This week, I am rereading Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar, a very long, lush 1955 novel about a young woman growing up on the Upper West Side of New York in the 1930s. Marjorie’s family lives just above its means, and Marjorie is beautiful and spoiled and always looking for more. It’s refreshing to read a book like this one by a male author about a woman, though the novel doesn’t quite escape its era, ultimately giving Marjorie a sort of disappointing fate. But what I love about this book are all the lovingly detailed descriptions of place: factory floors; diners out in New Jersey where the New York rich complain about FDR and the New Deal; a summer stock theater in the Catskills with predatory directors. I miss reading about distinct places in fiction. I miss reading about how things smell or what the corner booth in a bar feels like. I understand we live in a homogenized world, where every new store installs the same lighting scheme. But I still need a little bit of grounding in my fiction, and Marjorie Morningstar puts me in a fully texturized world of New York City past.

 

This week, we’re doing something a little bit different: featuring a guest writer. Bill Cheng is the author of the acclaimed novel Southern Cross the Dog and also one of the most astute readers I know. I loved Min Jin Lee’s American Hagwon, but I wanted, very desperately, to read his take on it. As Bill himself writes below, the central question of this novel is, “Who has helped us get as far as we have in our lives? Who are we helping in turn?”

American Hagwon is Min Jin Lee’s follow-up to her 2017 epic, Pachinko. The novel, spanning 15 years across South Korea, Australia, and the United States, follows the Kohs, a Korean family, as they attempt to weather the 1997 collapse of South Korea’s economy, which throws the trajectories of their lives into a tailspin. Suddenly, the normal jockeying for admittance to elite schools and education programs and the perils of immigrating for a better economic life take on a more fraught significance, as the Kohs and their circle of friends and acquaintances makes a series of fateful decisions that will shape their futures. The 1997 economic crisis is just one thing that moves the characters around. The Kohs may be responding to big, global changes, but nothing truly epic happens in the book. Rather, it’s a lot of small things that come together to form a story. The Kohs feel very ordinary, as do their choices. What makes the book remarkable is Lee’s ability to make that feel worth reading.

American Hagwon is not the story of a single child, or even a family, but the vast ecosystem of people, communities, and institutions that attempts to make sense of what it means to be a success in the modern world. The Kohs operate within a cultural and economic environment where education, particularly one signified by elite or prestigious schools abroad, is placed at a high premium. Competition is fierce; spots are few. It’s in this milieu that hagwons (what in the U.S. would colloquially be considered “cram schools”) thrive, providing supplementary education outside of a traditional school system.

 

When her daughter’s teacher, Mr. Na, stops into Helen Koh’s home unannounced one morning, the visit is coded with threats and insinuations. The Koh family had recently repatriated from Sydney to the middle-class neighborhood of Gaepo-dong. Mere pages prior, we saw Mr. Na bully the gentle and withdrawn Mido Koh, humiliating her in front of her classmates and rapping her knuckles with a ruler.

 

During the visit, Mr. Na insists that Mido has fallen behind her peers and requires extra attention—attention that he would be willing to provide. Despite already having difficulty making ends meet, Helen is a mother who knows how things are done in Korea. She pools the money she had budgeted for her three children’s education and slips it into his briefcase.

But the predatory schoolteacher who solicits a bribe from the caring parent is also not without his own troubles: “I have to take care of my family and make sure they have a bright future, but it’s tough. My parents worked on a farm. I’m a luckless country boy, but I studied and became a middle school teacher,” Mr. Na says to Helen. “I am honored to be a member of a noble profession, but it’s not possible to take care of your family on a teacher’s salary alone. My children have to eat, go to hagwon, and I’m the eldest son. There are also my aging parents to consider.”

Later that night, Helen describes Na’s visit to her husband, John. Rather than become outraged or indignant, his response is mild acquiescence. “What else could you have done? Teachers have to eat, too, so they do these shameful things,” he says.

Helen, John, and Mr. Na are all responding to forces larger than any one individual. Understanding these forces and making them legible seems to be the dominant undertaking of Lee’s novel. At times, the complexity of these negotiations can feel like being inside a Rube Goldberg machine: To get her kids into the elite hagwon Eagle Academy, Helen befriends Mido’s classmate’s mother, Nari. This friendship would not have happened were it not for the urgings of Sonya Cho, Helen’s sister and an affluent and respected elder of their church. And were it not for Eagle Academy, Mido’s brother, DH, would not have befriended Peter Cha, whose mother, Renee, would not have ended up funding DH’s college tuition as a secret benefactor.

 

If my description of these characters sounds mercenary, it doesn’t come off that way in Lee’s novel. The bulk of her characters act with kindness, grace, and humility—traits I believe are at least in part informed by shared cultural beliefs around work, self-sacrifice, filial duty, and community. Time and time again, the Kohs and their supporters subject themselves to toil, indignity, and loss of social standing for the promise of improving the lives of those they care about.

In 1997, the Asian financial crisis leads to the devaluation of the Korean won. Characters are forced to relocate abroad, and those who don’t are placed under extreme economic pressures. John Koh, who had recently been demoted and transferred back to Sydney following a scandal involving his friend and boss, finds his job under threat at a time when he needs to pay for all three of his children’s college tuitions. John and Helen decide to relocate to Orange County, California, to be closer to their son Bo. In their downsized apartment, they are welcomed by Nari, who had left Korea earlier to manage a struggling takeout restaurant with her husband.

It’s in moments like these that Lee brings her most deft prose work. She writes with an easiness that lays bare the most essential qualities of her characters: their goodness, their charity, their willingness to sublimate their personal ambition for the well-being of others. Lee’s prose is spare and precise. It brings a quiet grace to the small, everyday sacrifices of her characters without aggrandizement.
Nari welcomes the Kohs with gifts of roach traps and steel wool to fend off the mice. “It’s terrible being poor here, but you’ll work hard, and things will get better,” she says. “When we got here first, my sister-in-law rented us a spare bedroom from another family. She had no space. We were trying to save for a down payment for the store. It’s not easy, but we have strong bodies and even stronger minds.… Remember that we are very strong people and we are good learners.… I wasn’t the best at school, but life is also a school, isn’t it? Living can sharpen us.”

One wonders if the American in American Hagwon is less a signifier of geography than it is one of metaphor. I can’t help but see the novel as a work engaging in a broader conversation around American idealism and the American dream.

American fiction has a long-standing tradition of taking the view that success and ambition are individual undertakings—the Jay Gatsbys and Horatio Alger characters. As a culture, Americans want to celebrate the singular great man and his meteoric rise. But American Hagwon offers an alternative to this American dream that moves away from unrelenting individualism. Instead, it shows the ways in which personal success and failure are at least partially impacted by the way we are supported or fail to be supported by the systems around us.

In many ways, I feel implicated by this novel. It captures a sensibility and point of view around family and education that feels deeply Asian American, particularly for those of us who are first- and second-generation Americans. No community is a monolith, but there are broad strokes we might gesture toward: an emphasis on academic perfection, STEM or law careers, financial success. American Hagwon looks deeply at these stereotypes to provide a context that feels spiritual, earnest, warm, vulnerable, and self-reflective.

For these characters, the American dream is less about the pursuit of wealth, prestige, or power than it is about finding meaning by uplifting others. It argues that sacrifice is not about what you lose but the ways you enrich yourself by enriching those around you. It’s difficult to read American Hagwon without reflecting on the ways we participate in that ecosystem, especially for those of us who come from immigrant families. Who has helped us get as far as we have in our lives? Who are we helping in turn?

Without a doubt, American Hagwon models the American immigrant story of the late 20th century: push-pull forces bringing individuals to this country and landing them into support systems that were laid out by those who came before them, which allow them pathways to economic and social safety, and eventual integration into the wider American fabric. But to call it just an “immigrant story” feels disingenuous to the breadth of people this story belongs to and dangerous to the times we live in.

That is the American story—at least, the one I see. And anyone who wants to consider themselves American should not forget it.

 

In each edition of this newsletter, we ask writers to share a space where they wrote something beautiful. It can be their regular writing spot or an unexpected place of inspiration. This week’s writer is Amy Fusselman. Fusselman is the author of Cloud Six, an absurdist novel about the afterlife.

Amy Fusselman: “With each of my pregnancies, I found that the closer I got to labor, the more I would stress about a particular object that I was buying for the baby. With my first kid, it was curtains, and with the second, it was this chair. It wasn’t a traditional nursing chair, but it was called a ‘chair and a half’ at the furniture store.

“The chair, which was originally covered in beige linen, was used very intensely for several years before it became the place where my sons threw their dirty clothes. Then my husband passed a fabric store in our neighborhood where he saw this fabric in the window. We reupholstered the chair in it and then moved the chair to the living room.

“We now call this the horror chair. I have commandeered it as my workspace. Writing is sometimes a horrifying task, so I am delighted to sit here to do it.”