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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.

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.

American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee, Cardinal, 656 pp., $36, September 2026

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.

South Korean students study a map of the United States as to practice their English language skills in Seoul on Dec. 10, 2004. Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

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........

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