![]() ![]() 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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