The Empty Classrooms of ‘American Hagwon’

One of the first places I was made aware of my race was the classroom. Placed in a cohort for so-called gifted children, I quickly understood that while my white classmates were considered gifted because they were naturally inclined or exceptionally hard workers, my academic aptitude was seen as a facet of my ethnic background.

My classmates’ parents would pry, asking about my standardized test scores only to wave them off as a result of my supposed cultural upbringing. Friends assumed my Japanese mother was a tiger mom hounding me to finish my homework, when in fact it was my white father who pushed me academically.

There were many things in my life that I saw as part of my Asianness: the food I liked, the manga I read, the language I spoke at home. But at school, I learned that there was nothing as Asian to my classmates as my grade point average. Americans expected Asians to care deeply about school, to excel no matter the cost.

The novels of Korean American author Min Jin Lee’s planned diaspora quartet, whose previous installments include Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, attempt to distill various facets of the diasporic Korean experience. Lee’s hotly anticipated third novel, American Hagwon, tries to untangle the essentialization of education, asking why diasporic Asians pin their hopes on it and what they get in return.

American Hagwon spans 1992 to 2007, following John and Helen Koh as they struggle to keep their family afloat. Their three children, Bo, DH, and Mido, follow their parents from South Korea to Australia to the United States, growing from schoolchildren into young adults trying to support their parents financially. Sudden job loss, infidelity, poverty, illness, and even the 1997 Asian financial crisis buffet the Kohs as they claw their way to stability on scarce funds.

Lee’s novel is ambitious, taking a panoramic and fulsome view of its characters’ lives. But its pulsing heartbeat, and the core of her vision of the Korean diaspora, is the hagwon: a private, for-profit cram school where children ostensibly go to get ahead. These are not trivial after-school activities: As of 2022, 78.3 percent of South Korean elementary-aged students attended private hagwons. In the United States, hagwons are less prevalent and often attached to Korean American churches, a familiar locale in Lee’s novels.

Lee treats these cram schools as arenas of conflict, reckoning, and rote labor in American Hagwon. The Koh children attend hagwons when they are young, and Lee casts them as places where a student’s sense of self is built up and broken down—an academic forge where they test their mettle against the demands of a stratified society.

Bo, for example, chooses to live near his hagwon even after his family leaves South Korea for better economic prospects, and studies for the Suneung—the grueling, nine-hour university entrance exam. Later, youngest child Mido puts her own college education on hold to work at a hagwon in the United States under a maverick owner nicknamed Lion, whose approach puts students’ wellbeing ahead of test scores. (It still delivers college admissions results.) There, Mido falls in love, grieves family tragedy, and begins to find herself.

So many of the characters’ formative moments happen in or around the hagwon that it functions as a synecdoche for the novel—as if to say, Look how much time these Koreans spend in this temple for educational advancement. See their single-minded dedication.

It should come as no surprise that Lee imbues the hagwon with so much meaning. She is, after all, an ethnographic novelist whose worlds are baroque yet entirely pleasurable to sink into. Each new setting, drama, and side character’s yearning culminates in a larger comment on a social question, much like Charles Dickens and poverty or Leo Tolstoy and Russian class dynamics. (In interviews, Lee talks about her great love of the 19th century social novel, and it shows.)

Pachinko, Lee’s second novel, was celebrated for its life-like portrayal of Korean migrants in Japan. The author told a polyphonic, affecting story of resilience and memory, asking how we ought to remember those whom history would rather us forget. To achieve that granularity, she populated the book with meticulously researched settings, animated by heroines and villains who drew sympathy from even the most stoic of readers.

American Hagwon attempts the same, and its worlds feel real, from the sumptuous rooms of a luxury apartment in Seoul to the dingy back kitchen of a seafood joint in southern California. The novel clearly knows the sociology of its setting, describing the inner machinations of late ’90s Korean American community politics with an insider’s ease.

But against this impeccably painted backdrop, the people who inhabit the rooms feel flimsy. There are moments, especially in the latter half of this almost 700-page novel, where one can’t help but feel that character complexity is sacrificed for social commentary about Asians and education. Yes, American Hagwon is interested in nuanced questions about education, wisdom, and what it means to live a meaningful life. But its characters start to flag under the weight of those questions.

Take Danbi, the book’s consummate villain. Unlike the antagonists in Lee’s previous novels, there is very little to like about Danbi. She is conniving and promiscuous, a liar and a cheat; there is no attempt to complicate her or redeem her. It is as if the book has made her the emblem of an unmeaningful life. This simplification is puzzling given the novel’s insistence on a systemic view of society.

If American Hagwon wants to examine the pitfalls of South Korea’s emphasis on education, surely the book’s ultimate antagonist should be societal as well—inequality, poverty, or lack of access to higher education, for example. Instead of an unlikable person struggling to survive in a hypercompetitive system, we get a jezebel who causes the downfall of not one but three separate men—a narrative with a predictably damning tenor.

Other characters suffer under the book’s desire to make a point rather than tell a story. Mido, ostensibly a heroine, is presented as an intriguing child: quiet and shy, but determined. One would expect to see her become more layered as the novel progresses. In adulthood, though, Mido is relentlessly, tediously good. She never attains conventional success in school, but she becomes a hardworking and sought-after hagwon instructor. She is appropriate to a fault, less a character than a vehicle for a moral.

Perhaps Mido is meant to be the anti-Danbi, proof that one can lead a meaningful life even without an Ivy League education. As a hagwon instructor, education is still certainly the yardstick of her life’s worth. And like Danbi, she is uncomplicated: moral, doe-eyed, and an embodiment of the message that good things happen to good people.

What, then, is the moral that Lee is so intent on promoting? Despite the black-and-white characters and their dime-novel outcomes, it’s hard to say.

On one hand, American Hagwon is curious about the Korean diaspora’s relationship to education, particularly what it means to parents hoping to claw their way upward in a hostile society. On the other, it seems to question whether it is ultimately for the betterment of South Korean children to be so focused on schooling, even as its main characters find success teaching in cram schools.

Of course, novels don’t need to deliver a thesis, nor is an author required to give a simplistic final take on their subjects. But this book’s threads are so discordant that it is hard to see where the reader is meant to arrive without Lee weighing in conclusively. This ambiguity is doubly frustrating when so many characters are reduced to caricatures in service of the message.

Perhaps some of the muddiness reflects the increasingly fraught relationship between Asian Americans and the U.S. education system. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a coalition, led by a coalition of Asian American students, backed by conservative activists, that struck down affirmative action.

The coalition argued that Asian Americans were being punished by policies meant to account for the systemic hurdles to higher education faced by other minorities, and that they should be rewarded for their intense focus on academics rather than filtered out because too many of them did well. In the years since, data has shown that the ruling has not done much to help Asian American college applicants, with little to no change in their overall rates of enrollment at Ivy League institutions.

Which is all to say, though American Hagwon tries to unravel the essentialization of Asians and academic excellence, it ignores how that essentialization has been used to disenfranchise other minorities seeking educational advancement. The novel’s fretting over what education is for and how one attains wisdom—Lion’s voice in his hagwon comes to mind—starts to feel stale, if not slightly sinister, when we consider how the Asian American pursuit of education has been used as a cudgel to dismantle education for all.

Lee’s fans know that her opening lines offer an emotional thesis for the novel that follows. “History has failed us, but no matter,” opens Pachinko, defiant in its tale of resilience against Japanese erasure. “Competence can be a curse,” starts Free Food for Millionaires, as it plots its heroine’s struggle to free herself from the trappings of capitalism.

American Hagwon begins: “The rules of engagement have changed already.” The line points to the tempestuous winds of fortune and failure that follow the Koh family from continent to continent and job to job, as its members hold on to school as their only hope. It also rings true of the book’s most damning weakness. The Asian relationship to education is no longer an innocent thing. The rules of engagement have changed, and this novel doesn’t seem to have noticed.