself to a bunch of sailors so the sailors can have a successful crossing across a violent sea. And then they get a lot of rice, and this rice that she gets for her life is given to a monastery. Why? Because then the monks can pray for her father's site to be restored.
This kind of story is really pointed to as the virtue of a good daughter or a good son. It comes from filial piety and, obviously, Confucianism. And we can criticize that, and yet, you understand why these pillars of philosophy are very important for a culture like Korea.
SIMON: How long did it take you to write this book?
LEE: Ten years (laughter).
SIMON: That's what I thought. Is this book over for you?
LEE: Yeah. I actually feel so grateful that it's done because I learned so many things along the way. I got to build the world that I wanted to build.
SIMON: Where do we find that world? In the book?
LEE: And also in the way I live. Because I think every author will probably say this - the act of writing a book really will transform you. Like, I'm a different person than I was before I wrote the book, and it's not just the years passing. It's actually what I learned and also the ability to make cosmos out of chaos. You start with the questions, and then you have the answers. But in order to arrive at the answers, I had to really reassemble and also make order out of all the disparate elements in my mind.
SIMON: Wow. I never do that.
(LAUGHTER)
LEE: That's very funny.
SIMON: "American Hagwon" is the new novel by Min Jin Lee. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
LEE: Oh, thank you so much, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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