American Han

A piercing, clear-eyed, and darkly funny debut novel about one Korean American family vainly trying to assimilate in a country full of mixed signals-- from the critically acclaimed Pushcart Prize winner and Center for Fiction fellow Lisa Lee.

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: both stellar tennis players and academically gifted, they worked hard to make their parents proud. 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 (their mother hellbent on having the perfect house and the perfect family, their father obsessed with working his way up from one successful business to the next), 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.

Both deeply serious and wickedly funny, AMERICAN HAN is a profound story about striving and assimilation, difficult love, and family fidelity. A searing portrait that challenges assumptions about the immigrant experience, Lisa Lee’s debut introduces a powerful new voice on the literary landscape.