The Korean word “hagwon” is about to become a household term across the United States. If anyone could pull off that unlikely feat, it’s bestselling author Min Jin Lee.

For her highly anticipated third novel, American Hagwon, out at the end of the month from Cardinal, the author sets her sights on these private, for-profit tutoring centers—or “cram schools,” as the media often describe them—that are endemic to Korean communities.

While many Koreans, both at home and in the diaspora, have a knee-jerk negative reaction to the word (pronounced “hog-one”), Lee, who was born in South Korea and immigrated to the United States at age 7, seeks to delve much deeper into what these institutions say about her people.

“There’s this idea that hagwons are places where hyper-driven rich people go to get their kids into a hyper-selective school,” she says in an interview at the Manhattan offices of her publisher, Hachette. “But when I went to all these hagwons, that was not my experience. I did see such places, but they were a tiny minority and almost a caricature of what the average experience was.” As a result, American Hagwon is full of surprising revelations, as Lee pushes against common stereotypes about the Korean obsession with education, achievement, and wealth.

She roots her multigenerational epic in the Koh family: father John, mother Helen, and their children Bo, DH, and Mido, each of them finely drawn, indelible characters. The novel captures how a family and its immigrant social circle fight to preserve their dignity while enduring two economic catastrophes (the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the Great Recession a decade later). Educating children remains a constant, driving priority, seen as the surest path to upward mobility and economic security. Yet only a few characters end up with name-brand degrees, and their jobs span white-collar work as well as retail, service, and fast-food gigs. It’s a very different picture of Asian American life than the one that most U.S. readers associate with this community.

Lee, in fact, considers it her mission to commit the lives of working-class Koreans to paper. Doing so requires drawing upon her personal experience growing up in Queens, then expanding her scope through extensive, hands-on research—“my fake anthropologist/sociologist behavior,” as she jokingly puts it. Longtime fans of her work know that while researching her 2007 debut, Free Food for Millionaires, she went so far as to sit in on classes at the Harvard Business School to better understand the mindset of the Wall Street traders for whom her young protagonist works.

While she herself did not attend a Korean-run hagwon (“I did go to Princeton Review, that counts as a hagwon”) and did not send her son to one, Lee, who lives in Harlem with her husband and son, made multiple research trips to Orange County, California, where she sets a chunk of the novel, and conducted scores of additional interviews with students, parents, educators, even economists and policymakers, in the U.S. and abroad.

“From all these interviews,” Lee says, “I found there was no agreement about money or religion or beauty being the most important things in life. What kept on coming up over and over was education—what they would do for their children, what were their regrets.” The importance of education stems from the Confucianism deep within the culture and the civil service examination system that persists in South Korea today. “There’s this idea that you could somehow ‘merit’ yourself into a person of significance,” Lee says.

Yet hagwons, as for-profit educational institutions, present an enormous economic burden for families in present-day South Korea, she learned. “A hagwon is where you learn to educate yourself by choice,” she notes. “It isn’t a traditional school in which the state tells you what you should learn.”

Cardinal, Lee’s imprint at Hachette, is gearing up to make American Hagwon a major publishing event of the fall. It’s unsurprising, given the runaway success of her last novel, Pachinko (2017), a National Book Award finalist with more than 2 million copies in print across all formats, according to the publisher. Word of mouth was critical to Pachinko’s momentum, Lee says, noting that the novel didn’t hit The New York Times bestseller list until it was in paperback, then remained there for more than 40 weeks.

Cardinal is releasing a deluxe limited-edition hardcover of Pachinko, which was the basis for an acclaimed Apple TV+ series in 2022, as well as special paperback editions of both Pachinko and Free Food. With roughly 10 years between the publication of each novel, the new editions reinforce the idea that a Min Jin Lee book is worth the wait.

“I want to create works of fiction that last,” Lee says of her writing timeline. “I really want to build things of quality. And I also want to be accurate and fair to the people that I love.”

When she speaks about her characters, it’s clear that she has a remarkable capacity to feel for them. In 2017, at the Brooklyn launch of Pachinko, she sobbed openly while reading a passage that captured Koreans’ second-class status as colonized subjects of Japan. “I lost it,” she recalls with amusement. “My publicist was like, ‘What the eff is wrong with her?’ I cannot be a cool cucumber.”

As the years pass, though, Lee is coming to embrace her earnest outpourings of emotion. “There’s a lot of typing and crying,” she says. “There is a part of me that feels so upset about all the Koreans I’ve met who just don’t get the recognition they deserve for their struggle. And I really admire struggle.”

That much is clear to any of Lee’s readers, who have much to look forward to in the coming decades. She’s already at work on a fourth novel, which she’s calling Marshall Plan. It’ll be the last installment of an undertaking that she’s described as her Diaspora Quartet.

Marshall Plan will examine the unsung lives of Koreans who migrated to Europe in the 1960s and ’70s to work in fields ranging from mining to nursing and the arts. In the post–Korean War era, Lee explains, these overseas workers were an essential source of currency flowing back to their home country during decades of rebuilding.

“They were so important in terms of immigration patterns,” she says. “These are groups that people don’t talk about, but their contributions to Korea and to the rest of the community can’t be minimized.”

Telling these stories in the realm of American fiction, Lee knows she is assuming a great deal of responsibility. She does so with humility.

“I can’t believe that I’m 57, and that I got to write these three novels, and then I’m going to write one more,” she says. “I can’t believe that’s a real thing.”

After Marshall Plan, one more book remains in Lee’s current pipeline—a work of nonfiction. Originally planned as a collection of the author’s many public speeches and essays, she’s decided instead to write a memoir. Her very fitting working title? Name Recognition.

Korean American writer Hannah Bae is a journalist, illustrator, and winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award.