To what gods do we sacrifice our children?

Eighty percent of children in South Korea are enrolled in tutoring centers, called hagwons, starting at the age of four or five. "When Koreans leave South Korea, they also carry with them a wish to learn, and I think that's a beautiful thing," Min Jin Lee tells Meghna Chakrabarti in a WBUR interview. "Wherever you find Koreans, you will find hagwons."

Lee, the author of Pachinko, has a new novel, American Hagwon, which focuses on an immigrant family that teaches in hagwons in Orange County, trying to Americanize the zeal for education and excellence. Perhaps there's more to learning than ruthless competition to get children into elite colleges, the Kohs tell parents. It's a tough sell.

Most Korean-Americans say they went to different hagwons every year and "hated" the experience, says Lee. Do they send their children to hagwons? "Oh, absolutely." Her book is about the gap between their emotions and their decisions.

Her family moved from Korea to New York City when she was seven. Her parents did not send her to a hagwon.

In one scene in the novel, a minister in Seoul preaches against idolatry. Pastor Kim quotes from Leviticus, "Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Moloch."

"No doubt some of you may be tempted to offer up your disobedient teenager who refuses to study," he says. Parents chuckle. "Which gods do we bow down to today?," the pastor asks. "To what gods do we sacrifice our children? To which gods do we sacrifice our most prized ideals, and why?"

Lee captures Orange County's "unnerving combination of immigrant hope and malaise, writes Yvonne Kim, who grew up there, in the Cleveland Review of Books.

By the late 1990s, "the region had become a hub for Asian immigrants, offering a generation of otherwise unremarkable Korean students a new shot at life (or at least an Ivy League education)," she writes. "Koreans, the second-largest Asian subgroup after the Vietnamese, made a living selling food, manicures, boutique clothing, and the promise of academic achievement."

"In 2002, the Los Angeles Times counted more than 100 hagwons in Los Angeles and Orange Counties, with monthly rates from $300 to $700; some even offered golf lessons," Kim writes. "Just six years later, another estimate reported 183 such institutions in Orange County alone."

In a rented church gymnasium, Lion Han, a young hagwon founder, tries to convince parents their children are not "lazy" because they can't live up to the legend of a Korean superhero, Hong Gildong. “Our children cannot know everything, create doubles, summon magic, fight better than everyone, and fly through the air,” he says. “I am pleading with you to remember that your child is a young human being,” Lion tells the parents.

Korean immigrant parents don't want to hear that, writes Kim. They prefer to think their children are "uniquely special."

"The new novel is accessible but complex; noble without being highfalutin; and, at almost 650 pages, tremendous bang for the buck, writes Alexandra Jacobs, in a New York Times review. "It has the wonderful muchness of a 19th-century novel."

I thought Pachinko, set in Japanese-occupied Korea and Japan, was excellent, and I plan to read American Hagwon. I like big books.