Before handing over her next novel, novelist Min Jin Lee flew to Sydney in 2025 to fact-check it — and the trip ended up reshaping how she understood both her characters and Australia itself.
American Hagwon, the follow-up to Pachinko and Free Food for Millionaires, follows the Koh family as they flee the fallout of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, moving from South Korea to Australia and then to the United States. The title refers to Korea's private cram schools, and education — who gets it, what it costs and how much it counts abroad — sits at the heart of the book. Lee, who has visited Australia four times, went to Sydney to fine-tune details about how people actually live and learn there.
Her research turned up some genuinely useful discoveries. A character in the novel spends a year at the University of Sydney and joins SUDS, the Sydney University Drama Society — the country's oldest continuously running theatre company. Lee visited the group's Cellar Theater and found a scrappy, democratic world where everyone sells tickets and makes posters as well as acts. Checking the legal angle, she sat down with Sydney barristers (meeting a Korean Australian lawyer whose religious, deeply moral character happened to share a name with her novel's femme fatale villain) and learned how differently Australian law splits work between solicitors and barristers.
What struck her most was Australia's education philosophy. Programs like HECS, where government tuition loans carry no interest and are only repaid once income crosses a threshold, and TAFE, a government vocational system that actually pays people to retrain, left Lee calling the system "more humane" than its American counterpart — no small detail for a novel about migrants rebuilding after losing everything.
For travellers, Lee's Sydney is a diverse, deeply Asian city with San Francisco-like good looks thanks to all that water and bushland. She says she doesn't feel like a minority there, and her food tip is a specific one: head to Royal Palace Seafood Restaurant in Chinatown with writer Benjamin Law's recommendation in hand and order the mango pancakes — crepe-like parcels with cream and mango that she dreams about.
Lee frames the whole trip around the sociologist's idea of habitus — the habits and worldview shaped by class, culture and place — arguing that the best travel is about trying to grasp how other people were formed. You don't need to be fact-checking a novel to travel that way, but Sydney, she suggests, is a good place to start.
Credit: Condé Nast Traveler
