Beyond Words: Min Jin Lee

About the Book

The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of “Pachinko” returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic: a masterpiece by turns sweeping and intimate, that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty.

In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in “American Hagwon” struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and Mido—find 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. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.

In “American Hagwon,“ Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice—for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers—is a kind of prayer.

“Min Jin Lee has written another masterpiece. ‘American Hagwon’ is, at once, an intimate story that spans three continents of the Koh family’s love, loss, and disappointments. It is also a story of how the ongoing demand for success can distort how we live and love. In this sense, the novel relentlessly criticizes a world defined by material gain, consumption, and status. The Koh family finds itself caught up in the whirlwind of it all. Despite the devastation wrought by the burden of achievement, faith and a gentle and unshakable love remain. Something we all need to remember and feel in these dark days.”—Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of “America, U.S.A.”

“An immersive, engrossing novel … this is panorama told in brilliant detail.”—Colm Tóibín

About the Author

Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels “Free Food for Millionaires” and “Pachinko,” a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a New York Times “100 Best Books of the Century.” She serves as the New York State Author Laureate from 2025 through 2027. She is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. Lee has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. She lives in Harlem with her family.