American Han

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the1980s, 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 hell-bent 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 theimmigrant experience, Lisa Lee’s debut introduces a powerful new voice on the literary landscape.

• "Tone perfect. To say that this book is smart is an understatement. The whole performs as a fantastic sleight-of-hand. Lee makes us look one way while all sorts of stuff comes into focus around us. This is a novel about a singular and eccentric family but yields understanding about so much more. Large issues abound here. This is a beautiful, important novel that will leave a mark."
  Percival Everett, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of James
• "AMERICAN HAN is a pulsating signal from the liminal zone where the American dream meets the American nightmare. It’s an SOS from the so-called good immigrants, dwelling in this zone where only their successes are visible but not their distresses. In this deeply perceptive novel, Lisa Lee excels at rolling up the sleeves of those immigrants and revealing the cuts and wounds, inflicted by others…and by themselves."
  Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer
• “I was captivated by this voice— so funny, blunt, probing, wrenching, moving. Lee’s searchingly honest portrayal of each character here means no one is spared, and it means no one is dropped, either. What a powerful examination of family, society, self.”
  Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
• “American Han is often hilarious, often gutting, and always deeply humane. These unforgettable characters will echo in my mind long after I’ve become a prickly immigrant elder myself.”
  Ruth Madievsky, author of All-Night Pharmacy
• “Narrated with such an assured voice that the complexities of racism, grief, class striving, violent love, and generational trauma appear with a stunning clarity. Only a magician could create from these topics such a wildly pleasurable, funny, and frightening novel. American Han is an unforgettable portrait of a family in crisis, and I loved every minute of it.”
  Shruti Swamy, author of The Archer
• “American Han is the best debut I’ve read in years. This unafraid novel is as full of mystery, humor, and hard-won knowledge as family life itself.”
  Lisa Locascio Nighthawk, author of Open Me
• “American Han shook me to my core. Gutting in its quietest moments and heartbreakingly familiar in its loudest conflicts, this book is a gripping portrait of the cost of assimilation into American life. Lisa Lee expertly holds us to this tense reckoning, forcing us to confront the brutality that shapes the racial fabric of the U.S. and the uncertain future in which we all play a part, however unsettling and true.”
  Muriel Leung, Lambda award-winning author of How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster