Min Jin Lee

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST PACHINKO New York Times Book Review Editor's ChoiceNPR Fresh Air Top Ten Books of the YearUSA Today Top Ten Books of the YearThe Times (London) Top Ten Books of the Year In her critically acclaimed debut, National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee introduces the indelible Casey Han: a strong-willed, Queens-bred daughter of Korean immigrants who is addicted to a glamorous Manhattan lifestyle she cannot afford. Fresh out of Princeton with an economics degree, no job, and a popular white boyfriend, Casey is determined to carve a space for herself in the glittering world she craves-but at what cost? Lee's bestselling, sharp-eyed, sweeping epic of love, greed, and hunger-set in a landscape where millionaires scramble for the free lunches the poor are too proud to accept-is an addictively readable, startlingly sympathetic portrait of intergenerational strife and immigrant struggle, exposing the intricate layers of a community clinging to its old ways in a city packed with haves and have-nots.

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Beatrix

 Tina offered up her baby-sister smile; it said, Tell me something I need to learn. Let me adore you again

Everyone scrounged for an identity defined by objects. 

She was a biographer who did not understand her own children's lives. Life was just guesswork even if you were an eyewitness.

Iara Figueira

Casey wasn’t indifferent to her father’s pain. But she’d decided she didn’t want to hear about it anymore. His losses weren’t hers, and she didn’t want to hold them. She was in Queens, and it was 1993. But at the table it was 1953, and the Korean War refused to end.

Joseph smiled ruefully at Tina. “The night before I left on the ship, my mother sewed twenty gold rings in the lining of my coat with her own hand. She had these thick rheumatic fingers, and the servant girls usually did the sewing, but. . .” He lifted his right hand in the air as if he could make his mother’s hand appear in place of his own, then clasped the right one with his left. “She wrapped each ring with cotton batting so there’d be no noise when I moved around.” Joseph marveled at his mother’s thoughtfulness, recalling sharply how every time he had to sell a ring, he’d unstitch the white blanket thread that his mother had sewn into the coat fabric with her heavy needle. 

To Casey, it seemed upside down to call a minority person a racist, or a woman a sexist, a poor person a snob, a gay person a homophobe, an old person an ageist, a Jewish person an anti-Semite. All these labels were carelessly bandied about at school. But she admitted that it was possible to hate yourself and easy to hate others because you’d been hated. Hatred had its own logic of symbiosis.

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