After Lisa Lee sent an early version of her debut novel with a different working title to her agent and fellow Korean American, Janklow & Nesbit’s Kirby Kim, he told her he recognized the “han” in it. Han is a Korean term for the mixture of anger and sorrow stemming from the country’s long history of oppression. “When Koreans immigrated to America after 1965,” Lee explains, “they brought that concept with them, where it evolved to incorporate American racism and pressure to assimilate.” Lee had been writing a dissertation on Korean American han but didn’t realize the extent to which her novel, which never mentions the term, was grappling with the same notion. Kim was also the one to suggest the final title, American Han (Algonquin, Mar.).

The protagonist, Jane Kim, is the daughter of entrepreneurial and overbearing Korean immigrant parents. In 2002, the San Franciscan law student is preparing to drop out and pursue creative writing. Over the course of that year, her parents separate and her brother, a tightly wound former professional tennis player turned police officer, commits a shocking act of violence, prompting Jane to reflect on her intense upbringing.

“This feeling of wanting more is shared by a lot of immigrant families,” Lee says, explaining that she wrote the novel as an attempt to understand an emotion she “couldn’t name.” Algonquin executive editor Kathy Pories found the portrait of the Kim family resonant because they try “so hard to integrate into American culture yet are always aware that they’ll never be truly perceived as American.”

Lee, who grew up in Napa Valley, underwent a journey similar to her protagonist’s. After studying English and music theory at UC Berkeley, she got a law school degree out of filial responsibility, despite knowing that her interests lay elsewhere. “I wasn’t a quitter,” she explains. Subsequently, Lee worked at Lexus Nexus before earning an MFA at the University of Houston and a PhD in creative writing and literature from USC.

She admits that if she had known how long it would take her to finish a book and get it published, she isn’t sure that she would have done it. “But I wanted freedom,” she says, “the freedom that feels just out of reach for my characters.”

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