On paper, John Koh is doing fine. He manages at a Korean trading firm, he’s moved his wife and three high-achieving children around the world for the job, and their income covers the family’s hefty living and school bills. Barely — and that’s the problem. In 1997 the Asian financial crisis arrives, and at 50 he loses the job. He and his wife, Helen, land in the Los Angeles suburbs, where he works the fryer at a place called Shrimp Castle and she, who once sold luxury goods, takes a consignment job at a housewares store in an open-air mall. He’s a character in Min Jin Lee’s new novel American Hagwon, reviewed by Sam Sacks in the weekend Journal, but the money lesson in his story isn’t fiction.
The book (Cardinal, 656 pages, $36) spans 1992 to 2007 and is, in Sacks’s description, a long family saga about money and ambition, built around a California hagwon — the Korean word for a private tutoring outfit, which might drill kids for exams or just help with homework; South Korea is full of them, and Korean neighborhoods in America have them too. Before the fall, the Kohs had followed John’s work mostly to Australia and South Korea. They were, the reviewer writes, “well-to-do, but tenuously so”: their income barely stretched over heavy living and school costs, so the crisis didn’t dent the prosperity so much as reveal it had been an illusion.
The children’s plans change too
Coming down in the world reshapes everyone’s future. DH is at Yale on a scholarship. Bo, who flunked the entrance exam for one of Korea’s top universities, comes to California to work at a hagwon run by Lion Han, and Mido leaves college in Australia — only for now, she insists — to move in with her parents and work alongside him. What holds them up is what the review admires: the family’s solidarity, their church, and Orange County’s Korean community, which fills in as kin. Lion’s school is deliberately low-pressure — he wants kids to like learning — and in the scene Sacks singles out he stands up in church to tell the parents that a top college isn’t the whole point, and that a child who never learns to lose has missed part of the lesson. The verdict on the writing is cooler: long, slow, plain, given to inventories — prices, outfits, menu orders. Sacks, a former test-prep tutor himself, still finds plenty to like in the book’s sincere wrestling with virtue.
Our read
Here’s the line a novel can say plainly and a planner has to say carefully: a household whose income covers its expenses exactly isn’t comfortable, it’s exposed (M5). The Kohs’ income barely covered their bills, and the family’s footing rested on John’s job — when the crisis came, the job went, and they started over in another country. Two general rules fall out. Keep a cash reserve sized in months of actual spending, and know the number before the crisis, because a job lost at 50 tends to take longer to replace than one lost at 30. And if your paycheck, stock, bonus and pension all depend on one employer or one economy, that’s a concentration, however good the company looks the year before.
What carries the Kohs, in Sacks’s telling, is the reserve people use when there’s no reserve: family, church, a community that shows up, a scholarship. That’s a real safety net, and a lot of families run on it, but you don’t want it to be the only one. If you can’t say how many months your household could run with no paycheck, that’s a fifteen-minute question with your last statement — better answered before anyone’s frying shrimp.