Min Jin Lee’s Underdog Morality
2026-10-01 10:00:00 • 38:34
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This September, my youngest child went to college, and the experience for me was very different
than when I sent my other two children to college.
With them, I didn't question the decision all that much.
They got in somewhere we celebrated off the went.
But now it's 2026, and college is a loaded word.
More expensive than ever, and its value not as clear.
At this moment, no honest parent can easily answer the question,
what is the relationship between a child's education and their future success and happiness?
I'm Hannah Rosen, this is Radio Atlantic.
The world has waited almost 10 years for a new novel by Minjin Lee.
In 2017, she published the best-selling historical epic, Pichinco.
It became a national book award finalist.
It was named one of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st century,
and it was adapted into a series for Apple TV.
Her first book since Pichinco is out this week.
It's called American Hagwon,
Hagwon, meaning private tutoring center in Korean.
Do you want me to tell you how to say Hagwon?
Just like Hannah Hagwon.
Does that make sense?
Is it the speed of it?
Hagwon?
No, no, no. You can say Hannah or Hana.
You say Hana.
Yes, it's exactly like that.
Hagwon.
Yeah, Hagwon.
Lee spent years researching and conducting hundreds of interviews with Korean parents,
students, and Hagwon teachers.
The novel follows a group of interconnected families who move between Korea, Australia, and the US.
Like Lee's previous books, Christianity, morality, and immigration are major themes in Hagwon.
But its central preoccupation is education.
The lengths that Korean parents will go to get their children into elite schools.
They're sacrifices, financial and emotional, and how they affect both parents and children.
All set against the backdrop of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which adds an edge of
desperation to the quest for success.
Minjin Lee joins me today to talk about life in the shadow of school.
Men, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Hana.
So as I was reading about you, I discovered something that made me so happy,
which is that you and I have extremely similar immigrant journeys.
We are exactly the same age.
We came to America at exactly the same time, both moved to Queens.
And I went to a stifuson and you went to Bronx Science.
We missed by a hair being high school classmates.
And I could have gone to stifuson because I got in.
But then my older sister went to Bronx Science and I was bullied so much as a kid.
And she protected me so people just said, my parents and everybody else agreed.
She should go to school with her sister.
For people who don't know, stifuson and Bronx Science, how should we describe them?
They're like the launchers of immigrants, I feel like.
Yes, if you're very, very lucky.
Yes, if you get in, they're magnet schools.
And if you happen to pass, they're hog one like.
If you manage to pass the test, the one critical test, you're one lucky immigrant.
But the thing I wanted to talk about was stifuson but Queens.
Because I so rarely meet people in my life who grew up in Queens.
Really?
And yeah, and the thing, I go back to Queens a lot.
My family still lives there.
The overwhelming feeling I have in Queens is that everybody there is displaced and carries
the feeling of displacement.
Even if they move somewhere else or do something else, it's just like an entire
burrow of people who are in the wrong place.
And I just wondered if you shared that as someone who grew up in the same era that I did.
I completely agree.
And then also, even if you don't feel that,
everybody you care about is like that.
So you can't help but feel this way.
Yeah, I mean, it was, you know, I lived in just like a mixed immigrant neighborhood.
And it sounds like you lived in a mo-
No, you didn't live in a Korean neighborhood.
There's so many, like I didn't know why people existed.
You did not.
No, you know why?
Because nobody was white.
You were from Pakistan, you're from India, you're from all these different countries.
So you always had a country affiliation.
So even if you were white, you would say I'm Polish.
Yeah, I'm Italian, I'm Irish.
Yes.
And if you spoke Spanish,
whatever country you came from, they're like, oh, he's Spanish.
And you're like, and then you don't think about the country, you think like, oh, no,
actually he's from Ecuador.
Right.
But then if you're from, let's say, the Dominican Republic, you're like, oh, no, I am not Puerto Rican.
Yes, yes.
That was actually the big battle in my middle school,
is between Dominicans and Puerto Rican.
The DRPR.
And the big thing was the lunch.
That's what I remember.
Like it was what language you speak and what did you bring to school for lunch?
That's where all the divides came in.
Anyway, okay, to your novel.
I did an informal survey of friends, and I would say less than half of them knew what the word
hogwon meant, nor did they understand the whole culture of hogwon and what comes along with that word.
So I think we need to start there.
Sure.
What is it?
So a hogwon is a learning center.
Anytime you pay somebody to teach you something that's not in regular school, that's a hogwon.
So in Korea, everybody goes to hogwons.
The elderly, the child, the middle age person goes to hogwons to learn gourmet cooking,
tap dancing, singing.
But this makes it sound lovely, like a hogwon.
No, it is actually lovely because you have the optionality of self-improvement.
And that's very normal.
And then you also have hogwons for civil service exams,
as well as when you're four years old, you go to hogwons to learn English.
So that's the hogwons that people really, I think Americans get really upset about.
And I know you did a lot of research into hogwons.
Can you just talk about the range?
Like was there a memory as you were looking into hogwons where you thought,
oh, this is very stressful?
And other times when you thought, oh, this is lovely.
Oh, I think before I started the research, I thought I was very
stressful because I read all the data.
And the data is terrifying.
So like 80% of Koreans and their five year olds to hogwons.
So as a Western person, as an immigrant, as an American, you're kind of going,
that's kind of a lot.
And also, you learn that the middle income of a Korean person was, let's say, $35,000.
And you're spending $400 a month to hogwons bills for your four year old,
which apparently explains the low birth rate and the low merit rate
of Korea.
So I found that really stressful.
And then of course, I go to all the different hogwons and I don't feel stressful at all.
Oh, interesting.
Because they're so normal.
And then even the hogwons in America, I thought they're actually necessary.
Interesting.
I did a complete 180.
Really?
So you started out with the stereotype of hogwons.
Like this is torturing the data.
Bigger than they are.
Don't get a childhood.
They don't get a childhood.
They're not able to play.
They're being crammed with information.
And that is not what you came out thinking.
I do not believe it anymore.
I don't think that they're lovely, but I see why they're necessary.
Uh-huh.
Even if it means that children, I mean, my stereotype,
and I visited Korea so I know a little bit, is that it's the number of hours.
It's the quantity of hours you were expected to spend in school.
Yeah.
And I think that if you're a working parent and you have kids,
hogwons are a kind of child care.
And also because you can't help the kids with homework.
So then parents will actually outsource this.
And it becomes a low cost way to get tutoring.
So if you think about it that way,
all of a sudden every working parent in America is like,
maybe why, why don't I do this?
It's like high-end aftercare.
Yeah, it sounds very good.
It's kind of like Kuman.
Yeah.
Kuman is very inexpensive in America.
If your kid does Kuman,
then you could be a legal secretary or
somebody's assistant chief of staff kind of person.
And so you know that's $400 a month.
I make $80,000 a year.
And my kid can do these work sheets,
get the stickers and the stuffed animals.
And the kid will be probably in the top 10% of my public school.
Okay. So in the novel, there's a mixed portrait, let's say.
So for example, there's a character named Ginny.
And she's almost a Dickensian character.
She feels the most Dickensian of your character.
She's sort of an urchin.
You know, she's sent by her parents at nine years old to go to the US.
And her sole mission is to get into UCSF and go to medical school and be a doctor.
But that means she ends up in a boarding house.
Where does this child come from and what does she represent?
They're all around those these kids.
So sociologists call them parachute children.
They usually come from East Asia.
And they're parachuted down to another country,
not necessarily always America, because America is actually quite expensive.
And the person who ticks care of them is called a homestay person, the guardian.
And you can pay somebody that you know or a family member,
and you pay room and board.
However, if you don't have the money to pay, where does this child go?
So you just said that to me pretty neutrally.
As if there's no heartbreak involved in the story of Ginny.
Is that actually how you feel or interpret Ginny?
No, what I really think is interesting to me is that the people who do it think of it as an
extraordinary privilege to get to do it. It's not like you're trying to get rid of your kid.
You're thinking, I will scrape and save and borrow to send my kid overseas.
Because we think the American education is that important because my kid has to be a global child.
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 a 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.
When you talk to the parents and you ask them what they went through,
you really start to understand that this is their decision.
And I have great sympathy for the parents who do this as well as the kids.
The kids are really confused, of course, because they're just children.
Right. It's so interesting to hear you talk about this because I know that you exist in the
tradition of social realist novels of the 19th century.
And there is an element of maybe social justice.
Sure.
And as I was reading the Sun Queens, we care about the underdogs.
And I was wondering, is this like, uptends and clairs social justice?
Like I'm trying to expose the sort of crushing capitalist pressures that produce
something like Ginny or, but that's not really your tone, even though that's,
you know, a mode that you exist in.
I'd say your tone is a little more anthropologist.
Yeah, I want to, I think you're so smart to pick up on that because there's a part of me that
wants to be the muck raker. People don't want to read it.
Interesting. Yeah.
Nobody wants that.
Nobody wants to sermon.
You know, people want to, they want entertainment.
Uh-huh.
And through entertainment and through, and through drama,
people will start to think, oh, I really feel bad for this kid, Ginny.
She's nine years old.
She's being parachuted and all of a sudden you become Ginny because that's what fiction does.
Because you identify with somebody in the scene.
You're like, well, how would that feel to be Ginny?
And I'm actually saying, I want you to think about Ginny, but I also want you to think about
the guardian.
Asian parenting often becomes pathologized.
It's decontextualized.
All we can see is the outcome or we can see the data around it,
but we don't see the human interest.
And as a matter of fact, if you're in the same situation,
you might actually make the same decision.
What drew you to this subject after Prachinko?
Why education?
Like, why did that become the thing that you thought was important to explore?
So I'm going to write this thing called diaspora quartet.
All the books are not related and characters are plot,
but they're related by this idea of diaspora.
Because I think diaspora is now the modern person's permanent condition.
Interesting.
What do you mean everybody?
Everybody.
Everybody's saying a complete name.
Not just Koreans, everybody.
So for example, environmental diaspora, right?
So you don't have any water in your city, in your town, and you have to move.
You don't have any more jobs in your town.
So you have to move.
If you want to get an education or you have to cross a border.
And I'm saying that we are being scattered by modern society.
So we have to study this subject.
Like, I think we've got to take it really, really seriously.
So my entire novelistic work before I quit is going to be diaspora.
The people that I look at are Koreans.
That's my lane.
It's a lane I really want to be in.
And after my first two books, I asked myself,
what is the value that Koreans care about more than any other thing?
Because, and I took it really based upon all my interviews.
I've had thousands of interviews.
And every single one of them, they talk about education
with this kind of very kind of controversial kind of take.
They all care about the subject, but they have such different opinions on it
that it always kind of took my breath away because
it was so not American.
And that's all I can say.
It was so unfamiliar to me at the same time.
So familiar because I heard it over and over again.
And how what is it?
How would you summarize it?
That they care about it more than religion.
They care more about it than money.
They care more about it than status.
Like it's almost a faith.
Like they believe it is a token to success.
Almost in a Pachinko way of like your gambler.
If you get this token, everything will work out.
Everything will work out.
And also it means so much to another person.
Like if we learn, oh, Hana went to this school.
Right.
Right?
Like let's say you're middle school.
I'm not even talking college here.
Like you went to this middle school.
It means that you weren't certain neighborhoods.
And you're that say, let's say the top student.
Because they have that.
They will remember the top student of middle school.
Yeah.
And consequently, that means something to your classmates
who went to the middle school with you.
And I think the average American person would say,
that is insane.
Right.
Right.
We don't think of it as a belief in that way.
Like an absolute belief.
Yeah.
So I mean, and it wasn't all the Koreans.
But I would find Koreans who would say these things.
And I thought, huh, that's so interesting.
So I thought, okay, I'm going to write it
to speak about education.
And I'm going to connect it with diaspora.
Because it made a lot of sense.
Because it would always say, I want to go here
to learn English from my kid.
And they would accept all these arrangements
like the parachute kid.
Like the wild goose phenomenon,
which is when the father stays home,
earned all the money,
and the mom and the kid lived somewhere else.
Like Australia, like the Philippines,
in order to learn English.
And people don't really know that they're Koreans everywhere.
Yeah, especially where English is spoken.
And you wouldn't, and it's not so obvious why they go.
Yeah.
So you're both examining this idea
and a little bit pushing back against this idea.
I want to figure it out.
And then I also want to be fair to it.
Because I don't feel like,
well, there's two things.
One is, I don't think in America,
we talk enough about education.
We're not helping children get the skills
they need to take care of themselves.
That is, like we're failing in education.
We're failing.
We don't worship it enough,
or we don't believe in it enough.
Like if we have Koreans who are doing things
in this sort of intense rate,
we are doing that almost as a nation.
We're falling behind.
In a two-legged, daisicle way.
In fact, I would say the mythology that's taken hold
at this moment in America is the opposite.
You're wasting your time.
Like what you really should be doing
is leaving your education
and going to be an entrepreneur or tech entrepreneur.
Like it's like you're a chump
if you stick to the road path.
Well, also this whole chumpness,
the chump population.
The fact that we can even call people chumps
is so anti-intellectual.
Which intellectual person would just say,
oh, you're a chump for getting a PhD?
You would study eight years to get a doctorate.
Because a tech professional would be like,
you're clearly a ding dong because I quit college.
And that kind, not all the tech professional is obviously.
But I think that kind of thinking is,
in Korea, if you have a PhD,
that's considered very honorable.
By most people, not everybody, but by many.
I was thinking of a specific scene in the novel.
It's this community gathering at a Christian church
and one of the main characters, whose name is Lion.
He's giving a big speech to all of the parents.
Lion is the one who runs this successful,
hot one business that caters to Korean immigrants and Los Angeles.
And in his speech, he's telling the parents,
like, will you please worry less about your kids' grades
and less about where they're going to college
and more about their mental health?
He's essentially pushing back against all their intensity.
It's an interesting scene for a lot of reasons.
One, it doesn't really work.
Like, it just makes it sort of more valuable
and ups the parents panic.
And two, it's interesting because,
like, he's running a hot one.
So I'm not really sure how to,
how to understand.
It's almost like the leaders of the AI companies
who are like, please restrain on these,
these in charge of it.
You know?
So I was curious to hear you talk about that scene.
You know, I met all these hot one teachers
who had been doing it for a long time
and the ones who've been doing it for a long time,
the ones who are really good.
They're almost like teenage whispers.
Because these young kids, they don't feel heard.
Yeah, they're told a lot of things, but they're not heard.
So when you have this magical person
who went to the famous school
that your parents want you to go to,
and they really listen to you
and they ask you questions like,
so why do you want to go to college?
Maybe it's not a good time.
And the kids like, what do you mean?
I have a choice.
Yeah.
And they get really excited.
And I think when you can have access to
what the kids are really thinking,
it's a very privileged position.
And then I think these teachers
start to really identify with the young people more.
And they're trying to help them.
Because what ends up happening
is some of these kids do go to these schools.
And then after the first year,
they literally just crash.
Yeah.
And they're also exhausted, especially in America.
Because when you have 14 AP classes,
no one should be doing that.
Okay, that's actually very helpful.
Because the hog one where a lot of the
action takes place, the one run by line,
is essentially what it stands for
is not a bucking of the system or resistance.
What it stands for is connection.
Like it's a place where
it's an idealized form of tutoring and education,
like almost connection between teacher and student.
I have no idea if that exists or is
common among hogwans, but that's what
novelistically it represents.
I saw hogwant teachers
overwhelmingly, they're pretty decent people.
But I have met hogwant teachers who do bad things,
who cheat, who help the children cheat.
Like they teach them bad values.
Yeah, or they write the college essays.
Right.
They just take the parents money.
And they turn these things out.
And they also, the worst thing I think they do
by cheating is by telling the kids,
this is the way the world works.
So you carry on and you keep doing this.
Right. So it makes them cynical.
Oh, the young people right now are so cynical in a way
that you and I are like innocent, so innocent at that age.
Because we did not know.
I'm not, I shouldn't speak for Johanna,
but most people that I knew of wrong signs,
we did not really understand a lot of things.
Like I didn't know about legacies, for example.
I didn't know about having a famous parent.
Like I didn't know about the sports track.
I didn't know how to get into school, especially in Bronx High.
There are so many things I didn't know.
And I think that when you figure out,
oh, actually, if there are 1200 seats in a class
for that college, really, there are about 400 left
for the general population.
And of that, that needs to be divided
among a global constituency.
Now that you do know all these things,
you did go to elite colleges.
I did.
Yeah.
So when you look back, I mean,
you went to some of the most prestigious universities.
Yeah, and George Shown did writing this book
make you think differently about your experience
in elite academia?
Well, I think that when I went to these elite spaces,
except for wrong signs where I really felt normal and happy,
it's New York.
And it's just other kids from the burrows.
And also not that much was expected of me.
Like I didn't have a lot of pressure at home
to study and to become something.
Because your parents were not,
so-called Tiger parents?
No, no.
I'm my mother's very laissez-faire.
Because she went to a very prestigious school in Korea.
And she's a music person.
And her attitude is,
if you have the brains and you squander it,
that's on you.
Yeah.
That's nice.
It's a freedom in that.
Yeah.
There's a lot of freedom in it.
And there's three of us.
So her attitude is, well, you know,
again, I was considered sort of the slower of the pack.
Yeah.
So then I really,
I just, I was left to sort of read the free books
and eventually find my way.
And I think when I went to college,
I met all these kids who are so polished and sophisticated
and suave.
And well, I mean, they were so well-traveled.
They just knew things that I just didn't know
and I remember feeling like,
oh, I don't know that.
I really don't know that.
And I've never been there.
And I don't know how to pronounce that.
Like, there were so many things I had read,
but I didn't know how to say.
After the break,
more unmingently's new novel,
American Hogwon.
And also, why she thinks of herself as a moral novelist.
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The novel is bookended by two financial catastrophes.
The 1997 IMF crisis in South Korea.
And the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis in the US.
Why was it important for you to set it in this time period?
What kind of pressure, extra pressure does that create?
Well, I want to talk about now.
I mean, I write social novels.
And I think one of the things that we don't want to do is we don't want to recognize
the villains in our lives because they're not legible to us.
Like a financial crisis.
Like we don't understand how much damage it does to all of us all the time.
Because we don't want to understand the subject.
I see.
So it's easy to understand like a bad parent who ships.
That's very concrete.
Yes.
A bad parent.
A war.
Yes.
The other country.
Yeah.
Right.
A religious group that you don't like.
That's very easy to say, oh, it's them.
It's not me.
A financial crisis.
We all actually participate in it.
And we don't want to be responsible for learning about it.
And again, that's education.
I actually think that if we had personal finance classes,
it would make a humongous difference in the way America runs.
Just as in Pichinko, because of this financial crisis and other reasons,
there are wild swings to family fortunes.
What is interesting to you about putting your characters through that kind of suffering?
Like what is important to learn about a family or about,
is that a way of testing people or evoking certain things?
Well, it's actually what happens to all of us.
Somebody loses a job.
When one parent loses a job or as we say, reduced,
you wake up, you open your computer and you get an email saying,
your division is gone.
That's America now.
Yeah.
How does that affect your family, especially as a parent,
as I say, 47 or 52?
It's really difficult to start again at this age.
And I wanted to show that happening to my characters,
because that's what's happening to us now.
Now, if that situation happens,
there are a lot of directions of family could break apart.
You know, people could get angry, violent.
The family you feature, what's remarkable about them is they almost immediately
choose to sacrifice for each other.
You know, the father goes from corporate world
to working at a fish fry restaurant.
The daughter who's really, really smart decides,
oh, I'm going to work and put my brothers through school.
So it's a lot of sacrifice.
What's interesting to you about sacrifice?
Well, when I interviewed all these different families
around the world about their education,
especially the ones that lost everything in the IMF crisis,
the one who actually succeeded,
the only survival strategy that worked was sacrifice.
In sequencing.
What do you mean?
Is it sacrifice within the family context?
Yes.
Somebody had to give.
Not everybody's going to get what they want.
It may seem pretty logical and obvious,
but if everybody tries to get what they want,
then the entire unit breaks apart.
Yeah.
I was wondering if you were working through the Korean concept,
or even a Christian concept of sacrifice.
You know, it's actually, I think,
there are religious aspects of it
that I think are valuable,
and it's shared cross-culturally by families
who have faith in a religion.
But also, it was just
the only thing that's going to work
because there's limited resources
and limited time.
So even if take religion away,
I think even economists would understand
that sequencing is sometimes the only choice.
Like if you only have $100,
and $40 is all you could spend for education,
and you have, let's say, three kids,
you can't do it for all the kids.
It's funny.
When you talk about some of these things
or these decisions,
you talk about the analytical part of them
and less about the sort of spiritual
philosophical part of it.
Like in the book, the way sacrifice happens.
I mean, there's a lot of morality.
I mean, would you agree with that?
That there is...
I'm definitely a moral writer.
Yeah.
I'm definitely a moral novelist.
I mean, in the same way, all the writers that I love
were moral novelists.
Actually, you know why?
Because actually, I think most people
are desperate for morality.
And what do you mean by morality?
Because there's one surface-level reading,
which is that in this novel,
family is really important and central,
holds people together,
and people really sacrifice for their families.
And the one person who does things
which are very patently, say, un-Christian,
lie, steal, seduce-married men,
really gets her come up ends.
So that's almost a traditional kind of morality.
But maybe that's not what you mean by morality.
No, that's actually just law.
I mean, I was a former lawyer.
So I have seen people who behave this way,
get in trouble.
I've talked to a lot of white collar criminal lawyers.
So it's really interesting.
You can argue that in this current climate
that we should celebrate the anti-hero.
We could, right?
Like, I kind of...
And I would say a lot of Korean movies about inequality,
at least the ones that are popular here
are very anti-hero, like squid.
I mean, they're brutal and they don't have any traditional morality.
They definitely celebrate the anti-hero.
Right.
But so I know the director and the writer of that show, for example.
And when we talk about politics,
he's a very moral person.
Interesting.
I mean, the reason why you show that in a satirical way
is because they're so outraged by the inequality.
I think Koreans are really outraged by unfairness.
Like, if you want to have a scandal in Korea as a politician,
your kid cheats on something and you let it go,
that's actually becomes a national scandal.
Like, if your wife accepts a handbag and she shouldn't have,
that's corruption.
That's interesting.
Because right now, there is sort of beginning to be a call
for Democrats not to just talk about affordability,
but to talk about how unfair things are,
to sort of add a kind of element of injustice and morality
to what's happening, which we see in data centers.
It hasn't quite percolated into the political language quite yet,
but it's there.
When you said people are desperate for morality,
what is in your head?
What are you thinking about?
Well, when I think the temperature of America right now
with people that I meet,
people are really upset about the fact that we're also cynical,
including children.
Nobody believes in anything.
And we think that terrible things are happening
and nobody's being held accountable.
Yet, regular middle-class people still have to pay their bills
and we can't ask questions why.
Gas prices are going up, egg prices are going up,
the rents going up, there's no house to buy.
The interest rates are going up.
So this affordability crisis is a lot about,
hey, this is not fair because some people who have assets
are doing great.
Because a stock market, despite all these things,
is artificially inflated and it's doing great.
But if you're the chump who doesn't have assets,
you're really upset.
Again, fairness.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think most people,
most people really see themselves as decent.
That's the other thing.
Because I've interviewed a lot of people who do some crazy bad things,
illegal things.
And they always have a reason why.
And they'll say things like, I did it for my family.
I did it for my mother.
I mean, I did it for XYZ and you're kind of going,
but it's illegal.
But they have a reason.
And so when I listen to them, I go, okay,
well, most people really believe that they're pretty decent.
And then I meet people who are really trying to do the right thing
with almost nothing.
That always stuns me.
Yeah.
So you've talked a little bit about the quartet here.
The fourth book is going to be called the Marshall Plan.
It's almost terrible to ask someone,
how is it going?
I'm not even going to ask.
I started.
You did.
Congratulations.
Can you just talk a little bit about what you're exploring in the Marshall Plan?
So I think that the Marshall Plan is probably the smartest,
most moral thing America did.
Let's just say what it is.
It's the 1948 US Initiative to help with economic recovery in Europe
after World War II.
How's that?
That's a very, very, thank you.
A-plus.
Okay.
And the reason why that's quite astonishing is because we could have taken the
tack Germany, you did something beyond evil.
You should be punished.
You should just suffer, right?
But I think that people were aware that that's suffering during World War
I and the economic terms of which cost inflation and which caused the
Stemagog to become powerful.
And then he escaped go to the minority.
Maybe we don't want to do that again.
And by rebuilding and rebuilding by giving money to Europe, all of us benefited.
America and Europe.
So it's this thing that I think we always turn to and saying we could do that.
Why don't we do that again?
Why do we always like hurting people?
I'm writing something called Marshall Plan, not the Marshall Plan.
And it's about this idea of remittances and reconstruction.
So all these Koreans left Korea in the 60s and 70s and they went to Germany
to work as miners and nurses, about 20,000 of them.
And they sent their Deutschmarks back to South Korea to help rebuild the country.
And then also many Koreans went to Europe and became artists and learned more about the arts in
Europe. Singers, violinists, filmmakers, photographers.
And then also many women married GI's and went to America.
And they sent money back to South Korea.
I'm interested in this idea of remittances.
I'm seeing, as you're talking, I think I'm getting a better sense because it's not a quartet
in that we're following the same characters over time.
But you are thinking very hard about the world as it is,
kind of different ways that it could be.
Yeah.
Morality in a sort of complex way because it's a morality that is constrained and exists in a very
realistic world.
Like a world in which no one's really dealt a fair hand in which bad things happen.
And particularly to people who don't have that much power.
Yeah.
You know, um, you're getting it.
You're really getting it.
And it's so important to me because I'm not that interested in pointing out problems.
I'm trying to figure out what works and what is work for people who have very little.
Because all I hear all the time is that the world is burning down.
I'm thinking like this is not what we tell college students or teenagers.
It's not something we tell middle-aged people.
You mean because it's not inspiring.
Because one, it's also not true.
It's not true.
If you look at the history of the world, like things are horrible now,
but they're also like what's horrible then?
And in some ways, significantly more horrible than for women.
Right?
All of the illnesses that we've cured since then.
And I keep thinking, well, how did all of our ancestors deal with these horrific problems of
just foolishness and hatred?
All of it.
And we need to figure something out.
And we need to remember because I know that this like perpetual state of fear and anxiety
is not something that we can, like, we can't do this.
We have to have another story.
This is so good because I think a lot of people in this moment in American history
take the path of avoidance or distraction.
And you are essentially writing or speaking an intellectual's guide to a happy life.
Like a high information guide to a happy life.
So I appreciate it.
Well, men, thank you so much for joining me.
And congratulations.
Well, Han and I know that we're twins.
And I kind of wish I'd gone to Bronx Science, you know.
This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes and Genei West.
It was edited by Kevin Townsend.
Ivan Kim Factchecked.
Rob Smersiac engineered and provided original music.
We also had music from Break Master Cylinder.
Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio.
And Andrea Valdes is our managing editor.
Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all
Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to the Atlantic at theatlanic.com slash listener.
I'm Hana Rosen.
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