Min Jin Lee asks, is college still a reliable investment?

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Min Jin Lee (0:30)

What I think is sort of unfair about college is that very few people are looking at your education holistically and saying, what do you think this is all about?

Reema Khrais (0:45)

I'm Reema Grace, and you're listening to This Is Uncomfortable, the weekly podcast from Marketplace about life and how money messes with it. This week, I'm talking with Min Jin Lee, the author of the acclaimed novels, Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, which was the finalist for the National Book Award and named one of the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Min is also a writer in residence at Amherst College. Her books explore, among other things, the Korean diaspora and the particular way many immigrant children carry. Her latest novel, American Hagwon, is the third in her Korean quartet. I just finished it, really enjoyed it. The novel mostly follows the co-family and the different ways they show up for another as they pursue higher education and a more financially secure life.

Education is at the center of this story, but the book is also really about everything that can get wrapped up in that pursuit, from love and fear to ambition and money. It made me think about what parents want for their kids, the pressure they can place on them without necessarily meaning to, and what those kids can come to believe they owe in return.

Min Jin Lee, welcome to the show.

Min Jin Lee (1:55)

Hi, Reema.

Reema Khrais (1:57)

I'm so excited to be speaking with you.

I wonder if we could just start by giving listeners a little preview of American Hagwon. How would you describe the novel to someone who hasn't read it yet?

Min Jin Lee (2:06)

It's about a Korean family between the years 1992 to 2007, and it's about a family that is really affected by economic shocks, that are global, and between two economic shocks particularly, it's the Asian financial crisis and the global financial crisis. And in that time, these two parents, a mother and a father, who really have climbed out of poverty into middle class, they raise three children, and the children are born in the United States, but they educate them all over the world. And it's about taking the economic shocks and about your life experiences of having left your socioeconomic class, believing that somehow your education and your efforts would just keep things secure, and realizing that life keeps changing and therefore, they take that wisdom and try to figure out how to raise our family.

Reema Khrais (2:58)

That's beautifully said. Yeah, I mean, what stayed with me is just how deeply this family is shaped by the experience of financial insecurity. Like the parents know how quickly stability can disappear, and then, you know, they're determined to make sure no one in the family ever feels vulnerable again, even if that requires a lot of personal sacrifice.

Min Jin Lee (3:15)

I think that that's really the condition of the average person in the world right now.

Right now, I think most of us, almost all of us, feel this deep economic insecurity. So even if you are trying your best, there are things that are so beyond our control about your economic situation that our basic survival is being threatened.

Reema Khrais (3:38)

So the title of the book is American Hagwon, and I need to ask for those not in the know, what is a Hagwon and what is its role in Korean life?

Min Jin Lee (3:46)

So a Hagwon is any for-profit learning center. So you can have a Hagwon for the SATs, you can also have a Hagwon for tap dancing. It's embedded throughout the Korean culture and society, and people go to Hagwons not just in high school, they go when they are four years old.

Yeah, the majority of the children, the majority, not the minority, the majority of the children in Korea, starting at age four or five, go to Hagwon to learn English.

Reema Khrais (4:20)

Before we dig deeper into the novel, I would love to hear more about how your own ideas about money and security began. How was money talked about in your own family growing up?