{ "item_title" : "American Han", "item_author" : [" Lisa Lee "], "item_description" : "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.--Muriel Leung, Lambda award-winning author of How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster 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 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 the immigrant experience, Lisa Lee's debut introduces a powerful new voice on the literary landscape.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/64/375/725/1643757253_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "29.00", "online_price" : "29.00", "our_price" : "29.00", "club_price" : "29.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "29.00" } }

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In her final year of law school in San Francisco, Jane Kim is on a great scholarship and rooming with her best friend, but something feels off. She is just starting to plan the next phase of her career when her mother arrives unexpectedly on her doorstep, announcing her intentions to leave Napa and start life anew in San Francisco. All at once, it seems that Jane and her mom—followed shortly by her father and brother Kevin—are embarking on major life changes.

American Han unspools in vignettes, some set in the present in 2002, others revisiting key memories stretching back to Jane’s childhood. These episodes, often shaded with sadness and nostalgia, reveal defining moments in her relationships with her mom, dad and brother: digging for a jar of kimchi buried in the garden, attending a going-away party with her mother’s friends, childhood camping trips to Tahoe. Competitive tennis matches and piano recitals are milestones of the siblings’ youth, and their experiences of each are shaped by gender roles and the pervasiveness of the model minority myth, which impacts them as Korean Americans. Jane’s prowess at tennis and piano leave a young Kevin feeling like a comparative failure amid rigid expectations that he become a high-achieving provider.

The core of American Han is Jane’s relationship with her mother. Jane and her mom experience both intense closeness and distance, fueled by accumulated love and pain and too-fresh memories in a pattern that will quickly reach the heart of anyone who’s struggled with a parent-child relationship. The novel asks a question for the ages—what happens to love when it is pushed, prodded, squeezed and weighed on from all angles? Fortunately, the question is layered enough to render Lisa Lee’s debut a powerfully complex, moving take on one family’s answer.