In your story “Testing,” Bo Koh, a young Korean man who has grown up partly in the U.S. and Australia, is studying for the Suneung, an intensive, daylong university-entrance exam that dictates not only which university a student can attend but often the entire course of that student’s professional life. What made you want to take a look at the Suneung process in fiction?
Taking the Suneung is a rite of passage for a Korean high-school student who wants to obtain a four-year college education. Although there are ways to be accepted into a four-year college without taking the Suneung, it is the primary path for regular admissions. Despite sensationalized accounts of “killer questions,” planes being grounded for thirty-five minutes so that the nation can be silent during the examinees’ English-listening-comprehension sections, and mothers praying fervently on the third Thursday of November, the Suneung is not necessarily an impossible exam for everyone; its challenges depend on which university the student wishes to attend.
In South Korea, almost eighty per cent of children regularly attend a hagwon—a private-tutoring center that supplements their schooling and prepares them for tests—which means that many kids are spending up to twelve hours a day in a classroom. Hagwons are central to “Testing,” and to “American Hagwon,” which comes out in late September. What do you think of the hagwon system?
I didn’t attend Korean hagwons as a child. My mother, a former music teacher, believes that you cannot force a child to study. My sisters and I were allowed to decide how we wanted to learn. In my junior year of high school, I asked my parents for money to take a Princeton Review course, because several students I knew were preparing with Princeton Review materials, and my parents gave it to me. In college, I taught the verbal section of the SAT for the Princeton Review company for one semester as a part-time job. Kumon, Princeton Review, and Stanley Kaplan are commonly known hagwons in the U.S., and most students from middle- to upper-income families at some point encounter them.
In Korea, hagwons are far more integrated into society—for children at a much younger age and not necessarily for one specific exam. Hagwons, which are for-profit learning centers, are often seen as a kind of “shadow education” to formal schools. Many people criticize hagwons but, as an American, I feel reluctant to do so. Korea’s fast-changing society requires a great deal from parents and families, without providing many social protections, and I think hagwons are a by-product of that society’s growing demands, of globalization, of neoliberalism, and of a Confucian culture that is still attached to the meritocratic value found in exams. There are many, many different kinds of hagwon, and the more I visited them and observed the communities around them the less I could generalize their role in Korean society. Some were unappealing, and others made a great deal of sense, but each addressed a specific kind of need for children, parents, families, tutors, consultants, educators, and schools. The hagwon economy is also a multibillion-dollar business that employs many people.
“American Hagwon” follows Bo and his family, the Kohs, through many stages of their lives—economic difficulties, educational struggles, the complications of emigration and immigration, and more. Did you know from the start that the novel would focus on one family?
From the beginning, I knew that there would be a hagwon in America with two spirited teachers, and that they would have a specific philosophy about education. From them, I found the Kohs, my central family, and their community.
Were you at all inspired by your own family’s trajectory when thinking about the Kohs’ journey?
I am continually inspired by my family’s trajectory, because I remain interested in the condition of diaspora, its causes and effects. My family has experienced numerous socioeconomic changes, and now that I am fifty-seven years old with a family of my own, I am humbled by how my parents and ancestors managed so many unexpected, cataclysmic events and somehow kept us together.
“Testing” is both a work of fiction and, to some degree, a social commentary. Which comes first for you, the story or the sociology?
For me, the metaphysical questions always come first, and the story emerges organically from the questions. I grew up reading social novels from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they made me curious about what would happen to each of us in a society. I find that I can best explore my questions by following characters as they make choices and take actions, even as events beyond their control disrupt their best-laid plans. My characters have desires, obstacles, and time, but, like us, they live in an organized society, and I am fascinated by how they relate to their world and their fate within it.
As much as I love literature, art, classics, languages, music, religion, and history, the more I read and write the more I want to understand how those abiding loves relate to the social sciences—sociology, psychology, economics, politics, and anthropology. I believe that literature is interdisciplinary, and, when I write social novels, this integration becomes clearer to me. ♦
