An Evening with Min Jin Lee | Fundraiser for New Life Community Development

Pre-purchase your copy of the featured title to guarantee your signed copy! This helps ensure that everyone who wants a book goes home with one, in case we sell out at the event. 

This event is benefiting New Life Community Development Corporation, a 501c3 nonprofit serving low income individuals in Elmhurst and Corona.

Join Min Jin Lee in conversation with Lucy Yu in the bestselling author’s very own hometown of Elmhurst, NY, to celebrate the arrival of her latest novel American Hagwon, and to fundraise for an Elmhurst-based non-profit.

Ticket price will include a signed copy and a donation to New Life Community Development Corporation, a 501c3 organization serving low income individuals in Elmhurst and Corona with a food pantry, health center, financial literacy, and social emotional wellness programming.

10% of each purchased copy of American Hagwon will also be donated towards New Life Community Development Corporation.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic: a masterpiece by turns sweeping and intimate, that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty.

Min Jin Lee brings grand ambition, fierce heart, and the tenderest hope to a novel I didn’t want to end.” —Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger

In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and Mido—find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California—where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.

In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice—for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers—is a kind of prayer.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Min Jin Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea and immigrated to Queens, New York with her family when she was seven years old. She is a writer whose award-winning fiction explores the intersection of race, ethnicity, immigration, class, religion, gender, and identity of a diasporic people.

Lee’s debut novel Free Food for Millionaires (2007) was a Top 10 Books of the Year for The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air, USA Today, and a national bestseller. Pachinko, her second novel, is an epic story which follows a Korean family who migrates to Japan; it is the first novel written for an adult, English-speaking audience about the Korean-Japanese people. Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017, and is one of Kirkus Review’s Best Books of the 21st Century (So Far). A New York Times Bestseller, Pachinko was also a Top 10 Books of the Year for the BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the New York Public Library. Pachinko was a selection for “Now Read This,” the joint book club of PBS NewsHour and The New York Times. It was on over 75 best books of the year lists, including NPR, PBS, and CNN. Pachinko has been translated into over 35 languages and is an international bestseller. President Barack Obama selected Pachinko for his recommended reading list, calling it, “a powerful story about resilience and compassion.” In 2024 Pachinko (#15) was named one of the New York Times Book Review’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.

IN CONVERSATION WITH

Lucy Yu is a writer and multi-disciplinary artist living in Brooklyn, New York. She is also the owner of Yu & Me Books in Manhattan’s Chinatown, the first queer Asian American bookstore in New York City. Yu & Me Books specializes in immigrant stories, writers of color, and historically marginalized experiences.