Her family settled in Elmhurst, Queens, and her parents ran a wholesale jewelry store in Manhattan’s Koreatown, where they worked six days a week, until they retired.
She immigrated to the United States from Seoul, at the age of seven. Lee’s gift is her ability to write sweeping, magisterial books that take on ponderous political themes––the Korean diasporic experience, the invisibility of marginalized groups in history, the limits of assimilation––and to make their unhurried, quiet intrigues read like thrillers. When I revisited them recently, I found myself immediately drawn in, much like the first time I read them, towed along by her intimately drawn characters and tightly cinched plotlines.
A defining quality of her novels is their propulsiveness. Yet Lee’s writing does not feel overstuffed with facts.
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For her two previous novels, “ Free Food for Millionaires,” from 2007, and “ Pachinko,” a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for fiction, she filled more than ten Bankers Boxes with interview notes and other background material. She is about halfway through a draft of “American Hagwon,” and so far has interviewed more than seventy-five college students of Korean descent. Lee is a prodigious, inveterate researcher, who takes a journalistic approach to writing her novels.
Before my visit, on a recent Monday morning, she had made sure to tidy up the room, but had left out a stack of books-some research materials for her third novel, “American Hagwon.” (The Korean word hagwon refers to a type of private enrichment school that is ubiquitous in Korean communities around the world.) They were mostly academic works about education and its centrality in Korean communities some titles included “ Koreatowns,” “ Education Fever,” and “ The Asian American Achievement Paradox.” It is a compact, sunlit room, with a couch, a pair of desks, and a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. A creaking wooden staircase runs up its spine, leading to Lee’s research library, on the top floor, where she works. The author Min Jin Lee lives in a four-story town house in Harlem that she and her husband purchased in 2012.
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