What would you sacrifice to give your family a better life? That’s the question at the heart of New York Times bestselling author Min Jin Lee’s four-novel series about the Korean diaspora. Each book explores a different community and chapter of the Korean experience abroad. Her debut, Free Food for Millionaires, follows Casey Han, the daughter of Korean immigrants navigating class and ambition in New York City. Then came Pachinko, her sweeping bestseller about generations of a Korean family building a life in Japan, which became a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction.
Now Lee is back with the third installment, American Hagwon, and this time, she’s exploring what happens when the pursuit of a better life gets tangled up with the pursuit of a better education. The novel follows John and Helen Koh and their three children after the 1997 Asian financial crisis and a personal betrayal shatter their middle-class life in Seoul. This sends the family first to Sydney and eventually to Southern California. And while the title refers to Korea’s private after-school educational centers, Lee says the story reaches far beyond the classroom. “It’s about education and diaspora and immigration, but mostly it’s about loyalty and sacrifices that we make in order to survive when terrible things that we don’t expect happen,” she tells us.
For this episode of The Reader’s Digest Escalator Interview, we caught up with Lee to talk about American Hagwon, the larger four-book project and where she finds the inspiration for characters who feel so vividly real. Her answer? “People in the real world,” she says. “I interview thousands of Koreans from around the world, and I’m really privileged to know many of them very well.” Of course, we also asked the questions every book lover really wants answered. Lee revealed her favorite reading spot, took us inside her writing routine (yes, there’s coffee), shared the hardest part about being a writer and dished on her writing snack of choice. Because even an epic literary project about the Korean diaspora requires snacks.
Read on for our exclusive interview with Min Jin Lee, and shop her recommended reads below!
View this post on Instagram
Join the free Reader’s Digest Book Club for great reads, monthly discussions, author Q&As and a community of book lovers.
Why trust us
At Reader’s Digest, we’ve been sharing our favorite books for over 100 years. We’ve worked with bestselling authors including Susan Orlean, Janet Evanovich and Alex Haley, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning Roots grew out of a project funded by and originally published in the magazine. Through Fiction Favorites (formerly Select Editions and Condensed Books), Reader’s Digest has been publishing anthologies of abridged novels for decades. We’ve worked with some of the biggest names in fiction, including James Patterson, Ruth Ware, Kristin Hannah and more. The Reader’s Digest Book Club, helmed by Books Editor Tracey Neithercott, introduces readers to even more of today’s best fiction by upcoming, bestselling and award-winning authors. For this piece, Leigh Belz Ray interviewed author Min Jin Lee. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
The post Watch <i>The Reader’s Digest Escalator Interview</i> with Author Min Jin Lee appeared first on Reader's Digest.
from Reader's Digest https://ift.tt/NGoqhd2
Comments
Post a Comment