Excerpt from American Han by Lisa Lee, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I didn't want to marry an ugly doctor, like my sisters," my mom said. "My mom set me up with one, but I didn't like him. I told her that I didn't want to marry him and she didn't care — she told me I had to or she'd disown me. So I ran away with your dad. He didn't have any money, but he was the most handsome man I'd ever met. I wanted to have pretty children. He drove a motorcycle and played the guitar and sang Elvis songs to me. I cried the whole way to San Francisco. I'd disobeyed my family and I knew they wouldn't talk to me again — and they never did, not until Kevin was born."

While my mom's family thought of themselves as superior in class and status to my dad's, my dad's family thought my mom wasn't pretty enough to be one of them. They thought they were the best- looking Koreans to walk the earth. Two things both sides could agree on: hatred for the other and that joining together was not a good match. After a few years in San Francisco, my parents moved to Napa, where they had no family and no friends. Kevin and I were born there, and we became the Kims in Napa. As opposed to the Kims in LA, Oakland, or San Jose, for whom more context had to be given for anyone to be sure which Kims someone was talking about.

Being the best was very important in our family. Kevin's and my successes reflected on us all. When Kevin and I picked up tennis and piano — tennis as soon as we could hold rackets, piano before we could read — and were exceedingly good at both, our parents were determined to make their investment worth it: we would be winners. And we were, though I think I should note that even with our awards and national rankings, we weren't necessarily impressive by the standards of certain Asian Americans, as our parents and aunts and uncles reminded us constantly. For some of us, the bar starts high. I had what was called "natural talent." Piano teachers and tennis coaches were baffled — once- in- a- lifetime talent, they said, truly exceptional, words like "prodigy" and "phenom" were thrown around. They urged my parents to move to places like New York City and Florida, where the right people could mentor me. In New York, I'd continue piano, studying under the best, and I'd be off to Juilliard and Carnegie Hall before we could blink. In Florida, I'd quit school and train under Rick Macci at his namesake academy alongside other children aiming to turn pro by age thirteen. But I must have been nine, and I couldn't choose, nor did I want to move. I wasn't interested in being gifted; giving in meant giving up everything else and how do you ask that of a child? I just wanted to play tennis the way I saw other people do it — for fun — but I was beginning to see that to play for fun, there was a certain level that you couldn't cross, and I'd crossed it by the time I was eight when I double bageled my mom, a life time player, and won my first USTA 14- and- under tournament. It was the same with piano. At first, playing the piano had satisfied something in me that I couldn't name, but practicing hours upon hours, day after day, to perfect a program for an upcoming competition took that away.

Lucky for me, my parents didn't know how to uproot themselves and start over again, so we stayed where we were, and that so- called talent, talent that only brought me grief, got me far, but not far enough, because you need the fire to get you the whole way and I didn't have it. Expectations were too high. That's what caused me grief. Expectations and the mix of admiration and envy from the white families in our town who resented me and my family and what our success meant about them. I kept training and practicing and competing, but never fully committed to either, making myself frustrated and bored. I didn't want to quit because tennis and piano felt easy and natural and gave me my identity, but I also didn't want to give up everything I would have had to give up to reach what everyone said was my potential. I felt like a fraud. I wished that I could play for enjoyment, not to win. But for me, there was nothing between winning and quitting, an agony that I wouldn't wish on anyone.

Excerpted from American Han by Lisa Lee. Copyright © 2026 by Lisa Lee. Excerpted by permission of Algonquin Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.