“Free Food For Millionaires” by Min Jin Lee

This was Lee’s first published novel. Like “Pachinko” it is at heart a story of an immigrant family trying to find a place in their new world. They struggle with straddling the line between their old and new cultures, trying to feel at home in both or even in either one. However, unlike Lee’s latest work, this novel has more of a soap opera tone. I do not mean that in a disparaging way. The story is not tragic, while still dealing with the harsh realities that all immigrant families face. This novel deals with the dramas of dating, clothes, and style, while also touching heavily on more weighty themes such as familial duty, fitting in, and racial mixing. The protagonist, Casey, is a Korean girl who just graduated from Princeton and grew up in Queens, the daughter of two dry cleaner workers. She is thoroughly Western in mindset, but her family tries to assert their own Eastern sensibilities on her as well. Her younger sister, Tina, a pre-med at MIT, has seemed to have figured out how to balance both worlds and, therefore, is viewed as the golden child in the family. Casey struggles through life, dating and dumping a white boyfriend, hooking up with coworkers at an investment bank, and eventually dating a Korean-American banker from Texas. Her work life is equally hectic, as she refuses to settle for what is expected of her. Throughout the story socioeconomic class comes up again and again as Casey interacts with Ivy League graduate bankers and friends from Princeton who went to Andover, Exeter, and Groton and who summer on Nantucket. Her best friend from college is on a seemingly endless tour of men through Italy as she continually postpones a graduate degree in art. Casey’s mentor is an older Korean lady, married to an Italian Jew, who runs her own boutique department store in Chelsea. She freely gives out lavish gifts and advice, but expects devotion in return. One anchor in every Korean immigrant community is the Church. But even within the congregation in Queens there is a divide between the doctors, accountants, and other professionals and the dry cleaners, shopkeepers, and bodega owners. Class again asserts itself. This is a tale of a girl growing up in New York, finding herself, and learning how to be true to her values, while coming to terms with her parents and traditions.

“Pachinko” by Min Jin Lee

This is an epic about four generations of a Korean family who were forced to immigrate from Busan to Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea. The story starts in 1910 and ends in 1989. Eventually, the family moves to the Korean ghetto in Osaka, where they struggle to find work and food to survive World War II. As Koreans and as Christians, they were doubly discriminated against by the Japanese. Throughout the novel, there are hardships and deaths as well as births and love affairs, as each generation grows up and makes their own way through a foreign society. Much of the book is about what it is like to be an immigrant in a place that does not want you and where you are constantly treated as sub-human. There is the struggle to survive and even thrive in a place where you know you are not wanted. Lee manages to make this tragic tale hopeful at the same time. As one reads on one cannot help but root for this family and feel for every gut wrenching blow that they must endure and overcome. The characters are complicated, never clearly good nor bad, and they often struggle to make the right decisions in life. Chance often intervenes, for better or for worse, just when the winds of fate look to be blowing a certain way. Through the lens of one Korean family struggling to survive in Japan, Lee depicts the dilemma many immigrants feel about no longer having any place to call home.