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If there is a villain in Min Jin Lee’s new novel, American Hagwon, it’s Danbi, a young woman who seduces married men, frames a co-worker for sexual harassment, and embezzles money. But as with Lee’s earlier, breakout epic novel, Pachinko, this one has no real villains. Danbi, like most people in Lee’s novels, is moved by larger forces: a rural childhood, an alcoholic stepfather, and a desperate need to survive in the face of a looming economic crisis.
American Hagwon takes place during the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and follows a group of interconnected families moving among South Korea, Australia, and the United States. A hagwon is a private tutoring center and the repository of the Korean families’ anxieties about ensuring future success for their children. Lee’s landscape makes room for Dickensian-style urchins, such as a 9-year-old girl shipped alone to a boarding house in California so she can study hard and get into UC San Francisco, and also humane tutors who make it their mission to more deeply engage their young students and encourage parents to ease off.
Lee approaches her characters in the same way as the social realists of the 19th century, such as George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Leo Tolstoy. She subjects ordinary people to forces that test them—in this case, a Korean system that perceives elite education as almost an amulet against failure, putting tremendous financial and emotional pressure on both children and parents. But that doesn’t make her a relativist. “I’m definitely a moral novelist,” Lee says on Radio Atlantic. “You know why? Because, actually, I think most people are desperate for morality.”
In this episode, Lee talks about what led her to write the book, including her own path through the American school system, her mother’s laissez-faire approach to school, and her hundreds of interviews with Korean parents, students, and hagwon teachers. And she reflects on the central theme of all of her novels, which is the displacement of people: “I think diaspora is now the modern person’s permanent condition,” she says in the podcast.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: This September, my youngest child went to college, and the experience for me was very different than when I sent my other two children to college. With them, I didn’t question the decision all that much. They got in somewhere. We celebrated. Off they went.
But now it’s 2026, and college is a loaded word—more expensive than ever and its value not as clear. At this moment, no honest parent can easily answer the question: What’s the relationship between a child’s education, and their future success and happiness?
[Music]
I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. The world has waited almost 10 years for a new novel by Min Jin Lee. In 2017, she published the best-selling historical epic Pachinko. It became a National Book Award finalist, it was named one of The New York Times’ 100 best books of the 21st century, and it was adapted into a series for Apple TV. Her first book since Pachinko is out this week. It’s called American Hagwon, hagwon meaning “private tutoring center” in Korean.
Min Jin Lee: Do you want me to tell you how to say hagwon? Just like Hanna.
Rosin: Ho-gwon.
Lee: Does that make sense?
Rosin: Is it the speed of it? Hagwon?
Lee: No. Like, you know how you can say Ha-nnah or Ho-nna?
Rosin: It’s Ho-gwon.
Lee: You say Ho-nna.
Rosin: Yes.
Lee: It’s exactly like that. It’s Ho-gwon. Ho-gwon.
Rosin: Yeah, Ho-gwon.
Rosin: Lee spent years researching and conducting hundreds of interviews with Korean parents, students, and hagwon teachers.
The novel follows a group of interconnected families who move between Korea, Australia, and the U.S.
Like Lee’s previous books, Christianity, morality, and immigration are major themes in Hagwon. But its central preoccupation is education: The lengths that Korean parents will go to to get their children into elite schools, their sacrifices—financial and emotional—and how they affect both the parents and the children, all set against the backdrop of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which adds an edge of desperation to their quest for success.
Min Jin Lee joins me today to talk about life in the shadow of school.
Rosin: Min, welcome to the show.
Lee: Thank you, Hanna.
Rosin: So as I was reading about you, I discovered something that made me so happy, which is that you and I have extremely similar immigrant journeys. We are exactly the same age. We came to America at exactly the same time, both moved to Queens, and I went to Stuyvesant and you went to Bronx Science. We missed by a hair being high-school classmates.
Lee: And you know, I could have gone to Stuyvesant ’cause I got in, but then my older sister went to Bronx Science, and I was bullied so much as a kid, and she protected me, so people just said, my parents and everybody else agreed, She should go to school with her sister.
Rosin: For people who don’t know Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, how should we describe them? They’re like the launchers of immigrants, I feel like.
Lee: Yes, if you’re very lucky.
Rosin: Yes, if you get in. They’re magnet schools, and if you happen to pass—they are hagwon-like—if you manage to pass the test, the one critical test, you’re one lucky immigrant. . But the thing I wanted to talk about was not Stuyvesant but Queens, because I so rarely meet people in my life who grew up in Queens.
Lee: Really?
Rosin: Yeah. And I go back to Queens a lot. My family still lives there. The overwhelming feeling I have in Queens is that everybody there is displaced and carries the feeling of displacement, even if they move somewhere else or do something else. It’s just, like, an entire borough of people who are in the wrong place. And I just wondered if you shared that as someone who grew up in the same era that I did.
Lee: I completely agree. And then also, even if you don’t feel that, everybody you care about is like that. So you can’t help but feel this way.
Rosin: Yeah. I mean, I lived in just, like, a mixed immigrant neighborhood. And it sounds like you lived in a—no, you didn’t live in a Korean neighborhood.
Lee: There’s so many. Like, I didn’t know white people existed.
Rosin: You did not?
Lee: No. You know why? Because nobody was white. You were from Pakistan. You were from India. You were from all these different countries, so you always had a country affiliation. So even if you were white you would say, I’m Polish.
Rosin: Yeah.
Lee: I’m Italian. I’m Irish.
Rosin: Yes.
Lee: And if you spoke Spanish, whatever country you came from, they’re like, Oh, he’s Spanish, and you’re like—and then you don’t think about the country, you think like, Oh, no, actually he’s from Ecuador.
Rosin: Right.
Lee: But then if you’re from, let’s say, the Dominican Republic, you’re like, “Oh, no, I am not Puerto Rican.”
Rosin: Yes. Yes. That was actually the big battle in my middle school, was between Dominicans and Puerto Ricans.
Lee: Yeah, DR, PR.
Rosin: And the big thing was lunch. That’s what I remember. Like, it was What language you speak? and What did you bring to school for lunch? That’s where all the divides came in.
Anyway, okay, to your novel. I did an informal survey of friends, and I would say less than half of them knew what the word hagwon meant, nor did they understand the whole culture of hagwon and what comes along with that word, so I think we need to start there. What is it?
Lee: So a hagwon is a learning center. Anytime you pay somebody to teach you something that’s not in regular school, that’s a hagwon. So in Korea, everybody goes to hagwons. The elderly, the child, the middle-aged person goes to hagwon to learn gourmet cooking, tap dancing, singing.
Rosin: But this makes it sound lovely, like a hagwon.
Lee: No, it is actually lovely. Because you have the optionality of self-improvement, and that’s very normal. And then you also have hagwons for civil-service exams, as well as when you’re 4 years old, you go to hagwon to learn English. So that’s the hagwon that people are really—I think Americans get really upset about.
Rosin: Ah. And I know you did a lot of research into hagwons. Can you just talk about the range? Like, was there a memory as you were looking into hagwons where you thought, Oh, this is very stressful, and other times when you thought, Oh, this is lovely?
Lee: Oh. I think before I started the research, I thought it was very stressful because I read all the data, and the data is terrifying.
So, like,, 80 percent of Koreans send their 5-year-olds to hagwon. So as a Western person, as an immigrant, as an American, you’re kinda going, “That’s kind of a lot.”
Rosin: Yeah.
Lee: And also, you learn that the middle income of a Korean person was, let’s say, $35,000, and you’re spending $400 a month to hagwon bills for your 4-year-old, which apparently explains the low birth rate and the low marriage rate of Korea. So I found that really stressful. And then, of course, I go to all the different hagwons, and I don’t feel stressful at all.
Rosin: Oh, interesting.
Lee: Because they’re so normal. And then even the hagwons in America, I thought they’re actually necessary.
Rosin: Interesting.
Lee: I did a complete 180.
Rosin: Really? So you started out with the stereotype of hagwons—
Lee: Yes, based on the data.
Rosin: —like this is torturing children. They are—
Lee: Don’t get a childhood.
Rosin: They don’t get a childhood. They’re not able to play.
Lee: All of it.
Rosin: They’re being crammed with information. And that is not what you came out thinking?
Lee: I do not believe that anymore.
Rosin: Interesting.
Lee: I don’t think that they’re lovely, but I see why they’re necessary.
Rosin: Even if it means that children. I mean, my stereotype, and I’ve visited Korea, so I know a little bit, is that it’s the number of hours, it’s the quantity of hours you are expected to spend in school.
Lee: Yeah. And I think that if you’re a working parent and you have kids, hagwons are a kind of child care. And also, because you can’t help the kids with homework, so then parents will actually outsource this, and it becomes a low-cost way to get tutoring. So if you think about it that way, all of a sudden, every working parent in America is like maybe, Why don’t I do that?
Rosin: Yeah. It’s like high-end aftercare. Yeah. It’s—
Lee: —all very good. Well, it’s kinda like Kumon.
Rosin: Yeah.
Lee: Kumon is very inexpensive in America. And if your kid does Kumon, then you could be a legal secretary or somebody’s assistant-chief-of-staff kind of person and say, “You know, that’s $400 a month. I make $80,000 a year, and my kid can do these worksheets, get the stickers and the stuffed animals, and the kid will be probably in the top 10 percent of my public school.”
Rosin: Okay. So in the novel, there’s a mixed portrait. So for example, there’s a character named Ginny. And she’s almost a Dickensian character. She feels the most Dickensian of your characters. She’s sort of an urchin. You know, she’s sent by her parents at 9 years old to the U.S.
Her sole mission is to get into UCSF and go to medical school and be a doctor, but that means she ends up at a boarding house. Where does this child come from, and what does she represent?
Lee: They’re all around us, these kids. So sociologists call them “parachute children.” And they usually come from East Asia, and they’re parachuted down to another country, not necessarily always America—’cause America’s actually quite expensive—and the person who takes care of them is called the “homestay person,” the guardian. And you can pay somebody that you know or a family member, and you pay room and board. However, if you don’t have the money to pay, where does this child go?
Rosin: So you just said that to me pretty neutrally, as if there’s no heartbreak involved in the story of Ginny. Is that actually how you feel or interpret Ginny?
Lee: No. What I really think is interesting to me is that the people who do it think of it as an extraordinary privilege to get to do it.
It’s not like you’re trying to get rid of your kid. You’re thinking, I will scrape and save and borrow to send my kid overseas, because we think the American education is that important because my kid has to be a global child.
Rosin: And do you see it that way?
Lee: No. But you know what I do think? I think that what we don’t think about in America is the global contextualization of these parents’ decisions.
We’re talking about people who have nothing, or very close to nothing, and they’re trying to figure out, How do I become an elite person? Not me, but my child become an elite person. Like, how do I give my kid a shot? And it’s usually through exams. So you’ll have somebody in China and in Korea, in India, doing these kinds of things, and you’re right.
I mean, as a Western parent, it is really surprising. When you talk to the parents and you ask them what they went through, you really start to understand that this is their decision, and I have great sympathy for the parents who do this, as well as the kids. The kids are really confused, of course, because they’re just children.
Rosin: Right. It’s so interesting to hear you talk about this, because I know that you exist in the tradition of social-realist novels of the 19th century, and there is an element of maybe social justice in that?
Lee: Sure, sure. We’re from Queens!
Rosin: We’re from Queens. We care about all the—we care about the underdogs.
And I was wondering, is this like Upton Sinclair social justice? Like, I’m trying to expose the sort of crushing capitalist pressures that produce something like Ginny? But that’s not really your tone, even though that’s, you know, a mode that you exist in. Your tone is a little more anthropologist.
Lee: Yeah. I think you’re so smart to pick up on that, because there’s a part of me that wants to be the muckraker. But people don’t wanna read it.
Rosin: Interesting.
Lee: Yeah. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants the sermon. You know what people want? They want entertainment. And through entertainment and through drama, people will start to think, Oh, I really feel bad for this kid, Ginny. She’s 9 years old. She’s being parachuted.
And all of a sudden, you become Ginny, ’cause that’s what fiction does. ’Cause you identify with somebody in the scene. You’re like, Well, how would that feel to be Ginny? And I’m actually saying, I want you to think about Ginny, but I also want you to think about the guardian.
Asian parenting often becomes pathologized. It’s decontextualized. All we can see is the outcome, or we can see the data around it, but we don’t see the human interest. And as a matter of fact, if you were in the same situation, you might actually make the same decision.
Rosin: What drew you to this subject after Pachinko? Why education? Why did that become the thing that you thought was important to explore?
Lee: So I’m gonna write this thing called Diaspora Quartet. All the books are not related in characters or plot, but they’re related by this idea of diaspora because I think diaspora is now the modern person’s permanent condition.
Rosin: Interesting. What do you mean? Everybody?
Lee: Everybody. Not just Koreans, everybody. So for example, environmental diaspora, right? So you don’t have any water in your city, in your town, and you have to move. You don’t have any more jobs in your town, so you have to move.
If you wanna go get an education or you have to cross a border. And I’m saying that we are being scattered by modern society, so we have to study the subject. Like, I think we’ve gotta take it really seriously. So my entire novelistic work before I quit is going to be diaspora.
The people that I look at are Koreans. That’s my lane. It’s a lane I really wanna be in. And after my first two books, I asked myself, What is the value that Koreans care about more than any other thing? Because, and I took it really based upon all my interviews. I’ve had thousands of interviews, and in every single one of them, they talk about education with this kind of controversial kind of take.
They all care about the subject, but they have such different opinions on it that it always kinda took my breath away, because it was so not American. And that’s all I can say. It’s like, it was so unfamiliar to me, at the same time so familiar, because I heard it over and over again.
Rosin: And how—what is it? How would you summarize it?
Lee: That they care about it more than religion. They care more about it than money. They care more about it than status.
Rosin: Like, it’s almost a faith.
Lee: Yes. Yes.
Rosin: Like, they believe it is a token to success, almost in a pachinko way of, like, If you get this token, everything will work out.
Lee: Everything will work out, and also, it means so much to another person—like, if we learn, Oh, Hanna went to this school. I’m talking middle school. I’m not even talking about college here. Like, you went to this middle school. It means that you were in certain neighborhoods, and you’re, let’s say, the top student, ’cause they have that. They will remember the top student of a middle school.
And consequently, that means something to your classmates who went to middle school with you. And I think the average American person would say, “That is insane.” (Laughs.)
Rosin: Right. Right. We don’t think of it as a belief in that way. Like, an absolute belief.
Lee: Yeah. You know? So, I mean, and it wasn’t all the Koreans, but I would find Koreans who would say these things, and I thought, Huh, that’s so interesting.
So I thought, Okay, I’m gonna write this book about education, and I’m going to connect it with diaspora, because it made a lot of sense to me, because they would always say, “I wanna go here to learn English for my kid.” And they would accept all these arrangements, like the parachute kid.
Like the wild-geese phenomenon, which is when the father stays home, earns all the money, and the mom and the kid live somewhere else, like Australia, like the Philippines, in order to learn English. And people don’t really know that there are Koreans everywhere—
Rosin: Yeah.
Lee: —especially where English is spoken. And you wouldn’t—and it’s not so obvious why they go.
Rosin: Yeah. So you’re both examining this idea and a little bit pushing back against this idea.
Lee: I wanna figure it out, and then I also wanna be fair to it, ’cause there’s two things. One is I don’t think in America we talk enough about education. We’re not helping children get the skills they need to take care of themselves. That is—
Rosin: Like, we’re failing in education.
Lee: We’re failing.
Rosin: We don’t worship it enough, or we don’t believe in it enough.
Lee: Like, if we have Koreans who are doing things at this sort of intense rate, we are doing that almost as a nation. We’re falling behind.
Rosin: In a too lackadaisical way. In fact, I would say the mythology that’s taken hold at this moment in America is the opposite. You’re wasting your time. Like, what you really should be doing is leaving your education and going to be an entrepreneur or a tech entrepreneur. Like, it’s like you’re a chump if you stick to the rote path.
Lee: Well, also this whole chump-ness, the chump population, the fact that we can even call people chumps is so anti-intellectual.
Like, which intellectual person would just say, “Oh, you’re a chump for getting a Ph.D.”? That you would study eight years to get a doctorate. Right? ’Cause the tech bros would be like, “You’re clearly a ding-dong, because I quit college.” Not all the tech bros, obviously, but I think that kind of thinking is—in Korea, if you have a Ph.D., that’s considered very honorable. By most people. Not everybody, but by many.
Rosin: I was thinking of a specific scene in the novel. It’s this community gathering at a Christian church, and one of the main characters, whose name is Lion, is giving this big speech to all of the parents. Lion runs this very successful Hagwon business that caters to Korean immigrants in Los Angeles. And in his speech, he’s telling the parents, Will you please worry less about your kids’ grades and less about where they’re going to college, and more about their mental health? He’s essentially pushing back against all this intensity.
It’s an interesting scene for a lot of reasons: (1) It doesn’t really work. Like, it just makes him sort of more valuable and ups the parents’ panic. And (2) it’s interesting because, like, he’s running a hagwon, so I’m not really sure how to under—it’s almost like the leaders of the AI companies who are like, Please restrain us. Like, he’s in charge of it, you know? So I was curious to hear you talk about that scene.
Lee: You know, I met all these hagwon teachers who had been doing it for a long time, and the ones who have been doing it for a long time, the ones who are really good, they’re almost like teenage whisperers, because these young kids, they don’t feel heard.
Rosin: Yeah.
Lee: They’re told a lot of things, but they’re not heard. So when you have this magical person who went to the famous school that your parents want you to go to, and they really listen to you, and they ask you questions like, So why do you wanna go to college? Maybe it’s not a good time. And the kid’s like, What do you mean? I have a choice?
And they get really excited. And I think when you can have access to what the kids are really thinking, it’s a very privileged position. And then I think these teachers start to really identify with the young people more, and they’re trying to help them. Because what ends up happening is some of these kids do go to these schools, and then after the first year, they literally just crash. And they’re also exhausted, especially in America. Because when you have 14 AP classes, no one should be doing that.
Rosin: Okay, that’s actually very helpful because the hagwon where a lot of the action takes place, the one run by Lion, is essentially—what it stands for is not a bucking of the system or a resistance. What it stands for is connection. Like, it’s a place where it’s an idealized form of tutoring and education, like, almost a connection between teacher and student. I have no idea if that exists or is common among hagwons, but that’s what novelistically it represents.
Lee: I saw hagwon teachers. Overwhelmingly, they’re pretty decent people. But I have met hagwon teachers who do bad things, who cheat.
Rosin: Who help the children cheat. Like they teach them bad values.
Lee: Yeah, or they write the college essays. They just take the parents’ money, and they churn these things out, and they also—the worst thing I think they do by cheating is by telling the kids, “This is the way the world works. So you carry on, and you keep doing this.”
Rosin: Right. So it makes them cynical.
Lee: Oh, the young people right now are so cynical in a way that you and I are like innocent, so innocent at that age, because we did not know. I shouldn’t speak for you, Hanna, but most people that I knew at Bronx Science, we did not really understand a lot of things.
Like, I didn’t know about legacies, for example. I didn’t know about having a famous parent. Like, I didn’t know about the sports track of how you get into school, especially at Bronx Science.
There are so many things I didn’t know, and I think that when you figure out, actually, if there are 1,200 seats in a class for that college, really there are about 400 left for the general population. And of that, that needs to be divided among a global constituency.
Rosin: Now that you do know all these things, you did go to elite colleges.
Lee: I did. Yeah.
Rosin: So when you look back, I mean, you went to some of the most prestigious universities, Yale and Georgetown. Did writing this book make you think differently about your experience in elite academia?
Lee: Well, I think that when I went to these elite spaces, except for Bronx Science, where I really felt normal and happy—it’s New York, and it’s just other kids from the boroughs. And also, not that much was expected of me. Like, I didn’t have a lot of pressure at home to study and to become something.
Rosin: Because your parents were not the so-called tiger parents.
Lee: No. My mother’s very laissez-faire, ’cause she went to a very prestigious school in Korea, and she’s a music person, and her attitude is, “If you have the brains and you squander it, that’s on you.”
Rosin: That’s nice. There’s freedom in that.
Lee: There’s a lot of freedom in it, and there’s three of us. So her attitude is, well, you know, again, I was considered sort of the slower of the pack.
Rosin: Yeah.
Lee: So then I really, I just, I was left to sort of read the free books and eventually find my way. And I think when I went to college, I met all these kids who were so polished and sophisticated and suave, and they were so well traveled. They just knew things that I just didn’t know, and I remember feeling like, Oh, I don’t know that. I really don’t know that, and I’ve never been there, and I don’t know how to pronounce that. Like, there were so many things I had read but I didn’t know how to say.
[Music]
Rosin: After the break, more on Min Jin Lee’s new novel, American Hagwon, and why she sees herself as a moral novelist.
[Break]
Rosin: The novel is bookended by two financial catastrophes: the 1997 IMF crisis in South Korea and the 2008 subprime-mortgage crisis in the U.S. Why was it important for you to set it in this time period? What kind of pressure, extra pressure does that create?
Lee: Well, I wanna talk about now. I mean, I write social novels, and I think one of the things that we don’t wanna do is: We don’t wanna recognize the villains in our lives, because they’re not legible to us. Like, a financial crisis—we don’t understand how much damage it does to all of us all the time, because we don’t wanna understand the subjects.
Rosin: I see. So it’s easy to understand, like, a bad parent who ships—that’s very concrete.
Lee: Yes, yes.
Rosin: Yes, I see.
Lee: Yeah. A bad parent, a war.
Rosin: Yes.
Lee: The other country.
Rosin: Yeah.
Lee: Right? A religious group that you don’t like. That’s very easy to say, Oh, it’s them. It’s not me. A financial crisis? We all actually participate in it. And we don’t wanna be responsible for learning about it. And, again, that’s education. I actually think that if we had personal-finance classes, it would make a humongous difference in the way America runs.
Rosin: Just as in Pachinko, because of this financial crisis and other reasons, there are wild swings to family fortunes. What is interesting to you about putting your characters through that kind of suffering? What is important to learn about a family, or is that a way of testing people or evoking certain things?
Lee: Well, it’s actually what happens to all of us. Somebody loses a job. When one parent loses a job or is, as we say, reduced, you wake up, you open your computer, and you get an email saying, Your division is gone. That’s America now.
Rosin: Yeah.
Lee: How does that affect your family? Especially if the parent is, let’s say, 47 or 52. It’s really difficult to start again—
Rosin: Yeah.
Lee: —at this age. And I wanted to show that happening to my characters because that’s what’s happening to us now.
Rosin: Now, if that situation happens, there are a lot of directions: The family could break apart. People could get angry, violent. The family you feature, what’s remarkable about them is they almost immediately choose to sacrifice for each other. The father goes from corporate world to working in a fish-fry restaurant. The daughter, who’s really, really smart, decides, Oh, I’m gonna work and put my brothers through school. So it’s a lot of sacrifice. What’s interesting to you about sacrifice?
Lee: Well, when I interviewed all these different families around the world about their education, especially the ones that lost everything in the IMF crisis, the ones who actually succeeded, the only survival strategy that worked was sacrifice and sequencing.
Rosin: What do you mean? Is it sacrifice within the family context?
Lee: Yeah. Somebody had to give. Not everybody’s gonna get what they want.
Rosin: Uh-huh.
Lee: And it may seem pretty logical and obvious, but if everybody tries to get what they want, then the entire unit breaks apart.
Rosin: Yeah. I was wondering if you were working through the Korean concept or even a Christian concept of sacrifice.
Lee: You know, it’s actually, I think there are religious aspects of it that I think are valuable, and it’s shared cross-culturally by families who have faith in a religion, but also it was just the only thing that’s gonna work, because there’s limited resources and limited time. So even if, take religion away, I think even economists would understand that sequencing is sometimes the only choice. Like, if you only have $100, and $40 is all you could spend for education, and you have, let’s say, three kids, you can’t do it for all the kids.
Rosin: It’s funny, when you talk about some of these things or these decisions, you talk about the analytical part of them and less about the sort of spiritual, philosophical part of it. Like, in the book, the way sacrifice happens—I mean, there’s a lot of morality. Would you agree with that, that there is—
Lee: I’m definitely a moral writer.
Rosin: Yeah.
Lee: I’m definitely a moral novelist. I mean, in the same way all the writers that I love are moral novelists. Actually, you know why? Because, actually, I think most people are desperate for morality. (Laughs.)
Rosin: And what do you mean by “morality”? ’Cause there’s one surface-level reading, which is that in this novel, family is really important and central, holds people together, and people really sacrifice for their families. And the one person who does things which are very patently, say, un-Christian—lie, steal, seduce married men—really gets her comeuppance. So that’s almost a traditional kind of morality. But maybe that’s not what you mean by morality.
Lee: No. That’s actually just law. I mean, I was a former lawyer.
Rosin: (Laughs.) Yeah.
Lee: So I have seen people who behave this way get in trouble. I’ve talked to a lot of white-collar-criminal lawyers. So it’s really interesting. So you can argue that in this current climate, that we should celebrate the antihero. We could, right?
Rosin: And I would say a lot of Korean movies about inequality, at least the ones that are popular here, are very antihero, like Squid Game. I mean, they’re brutal and they don’t have any traditional morality. They definitely celebrate the antihero.
Lee: Right. But so I know the director and the writer of that show, for example, and when we talk about politics, he’s a very moral person.
Rosin: Interesting.
Lee: I mean, the reason why you show that in a satirical way is because you’re so outraged by the inequality. I think Koreans are really outraged by unfairness. Like, if you wanna have a scandal in Korea as a politician, your kid cheats on something and you let it go, that actually becomes a national scandal. If your wife accepts a handbag and she shouldn’t have, that’s corruption.
Rosin: That’s interesting, ’cause right now there’s sort of beginning to be a call for Democrats not to just talk about affordability, but to talk about how unfair things are. You know, to sort of add a kind of element of injustice and morality to what’s happening, which we see in data centers. It hasn’t quite percolated into the political language quite yet, but it’s there.
When you said people are desperate for morality, what is in your head? What are you thinking about?
Lee: Well, when I take the temperature of America right now with the people that I meet, people are really upset about the fact that we’re all so cynical, including children. Nobody believes in anything. And we think that terrible things are happening, and nobody’s being held accountable. Yet regular middle-class people still have to pay their bills, and we can’t ask questions why.
Gas prices are going up. Egg prices are going up. The rent’s going up. There’s no house to buy. The interest rates are going up. So this affordability crisis is a lot about, Hey, this is not fair, because some people who have assets are doing great, ’cause the stock market, despite all these things, is artificially inflated, and it’s doing great. But if you’re the chump who doesn’t have assets, you’re really upset. Again, fairness.
Rosin: Yeah.
Lee: You know, I think most people really see themselves as decent. That’s the other thing. ’Cause I’ve interviewed a lot of people who do some crazy bad things, illegal things. And they always have a reason why. And they’ll say things like, I did it for my family. I did it for my mother. I did it for X, Y, Z. And you’re kind of going like, But it’s illegal.
But they have a reason. And so when I listen to them, I go, Okay, well, most people really believe that they’re pretty decent. And then I meet people who are really trying to do the right thing with almost nothing. That always stuns me.
Rosin: Yeah. So you’ve talked a little bit about the quartet here. The fourth book is gonna be called the Marshall Plan. It’s always terrible to ask someone: How’s it going? (Laughs.)
Lee: (Laughs.)
Rosin: I’m not even gonna ask.
Lee: I started.
Rosin: Oh, you did? Congratulations.
Lee: Thank you.
Rosin: Can you just talk a little bit about what you’re exploring in the Marshall Plan?
Lee: So I think that the Marshall Plan is probably the smartest, most moral thing America
did.
Rosin: Let’s just say what it is.
Lee: Sure.
Rosin: It’s the 1948 U.S. initiative to help with economic recovery in Europe after World War II. How’s that as a summary?
Lee: Very, very. That’s—
Rosin: Thank you.
Lee: A+.
Rosin: Okay.
Lee: And the reason why that’s quite astonishing is because we could have taken the tack, Germany, you did something beyond evil. You should be punished. You should just suffer, right? But I think that people were aware that that suffering during World War I and the economic terms, which caused inflation and which caused this demagogue to become powerful, and then he scapegoated a minority, maybe we don’t wanna do that again. And by rebuilding—and rebuilding by giving money to Europe—all of us benefited, America and Europe. So it’s this thing that I think we always turn to in saying, We could do that.
Rosin: Yeah.
Lee: Why don’t we do that again? Why do we always like hurting people? I’m writing something called, Marshall Plan, not the Marshall Plan. And it’s about this idea of remittances and reconstruction. So all these Koreans left Korea in the ’60s and ’70s, and they went to Germany to work as miners and nurses, about 20,000 of them. And they sent their deutsche marks back to South Korea to help rebuild the country.
And then also, many Koreans went to Europe and became artists and learned more about the arts in Europe: singers, violinists, filmmakers, photographers. And then also, many women married GIs and went to America, and they sent money back to South Korea. I’m interested in this idea of remittances.
Rosin: I’m seeing—as you’re talking, I think I’m getting a better sense because it’s not a quartet in that we’re following the same characters over time, but you are thinking very hard about the world as it is, kind of different ways that it could be.
Lee: Yes.
Rosin: And morality in a sort of complex way, because it’s a morality that is constrained and exists in a very realistic world. Like, a world in which no one’s really dealt a fair hand, in which bad things happen, and particularly to people who don’t have that much power.
Lee: Yeah.
Rosin: You know?
Lee: No, you’re getting it. You’re really getting it. And it’s so important to me, because I’m not that interested in pointing out problems. I’m trying to figure out what works, and what has worked for people who have very little. Because all I hear all the time is that the world is burning down. And I’m thinking, like, This is not what we tell college students or teenagers. It’s not something that we tell middle-aged people. (Laughs.)
Rosin: You mean because it’s not inspiring?
Lee: Because (1) it’s also not true. It’s not true. If you look at the history of the world, things are horrible now, but they’re also—it was horrible then. And in some ways, significantly more horrible then. For women, right? All the illnesses that we’ve cured since then. And I keep thinking, Well, how did all of our ancestors deal with these horrific problems of just foolishness and hatred? All of it. And we need to figure something out, and we need to remember, because I know that this, like, perpetual state of fear and anxiety is not something that we can—like, we can’t do this. We have to have another story.
[Music]
Rosin: This is so good because I think a lot of people in this moment in American history take the path of avoidance or distraction. And you are essentially writing or speaking an intellectual’s guide to a happy life. Like, a high-information guide to a happy life. So I appreciate it.
Well, Min, thank you so much for joining me. And congratulations.
Lee: Well, Hanna, now that I know that we’re twins. (Laughs.)
Rosin: Yeah. I know, I kinda wish I’d gone to Bronx Science, you know?
[Music]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes and Jinae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Yvonne Kim fact-checked. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.
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