Novelist Min Jin Lee on the promise and perils of Western education

Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening, alongside politicians and thinkers like Corey Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, and so many more. That's all on the New Yorker radio hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts. This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross.

Our guest today is internationally acclaimed novelist Min Jin Lee, who's best known for the novel Pachinko. She spends a decade researching and writing each of her books. For her latest novel, American Hogwan, she interviewed people in South Korea, Australia, and the US to get their understanding of everything from national bankruptcy to female sexuality to the restaurant profit margins on frying shrimp. Lee spoke with guest interviewer Artie Shahani, host of the podcast Art of Power. Min Jin Lee is a celebrated social novelist whose books follow South Koreans as they try to survive at home and abroad as part of a sprawling diaspora. As a social novelist, Lee imbues her fiction with deep research into the causes of human suffering.

And the hacks we create to get around it. Her latest novel, American Hagwan, spans from the early nineties through the Asian financial crisis in nineteen ninety seven to two thousand seven and the beginnings of the global financial crisis. Her main characters, the Co family. Move from their homeland of South Korea. to Australia.

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