American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee

At 9:34 last Monday morning, I learned about the imminent release of American Hagwon. I had had no idea. Min Jin Lee caught me entirely by surprise. I had given up checking for a follow up to Pachinko, a magnificent book, years ago. You can’t wait forever, you know? You have to live your life.

Upon hearing the news, I immediately texted my book buddiest book buddy. “THERE’S A NEW MIN JIN LEE COMING OUT TOMORROW?????” [punctation and capitalization unchanged - ed.] She replied with a photo of the Advance Reader Copy she’d been keeping at her desk for weeks or even months. I used to be hip.

First thing Tuesday morning, I ran into the local Barnes & Noble and picked up a copy. It was a huge book, sticking out even among all the other high-profile August/September releases. You could fit two new Colson Whiteheads in this thing, or nearly three Emily St. John Mandels. I began reading the moment I got home, expecting that to be the rest of my day.

It wasn’t quite. Thirty or so pages in, I found myself happy to be distracted. Sending texts, tidying my desk, fiddling around with a guitar, any excuse to stop reading for a few minutes. That doesn’t necessarily mean the book isn’t working for me; my brain is as fried as anyone’s by modernity. The problem got worse as I continued, though. I was reading American Hagwon through sheer force of will, not any sense of enjoyment. On Wednesday morning at 10:11, I texted book buddy to say, “70 pages in, I see what we’re doing, but I am struggling to get into it as a reader.”

Much as Pachinko tells the story of a Korean family across several generations, American Hagwon follows the five members of the Koh family—parents Helen and John and their teens Bo, DH, and Mido—across fifteen years and three continents. They start the book as well-heeled members of South Korea’s upper-middle class, but a combination of ratfuckery and the East Asian economic downturn of the mid-90s sends them to a significantly more modest existence on the American West Coast.

You can tell even from that cursory description that the book’s big theme is the entropy of life. Our lives are not fully within our control, American Hagwon says. Doing your best, doing what you believe will lead to success, can only matter so much in the face of larger cultural forces, bad luck, or coincidence. This idea permeates the book from the first page to the last. The characters who ultimately find something approaching happiness are those who can embrace where life takes them, who can find a sustaining peace in who they are and what they believe instead of what they do and how much they make.

This is a great, timely theme, one that will certainly resonate with anyone under the age of, oh, let’s say 55, but Lee takes an unnecessarily didactic approach to getting the reader tuned in to its frequency. Every new character, and there are a lot of them, gets introduced with several paragraphs of backstory. We learn where they’re from, what they thought they’d do with their lives, and how they ended up where they are now.

The cumulative effect of this approach is stultifying. Any sense of narrative momentum evaporates when every new character is a speed bump. This approach also makes it extremely difficult for the reader to assign relative importance to the characters, a crucial bit of bookkeeping when reading something with this kind of sprawl. When the tutor Sean was introduced over several leisurely paragraphs on page 46, I thought we were about to spend an entire book together; he’s gone for good by page 60.

A lack of trust pervades the book, trust in the reader and trust in Lee’s own considerable abilities as an author. Themes are spelled out, which isn’t necessary when you have such a perfect marriage of theme and story. That lack of trust extends to the book’s need to include every last relevant inch of its narrative; American Hagwon could easily start 120 pages in and give us glimpses of the events from the first Book. It would certainly be stronger if it had done so.

The book’s other major issue is that the storyline surrounding the titular hagwon, a Korean-style tutoring center, is a total snooze fest. It exists to make a point, not because it is emotionally engaging or intellectually stimulating. Lee uses it to rail against the impossible and dehumanizing standards of the culture surrounding the Korean educational system in particular and status-conscious education in general, to reject the malignant idea that a child is only a success if they get into the very best school. She’s right, of course, but that doesn’t make those pages engaging. By the middle of the book, my eyes would glaze over every time a chapter started at the tutoring center.

That’s in stark contrast to the portions of American Hagwon that focus on the elder Kohs and their cohort (Kohort?). Lee has a natural affinity for and understanding of the older characters. There is a depth to the writing and emotions in these sections that is sorely lacking from the portions focused on the children. The older adults are simply more interesting.

Aunt Sonya, Helen’s sister, is the book’s great triumph. From the moment she first appears, she pops. Lee does her best work when writing about Sonya, her husband Yong-gil, and Yong-gil’s uncle, referred to primarily by his title as the Chairman. These chapters are nuanced, funny, surprising, both poignant and unsentimental. In a book that occasionally caused me to wonder if I’d still like Pachinko, Sonya’s chapters were a terrific reminder of what Lee is capable of. Book V, the final 150 pages, concerns itself almost entirely with the elders, and it is far and away the strongest portion of the novel. I read nearly all of it in one go, glued to a park bench.

The difference in quality between the interleaved halves of this book—neither bad, but one no more than fine—is so obvious and so consistent that I repeatedly wondered where the editor was. This is clearly a case of the author caring deeply about their story; it’s the editor’s job to make the author see the reality of what they’ve written. To me, American Hagwon cries out for the firm hand of a belligerent collaborator, someone who isn’t afraid to insist on cuts.

Lee would only benefit from this. She is prone to spread. Free Food for Millionaires, which I could not bring myself to finish, is 560 pages. Pachinko was 500, and needed every single one of them. I would suggest that American Hagwon isn’t 640 pages because it needs to be; it’s 640 pages out of habit. There’s a world in which editor Reagan Arthur told Lee to tighten the book up, to focus on the parts that so clearly work, a world in which American Hagwon has a different title—it is unfortunate that the book is named after its weakest aspect—and comes in at a tight and excellent 350 or so pages.

I would love to live in that world. The moments when Hagwon shines brightest are those when the author’s concerns are the most immediate and intimate; the death of a loved one, the complex dynamics of mature romantic relationships, or the ways different people navigate national identity, class disparities, and downward mobility. These are epic subjects, but they do not need to be the subject of an epic novel. Sometimes the smaller stories can say even more.

James

Mark Twain introduces Jim, the slave who accompanies Huckleberry Finn down the Mississippi, at the start of the second chapter of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

We went tip-toeing along a path amongst the trees back towards the end of the widow’s garden, stooping down so as the branches wouldn’t scrape our heads. When we was passing by the kitchen I fell over a root and made a noise. We scrouched down and laid still. Miss Watson’s big nigger, named Jim, was setting in the kitchen door; we could see him pretty clear, because there was a light behind him. He got up and stretched his neck out about a minute, listening. Then he says:

‘Who dah?’

James, in which Percival Everett retells The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, announces itself with astonishing clarity. It dropps readers into the opening of that second chapter as Jim saw it:

Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.

That is such a perfect encapsulation of everything the novel is doing, such a succinct explanation of its tone and its viewpoint, that I cannot help but hope it was the wellspring of the entire project. In my mind, Everett was talking about Huckleberry Finn with friends, joking about how Jim could probably see those little fuckers, only to realize he had something here. I have to believe he wrote that sentence down and the rest of this wondrous novel came spilling out. It’s the romantic in me. 

I was prepared for James to gently subvert the tropes at play in Twain’s novel, to slowly add detail where none had been, but it doesn’t really do that. Instead, James does away with those tropes fully within its first five pages, mostly through Everett’s use of language.

All of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is written in dialect, but Jim’s dialogue is particularly hard to parse: “A harem’s a bo’d’nhouse, I reck’n. Mos’ likely dey had rackety times in de nussery.” A lot of “dey”s, a lot of “warn’t”s, that sort of business. Jim is a comic foil, always an object and never a subject. His dialogue supports that.

Not so the Jim of James. Even if we ignore the timbre of the narration, he says as much in the second paragraph: “[Huck and Tom] were always playing some kind of pretending game where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy.” The narration is so assured, particularly when taken in contrast to the source material, that I was jarred when I turned the page and came to the first line of dialogue: “Who dat dere in da dark lak dat?”

First of all, it is a miracle of book publishing that the first line of dialogue sits at the very top of page 10, and not at the bottom of page 9. Having just finished reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in preparation for James—something I don’t think is essential to enjoy it, but which certainly enhanced my experience—I had already noticed Everett’s rejection of dialect, so it was dizzying and exhilarating to turn the page and see it. In that moment, before I knew everything Everett was up to, it suggested a sort of radical egalitarianism, the idea that our thoughts are not bound by the particulars of how we speak.

Second of all, I love that Everett chose not to use the same dialogue as Mark Twain. Both books are explicitly, textually first-person narratives written down after the fact. Huck remembers Jim saying “Who dah?”. Jim remembers it a little different. The choice to deviate from Twain’s/Huckleberry Finn’s account in the particulars while adhering to the broader structures reinforces the conceit behind both books.

Third and lastly, that is the moment in which James announces its love of language to the reader. One of Everett’s primary thematic obsessions here is code-switching, and the ways in which the specifics of the language we use communicate much more than just the words themselves are saying. Three pages later, Jim has a conversation with another slave in which they speak entirely without dialect. A page or two after that, Jim instructs his young daughter on “the correct incorrect grammar” for speaking to white folk. It’s all an act, a façade put in place to make sure the white people feel comfortable and secure.

The rapacity with which Everett acknowledges and discards tropes reminded me of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, a movie that burns away all the comforting slave tropes the audience might bring with it. The “kind slaveowner” is kind and good right up until the moment it’s inconvenient for him. The southern belle is just as malicious as her husband. An attempted lynching is slow, aching, and miserable, not a grand and dramatic burst of horrifying cinematic action. For his purposes, McQueen turned cinema against itself, just as Everett uses language here to find what’s at the bottom of one of the Great American Novels.

To say James is a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a good hook to get you interested—it worked for me!—but the reality is that James is done with Twain by the end of Part One. Everett has his own story, and his own concerns. This is a project of reclamation. It is a strident assertion that black people aren’t, will not be, and never were anything less than just that, people, whole and unto themselves, no matter what the white people write down.