There might be no better place to set a novel about the Asian American dream than Orange County. This stretch of California sprawl, just south of Los Angeles, is where global boba chains open shiny, new American locations and K-pop tours sell out arenas. It also carries the promise of opportunity, a pond just small enough to raise the next promising generation of pre-pre-med AP students. Orange County is such a complete microcosm, in fact, that it arguably doesn’t represent the standard immigrant experience at all: To grow up Asian in OC is to be protected from being a minority in America—though sometimes at the cost of being raised, in effect, in Asia.
This immigrant enclave is the focus of Min Jin Lee’s newest novel, American Hagwon, which follows a Korean family across three continents and two decades before settling in Orange County. Though more than 600 pages long, the book is easy reading, if at times clunky and cliché, reminiscent of the awkward bilingualism of kids who took Korean classes in church basements while also leaning on an overdone plot device—the 1997 IMF crisis—recognizable to anyone remotely familiar with Korean dramas. But whenever my patience threatened to flag, it was Lee’s eerily convincing portrayal of Orange County that drew me back in: She captured the place I grew up, with its unnerving combination of immigrant hope and malaise.
In Orange County, the Kohs make a living running some of the region’s first hagwons: extracurricular tutoring centers for homework and college-admissions guidance, a mainstay of Korea’s ruthlessly competitive academic environment. The bright-eyed leaders redesign the hagwon to create an equitable playing field for its students, turning the stereotypically toxic cultural export into something much more, well, American. Lee uses their journey to examine the ironic but unyielding hope of emigres who leave behind Korea’s cutthroat, orthodox customs only to end up recreating them abroad, and probes the limits of trying to fix a broken system from within. For an immigrant novel, a genre that typically demands a wholesale abandonment of old customs, it’s a refreshing line of inquiry, but Lee’s attempts to answer it disappoint, as the book’s ambition becomes its greatest liability, overlooking individual motives and interiority in favor of a generational narrative and an expansive yet shallow web of characters.
The novel begins optimistically enough: A new managerial position brings John Koh and his family back from Sydney to Seoul. His wife, Helen, initially worries about downsizing from a four-bedroom house with a backyard to an apartment, as well as enrolling Mido, their timid youngest child, in Korean middle school. But Mido quickly meets a new best friend, Yun, and the Koh children secure spots at Eagle Academy, a rigorous, high-demand hagwon. Even Helen comes around: She had preferred “to raise the children abroad to enlarge their opportunities,” but “there was some consolation: Mido’s shyness seemed almost commonplace in Korea. A child could be quieter here.” Then, when John’s closest friend and colleague pressures him to fire a junior employee with whom the friend is having an affair, the mistress frames John for sexual assault, and he is demoted. Meanwhile, Yun’s family, once comfortably upper-middle class, flees to Orange County after being scammed by a trusted business partner. American Hagwon traces the long afterlife of these betrayals, showing how ordinary families contend with the slow build-up of small tragedies and the decisions people make when life doesn’t seem to reward hard work or good intentions.
The Kohs scatter. John and Mido return to Sydney; Helen stays behind to support their older son, Bo, as he applies to college; DH, the gregarious middle son, attends boarding school in Connecticut on an athletic scholarship. Years pass before the family eventually reunites, in the late 1990s, in Orange County.
By this time, the region had become a hub for Asian immigrants, offering a generation of otherwise unremarkable Korean students a new shot at life (or at least an Ivy League education). After the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 lifted national-origin quotas, Orange County’s Asian population tripled, from less than five percent in 1980 to 13 percent in 2000. (By 2010, they represented 20 percent of the county.) Koreans, the second-largest Asian subgroup after the Vietnamese, made a living selling food, manicures, boutique clothing, and the promise of academic achievement. In 2002, the Los Angeles Times counted more than 100 hagwons in Los Angeles and Orange Counties, with monthly rates from $300 to $700; some even offered golf lessons. Just six years later, another estimate reported 183 such institutions in Orange County alone.
This is the Orange County in which Bo—at twenty-three, after three years in a closet-sized room failing his Korean college-entrance exams—starts afresh. Mido drops out of college in Sydney to help her brother support their parents, and the two find work at a hagwon founded by Yun’s boyfriend, Lion. Bo drives the van and tutors math; Mido teaches language. Over the years, the business—originally “three one-story storefronts capped together like uneven teeth”— grows to open a second location that offers SAT courses, college counseling, and campus tours on the East Coast.
It is in these strip malls, with their stucco buildings and massive parking lots, that Lee’s worldbuilding is most compelling. She gets so much of Orange County right. The first tutoring center is in Cypress, but I can’t help imagining it a few doors down from the Hannam Chain supermarket in Buena Park, and Yun’s family’s restaurant, Shrimp Castle, in the plaza right across Beach Boulevard. Just as familiar are the hagwons’ corny, religious names and the DVD stores where Yun and her mother rent Korean dramas. Any Korean in OC can probably guess which church inspired the fictional Gospel Presbyterian, with thousands of members, elected committees, and million-dollar funds supporting construction projects across multiple campuses. And, of course, the parents’ neuroticism is not one bit exaggerated, if at times tropey: One mother takes pride in knowing that her seven-year-old daughter “could play the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ and read five grades above her level.”
At first glance, their new home is a haven. “Palm trees, sunshine, and all the conveniences of Seoul,” says a mother visiting her son. And indeed, the second hagwon fits perfectly into its location of Irvine, an urban project engineered toward prosperity and intellect. In the 1960s, James Irvine’s company sold a thousand acres of land to build the ranching baron’s namesake University of California campus—and unveiled a master plan of surrounding homes, businesses, and parks. It soon became one of America’s safest and most-educated cities. But Irvine, where Bo attends college and I spent much of my teenage years, is also full of students who don’t recognize its luxuries until after they’ve left: It is, after all, difficult to appreciate palm trees and sunshine while stuck inside, studying for exams. Lee’s portrait of Orange County’s contradictions, and its superficial resemblance to Korea, hints at the family’s underlying unease: Perpetually godly and grateful, the Kohs would feel guilty admitting they were ever unhappy here.
But the book would benefit from at least allowing them to try. American Hagwon offers a rich portrait of Orange County but a comparatively thin one of its inhabitants’ presumably fraught relationships to it; instead, the new arrivals remain near-sighted and filial to a fault. “For the first time, my family needs me,” Mido writes to Tek, her long-distance boyfriend in Sydney. “I’ve always needed them, but now, they need me.” If she resents having forsaken other paths, Lee doesn’t let us see it. Mido never finishes her degree, but as a naturally gifted essay counselor, she makes more money than either of her brothers and feels she has achieved everything she came to California for. Yet her success only leads her to give up more of her life. When Bo decides to pursue a psychology PhD, Mido insists on paying and ignores his pleas that she return to her own school in Australia. DH reacts with “awe,” Lee writes: “When they were growing up, even their mother, who believed in miracles, would not have guessed that little Mido would be educating her two older brothers.”
The scene is an immigrant mother’s fantasy: three grown, self-sufficient kids looking after one another. (Tek preempts this criticism when the couple eventually breaks up: “This isn’t some Korean fairy tale,” he tells Mido. “This is your life.”) Never in this book, which spans an entire generation of family strife, do the Koh siblings truly fight; even their arguments, much like wrestling for the bill at a restaurant, are rooted in sacrifice. The problem isn’t that other choices would inherently make for better fiction, but that American Hagwon elides the complex motivations that would inform—and, for a reader, justify—such big decisions.
Mido might be a convincing youngest daughter, a former shy kid who gives too much of herself, if only Lee offered effective foils. But her brothers embody the same endless, almost flat, goodness and integrity. DH, who spends most of the novel away pursuing law, is never corrupted by the lesson, forced upon them at a young age, that their lives are a game of roulette. He eventually learns that his “scholarships” to Andover and Yale were secretly funded by the mother of his wealthy childhood best friend, Peter. She refuses to let him pay her back: “When you’re a rich lawyer, please take the best care of your father and mother. If they become rich, then you can give the money to another young person.” Ever the perfect son, he obeys but remains quietly adamant about the debt. Lee then dedicates three pages to highlighting DH’s diligence and thriftiness, as he turns down social invitations and a trip with his girlfriend’s family, “not wanting her father’s charity.” American Hagwon is full of these laundry-list passages in which Lee, instead of using her omniscient narration to probe deeper into her characters, seems oddly incurious and opaque about what lies beneath their apparent flawlessness.
This simplistic worldview—good people, bad system—informs the philosophy behind Lion’s hagwon, whose small staff approach their work with such thoughtfulness and commitment to justice that I often forget they are meant to be twentysomethings bumbling in a foreign country. Lion accepts a limited number of students by lottery, staunchly refuses bribes from rich, influential parents, and reserves anonymous scholarships in each cohort for low-income students. He holds his own against the tiger moms who request illicit copies of SAT questions and special treatment for their children: “Mrs. Kim, Mrs. Cho, Mrs. Im, Mrs. Eom, and the two Mrs. Lees— each of them was distinct in appearance, manner, and personality, but it was as if they had studied the same script.” Lee seems genuinely interested in scrutinizing the merits of Lion’s project, but the standoff between his youthful optimism and his clients’ stubbornness never evolves. And when Peter’s mother offers to help expand the franchise to Seoul, his immediate reaction is guilt about the students he’d leave behind: “He felt terrible about how unfair it was that some kids could afford to have great tutors like Peter and Mido, while others could never have them.” Here, Lee briefly interjects to acknowledge that Lion is sincere “almost to the point of naivete,” but without sufficient context about his background or inner life, it’s difficult to buy into his virtue. We must simply take her word for it.
American Hagwon finally considers the limits of this idealism when Lion and Mido decide, after all, to open a Korean center. Peter is baffled: “I can’t imagine a country that needs private tutors less,” he says. “There are thousands and thousands of hagwons there. Korea is doing just fine without us.” At last, Lee offers a robust, contrasting perspective that just might push them to question whether they are improving or perpetuating a toxic system. But when Mido unexpectedly runs into Tek in Seoul, their reunion quickly devolves into a binary, moralizing exchange: “You’re only helping kids who can afford this shit,” he says. “You’re supporting this endless culture of striving and cutthroat competition in a nation that has an inferiority complex.” Mido responds:
Most rich people here try to get their kid out of Korea by sending them abroad, but what about the poor or middle-class family who can’t possibly afford to send their kid to college in the United States? You’re going to look down on a middle-class parent for spending her last cent trying to help her kid learn English, when every corporate job here asks for your TOEIC score? … It’s too easy to blame parents or feel superior to your simplistic ideas of Koreans. I thought you were smarter than that. It’s not a compliment to me that you think I can be a playwright or an actor. I don’t think that’s a better job. It just sounds cooler to you than being a hagwon teacher.
This kind of stilted dialogue pervades American Hagwon. It can read less like that of real, first-generation immigrants and more like a Korean text translated bluntly into English. A generous reading might assume that Lee is intentionally recreating the formal speech of immigrants, but even then, the characters’ overuse of SAT vocabulary words sometimes comes off just as unrealistic and distracting as the grandiose ideals it expresses. Lion exemplifies this best. Fed up with the students’ anxiety and stress, he schedules a talk for 500 parents and urges them to let go of unrealistic expectations: “This flawed but worthy American project of immigration, reinvention, and multiple chances creates more possibilities, but it requires us to explore different paths in order to have lives of greater purpose.” With his lofty rhetoric, Lion reasserts his commitment to the hagwon’s mission and potential. But does anyone talk like this to a room of anxious parents?
It is here, in a rented church gymnasium, that Lee comes closest to confronting the project’s ultimate futility, and Lion, too, slowly starts to see it as well. He speaks in English and has a Korean translator repeat his remarks, giving him “the opportunity to study his audience’s faces carefully. He was able to observe his audience react twice to the same message.” But twice is not enough; he is speaking to a wall. The event inevitably devolves into something like a college-admissions seminar. A parent asks about the anti-Asian affirmative action in “prop 200-something,” and another diminishes the students’ struggles, comparing them unfavorably to Koreans who attend hagwons as early as kindergarten: “Our American kids are just lazy.” The room laughs, and Lion shakes his head. “Our children cannot know everything, create doubles, summon magic, fight better than everyone, and fly through the air,” he says.
He is referring to the famous Korean legend of Hong Gildong, which he had become fixated on a few weeks earlier while Yun was watching her DVDs. In it, the illegitimate son of a Joseon nobleman and his concubine, despite his otherworldly beauty and intelligence, is mistreated and forced to flee. He leads a pack of bandits who steal from the rich to help the poor, and eventually becomes the beloved king of an island nation. The fable, Lion insists to Yun, was “the genesis of all this madness,” the blueprint for Koreans’ relentless individualism and affinity for perfect fictional male love interests: “How many times has a dad asked us who’s the top student in his class, like his kid needs to have a target?” Lion asks. “The dad is looking for the Hong Gildong. He wants his kid to be Hong Gildong.”
But Lion’s interpretation also reveals the shortcomings in his business philosophy. In retelling the story, he overlooks a crucial detail: Hong Gildong is, in fact, literally supernatural. He is described as “remarkable from his birth to his death” and, upon first meeting the roaming thieves, wows them by hurling a boulder. It is these abilities—not his grit—that make him iconic. “I am pleading with you to remember that your child is a young human being,” Lion tells the parents. “No one needs to be a superhero.” But if the parents in that gymnasium ever saw anything in the legend of Hong Gildong, it is not that their children might study their way to success; it’s that they, too, might just be uniquely special. That’s where Lion’s American hagwon falls short, and what Lee’s American Hagwon never fully reconciles: There’s no arguing with parents who believe their children might be superheroes. He’s telling them a version of the story they don’t want to hear.
In calling out their tunnel vision, Lion becomes just as blindly optimistic, reducing the tale to a boilerplate hero’s journey. Lee seems to acknowledge this: Lion brushes off a reminder from Bo about the story’s other valuable themes (“rejecting hierarchy and primogeniture, personal effort, resilience in the face of inequity and abuse”). Yun, too, had been frustrated by his rant: She watched dramas for fun and escape, not serious life lessons. On TV, “she could rely on a neat resolution for almost every character, and fair endings in an unfair world.” Lion never recognizes that he, too, may be living in a fairytale, and for all Lee’s awareness, American Hagwon suffers the same fate: It becomes a neat drama. I’m not sure that a group of characters whose defining trait is goodness can adequately reckon with the hagwon. But if a single novel can’t do justice to Lee’s worthy questions about familial angst and obligation, a national reverence for scholarship, and a fixation on success no matter the cost — it should at least let its characters really wrestle with them. They’re star students, after all.
Yvonne Kim
Yvonne Kim is a senior associate editor and fact-checker at The Atlantic.