Min Jin Lee did not set out to become a spokesperson for the Korean diaspora. She set out to write good novels. But since “Pachinko” became a runaway bestseller in 2017 and was later adapted into an Apple TV+ series, Lee has become much more than a novelist. She has become one of the most recognizable Asian American writers in the world, moving easily between literary circles, cultural institutions, and the highest levels of public life. She has been a Guggenheim fellow and a Radcliffe Institute fellow at Harvard, served as writer-in-residence at Amherst College, and, since 2025, has been New York’s official State Author Laureate. Along the way, she has used her growing platform to give voice to a generation wrestling with assimilation, ambition, identity, and the cost of belonging.

Her long-anticipated new novel, “American Hagwon,” arrives September 29. It follows the Koh family from Seoul through the 1997 Asian financial crisis to Sydney and eventually Southern California, where the American dream collides with hagwons, the private academies that promise upward mobility and demand everything in return. It is Lee at her most personal, examining the machinery of striving from the inside.