Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s, Jane Kim and her brother, Kevin, dutifully embodied the model minority myth as their parents demanded: Jane went on to law school. Kevin came close to becoming a professional tennis player. But where they started is nowhere near where they have ended up: Jane has stopped going to her law school classes, and Kevin, now a policeman, has become increasingly distant. Their parents, each on their own path toward the elusive American Dream, don't want to see the family unraveling. When Kevin goes missing, no one recognizes his absence as the warning sign it is until it erupts, forcing them all to come to terms with their past and present selves in a country that isn't all it promised it would be.
The real art of American Han lies in the circuitous path this narrative follows ... What Jane gradually pieces together is a history shaped by parents determined to push their children into the swift-moving stream of American success. It’s a tragedy of almost bottomless torment, all the more painful for its waste and futility. But despite Jane’s wholly justified grievances, American Han rarely sounds like a wail of complaint — or not for long. Instead, it’s a desperate effort to understand her parents, to grasp the frustration and the fury they must have felt trying to navigate a thicket of condescending expectations and resentments ... What looks initially like another story of immigrant striving turns out to be something more unsettling — a family struggling with pain that only one of them can articulate.
In Lee’s reflective and layered storytelling, 'han' pervades the novel, as something Korean immigrants cannot leave behind and something they pass to the next generation.
The novel asks a question for the ages—what happens to love when it is pushed, prodded, squeezed and weighed on from all angles? Fortunately, the question is layered enough to render Lisa Lee’s debut a powerfully complex, moving take on one family’s answer.
