🇰🇷 Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee was born on 11 November 1968 in Seoul, the second of three daughters of a lower-middle-class family. Her father had served in the South Korean military before opening a small wholesale jewellery store; her mother was a homemaker turned bookkeeper. In 1976, when Min was seven, the family emigrated to the United States and settled in Elmhurst, Queens, where her parents bought a small newsstand near Pennsylvania Station and worked it almost every day for the rest of her childhood.

She has written about her early years in Queens as defined by language and church. She did not speak English when she arrived, learned it within months, and credits the Korean Presbyterian Church her family attended with much of the community structure of her adolescence. She read voraciously, won a place at the Bronx High School of Science, and went to Yale University, where she studied history and won the Wallace Stegner award for non-fiction writing as an undergraduate. She entered Georgetown Law in 1990 and worked for several years as a corporate attorney in Manhattan.

She left law in 1995, due in part to a chronic liver condition, and began to write seriously. The next decade was a series of starts and abandonments. She wrote three full drafts of what would eventually become Pachinko, scrapped all of them, and turned her attention instead to a novel about Korean-American life in New York. The book, Free Food for Millionaires, was published in 2007 and became a critical and commercial success in the United States, a sharp social novel about a young Korean-American Princeton graduate negotiating her parents' expectations and her own ambitions.

Pachinko, when it finally appeared in 2017, was the result of nearly thirty years of research, several relocations, and a fundamental restructuring after a 2007 move to Tokyo, where her husband had taken a job and where she conducted dozens of interviews with Zainichi Koreans, the ethnic Korean population of Japan. She rewrote the novel from scratch, abandoning her earlier omniscient narrator in favour of a more intimate, multi-generational structure that begins with the fisherwoman Sunja in colonial Korea and ends with her grandson, a Yale-educated equities trader, in Tokyo in the late 1980s.

The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award, was named one of the New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year, and became a long-running bestseller. More than any book of its decade, it brought Zainichi history, the systemic discrimination against ethnic Koreans in Japan, the layered traumas of colonisation and partition, to readers who had never encountered the subject. Apple TV's 2022 adaptation, in which Lee served as an executive producer, won her an even broader audience.

She has been a public intellectual in the way a small number of literary novelists become. She has written extensively on Korean-American identity, on the immigrant church, on financial markets, on the moral economy of family. She has lectured at Yale and elsewhere and has often spoken about the discipline of writing slowly, the value of failure, and the political function of literary attention.

She is also unusual within Korean-language literature in that she does not write in Korean. Her decision to compose her novels in English, while continuing to research, interview and travel within Korean and Japanese sources, has made her a kind of bridge writer. Korean readers have engaged with her work in translation as a window into how a Korean-American writer reframes their own history; English readers have come to know the Korean and Zainichi past largely through her prose.

She is at work on a third novel, American Hagwon, which is intended to close what she has called the Koreans trilogy that began with Free Food for Millionaires and continued with Pachinko. The book is about education, ambition and the Korean diaspora in the contemporary United States. Her readers have been waiting for several years. She has refused to be hurried.