While in DC, the award-winning author Min Jin Lee swung by to recommend three books that deal with love.

Hi, my name is Min Jin Lee, and I'm the author of Free Food for Millionaires, Pachinko, and now American Hagwon.

I have three book recommendations.

The first one is for a younger person, but it, it's also quite suitable for a mature person, and it's a book called The Velveteen Rabbit, written by Margery Williams.

It is a very beautiful, tiny story about a toy and how you become real by really loving it, and I think that in this time this might be a very good book because I think we've forgotten a lot about love.

The second book about love is a love to belong and a love to have a place in the world, and that's A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul.

This is a very important book to me because it really taught me to think about writing about what you know and the place that you know, and no matter how modest it is, the people in that community that you love are important, and their dreams are important.

And is it fair to raise the question about what they really learn?

You know, the popular stance about hagwons and Korean education is that it's stupid and it's evil and it's wrong to make kids study this way.

And that argument has been made.

It will continue to be made.

And I completely support believing this.

That said, the general competence and the abilities of Korean children are really high.

This kind of push, it did lead to this incredible development of a very, very poor country in a tiny amount of time.

Much of your novel seems to be about willful self-sacrifice.

And I want to talk about how they came to you.

They are based on the interviews that I did.

So I have done now thousands of interviews with Koreans around the world.

And in my experience, the vast majority of them really are fairly decent.

And they're really trying their best.

And the thing that troubled me was that most people in the West have no idea, and it's not your fault, that the Asian financial crisis, which is called the IMF crisis in Korea, which happened in 1997, is considered one of the most devastating things that have happened to the modern Korean person.

And that was when the currency of South Korea became so devalued that families had to... entirely disrupt their lives.

got things to do.

Yeah, yeah.

And then my mother is another one, where she grew up in a religious household, so her father was a pastor, and he was also a headmaster of an orphanage.

So she grew up knowing that people were very, very poor, but then you can still live, you can still live.

So they both have this sort of sense of, uh- You don't necessarily need a lot of things, but you could live with dignity and with survival and resources, and that each of you are responsible for, um, [smacks lips] taking care of yourself.

So there really are...

They're very effective people, and when they came to the United States, we became working class because they went from a middle class existence to a working class existence, and then slowly they really worked and worked and saved and lived in a pretty financially wise way.

And then, uh, we ended up doing better as a result of it.

Sure.

Yeah, yeah.

And then my mother is another one, where she grew up in a religious household.

So her father was a pastor, and he was also a headmaster of an orphanage.

So she grew up knowing that people were very, very poor, but then you can still live, you can still live.

So they both have this sort of sense of, uh, you don't necessarily need a lot of things, but you can live with dignity and with survival and resources and that each of you are responsible for your- Um, [tsking] taking care of yourself.

So they really are, they're very effective people, and when they came to the United States, we became working class because they went from a middle class existence to a working class existence, and then slowly they really worked and worked and saved, and lived in a pretty financially wise way.

And then, uh, we ended up doing better as a result of it.

Sure.

And do you see it that way?

No.

But you know what I do think? I think that what we don't think about in America is the global contextualization of these parents' decisions.

We're talking about people who have nothing or very close to nothing, and they're trying to figure out how do I have, become an elite person? Not me, but my child become an elite person.

Like, how do I give my kid a shot? And it's usually through exams.

So you'll have somebody in China and in Korea, in India doing these kinds of things, and you're right.

I mean, as a Western parent, it is really, really surprising.

Um, when you said people are desperate for morality, what, what is in your head? What are you thinking about?

Mm-hmm.

What I find really interesting is that people keep thinking about these, you know, unwashed people coming and showing up somewhere, how terrifying that is.

What I really want to question and upset the idea is to show how much, not only do they change, not only do you and I become assimilated, but actually how do we assimilate others?

Wow.

Yeah.

And then I didn't even tell my parents, and I was little, and also because I didn't know how to talk, I didn't know what to do.

But anyway, I didn't tell my parents.

She calls my mother and says, "Your daughter has behavioral issues." But then my mother told me, I kid you not, when I was, like, 49, 'cause this entire time I'm thinking this is my fault because I'm goofy.

Did they protect you from what must have been a cauldron of emotions that they were going through? Was the kitchen table a place where you talked about those things or was that the respite where instead you talked about more aspirational things?

Oh, it's such a good question and so smart and wise.

You know, now that I'm 57, I think like them.

Like, I think what they're thinking.

I'm not a child anymore.

And I think, oh, gosh, it must have been absolutely horrendous to come in your 40s to a new country in a second language where you don't know anybody with exactly $5,000.

It's not a lot.

Does it feel like, can you just say a word about the book and whether you think that it does really sort of meet the moment because of when it's surfacing?

understand?

Like if you ask me questions about books.

It's very hard to make me fluff.

I just know it.

This is a thing that I know very well.

Even though I'm not an English major, even if I don't have an MFA, I have a kind of facility because I'm in it.

I read so much and I know where things fit.

I'm like, girl, no. I'm not here for that.

and whatever friendship we had was gone in american hagwon ii the test has such consequence for bow for so many people i wonder what we're doing to ourselves to our students to our kids with the standardized tests

I love this story.

It's so good.

And I don't know what he was going through.

And I hope that he has since changed from that point of view.

Because envy is, it's a monstrous emotion.

Really monstrous.

And I think what's implied in my asking that question is what's happened since? How far have we gone and how far do we feel from that era from 92 to 2007, particularly in education?

And now here's Min Jin Lee reading Helen on 86th Street by Wendy Kauffman.

Helen on 86th Street.

I hate Helen.

That's all I can say.

I hate her.

Helen McGuire is playing Helen, so Mr. Dodd says, because out of the entire sixth grade, she most embodies Helen of Troy.

Great.

I mean, one is, is possibly that Vita's never been able to express her grief, right, over her father leaving.

Now, here's Min Jin Lee.

"Testing." Even as an infant, Helen and John Ko's firstborn had a calm temperament and an accommodating disposition, as if he appreciated what it meant to be a jangnam with the attendant privileges and responsibilities of primogeniture.

Bo never seemed to let the burdens of being the eldest child overwhelm him.

He exerted himself in the classroom and on the sports field.

He got along well with his peers.

A nice-looking and thoughtful young man, Bo was a blessing and a relief to his busy parents.

All three children had been born in Paramus, New Jersey, while John was working for a Japanese trading company in New York City.

The story highlights the modern-day phenomenon of parasocial relationships between celebrities and their followers.

followers.The interaction of fans through social media and the all-consuming nature of intense fixation.

The author asks the important question, "Is a fan's encounter with her idol a blessing or a curse?"