Min Jin Lee Was Underestimated for Half Her Life. Then She Started to Write.

A torch bearer for the great 19th-century tradition of social realism, she’s become one of the most important novelists of her generation.

By Marcela Valdes

“Smell that?” The novelist Min Jin Lee closed her eyes and drew in a breath. Garlic, ginger, turmeric, old floor polish, stale sweat, rat poison, glass cleaner, oregano. “It doesn’t smell like that on the Upper East Side,” she said with a laugh.

We were standing in the foyer of the apartment building on Van Kleeck Street, in Queens, where Lee lived with her parents and two sisters after they arrived from Korea in 1976. Everything looked the same: the dull metal mailboxes, the checkered linoleum in the hallway, the dusty glass wall facing the street. Only the names marking the buzzers had changed. In Lee’s childhood, they were mostly Irish, Greek and Eastern European. Now they were mostly Latino, Korean and Chinese.

The first thing that struck Lee about her new home was its ugliness. In Seoul, her mother kept their home impeccable. In Queens, their first rental was a one-bedroom furnished with grimy rugs, roaches and mice. Even at 7 years old, she understood that her family’s move to New York meant that they’d come down in the world.

In Seoul, they lived in a comfortable house in a middle-class neighborhood. Her father worked as a marketing executive. Her mother, who had studied music at Korea’s prestigious Yonsei University, taught children piano. But her father, who lost his home and most of his family as a teenager during the Korean War of the 1950s, feared that the violence of the Vietnam War might spread to South Korea and hurt his children. A relative in New York sponsored the family for visas, and they decamped for America, where her parents eventually found work in a wholesale jewelry shop in Midtown Manhattan. Every morning except Sunday they left the apartment at 6 to catch the subway, while the girls readied themselves for school alone. Read the full review at the New York Times.