#Min jin lee series#
#Min jin lee free#

There was an orange shag rug, which was dirty. with the ugliness, but I remember how ugly the apartment we were living in was. This is a funny thing about not having money: people think that if you don’t have money that you’re O.K. And then I realized that it looks just like Seoul, except with non-Korean people. I thought that people would be wearing ball gowns. I think when I first came here I was really disappointed, because I thought in my mind that America would be like “Cinderella.” I thought that I would get off the airplane and somehow the airport would be like a seventeenth-century fairy tale. What do you remember about first arriving in the United States? Your books are about the Korean diasporic experience. Our conversation has been condensed and edited. During our conversation, which lasted more than two hours and continued over e-mail, we talked about her experiences as an immigrant, her books, and her willingness to be “extra Asian” these days. She has become increasingly vocal, during the pandemic and amid the rise in violence against people of Asian descent, as an advocate for Asian Americans. Lee has a warm, motherly demeanor––she texted before my visit to warn me that it was icy outside––but also an unflinching bluntness. Among Lee’s latest projects is an introduction to Penguin Classics’ new edition of “ The Great Gatsby”-a novel that, she writes, “called out to me, a girl who lived in the valley of ashes.” But, for reasons that Lee declined to disclose to me, she is no longer involved in the production of the show.

#Min jin lee series#

The eight-episode series will première on March 25th. In 2018, Apple announced that it would turn “Pachinko” into a television drama, and that Lee would serve as an executive producer. Lee labored for two decades on “Pachinko,” an epic saga that follows four generations of a Korean family through poverty, humiliation, and tragedy in Japan. When it was finally published, six years later, it became a national best-seller. In 2001, Lee started writing “Free Food for Millionaires,” about a brooding daughter of Korean immigrants struggling to make her way in the louche world of high finance in Manhattan. After working for two years as a corporate lawyer, she quit, in 1995, and decided to become a novelist. She attended the Bronx High School of Science, studied history at Yale, and then went to Georgetown Law. 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.

#Min jin lee free#

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.