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Min Jin Lee
Bestselling author of "Free Food for Millionaires" and "Pachinko"
Megan Bang, Ph.D.
James E. Johnson Professor of the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University
American Hagwon: An Evening with Min Jin Lee
Book Giveaway: FAN is giving away copies of American Hagwon to attendees, while supplies last.
Min Jin Lee, the National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko, returns with American Hagwon, a breathtaking contemporary epic, 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, 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.
Through her three masterful novels—part of a planned quartet on the Korean diaspora—Lee gives shape to history’s seismic shifts, refracting generational change through characters you can’t help but root for. American Hagwon is both a classic in the making and a novel distinctly of our moment, one that helps us find firmer ground in a world unmoored from a most basic concern: how do we care for one another?
Lee will be in conversation with Megan Bang, Ph.D., the James E. Johnson Professor of the Learning Sciences and the former Director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern University.
NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED.
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American Hagwon: An Evening with Min Jin Lee
Min Jin Lee
Bestselling author of "Free Food for Millionaires" and "Pachinko"
Megan Bang, Ph.D.
James E. Johnson Professor of the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University
Evanston Township High School Auditorium
Note: Event start time is Central Time (CT).
NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED.