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

When I turned eighteen, I quit both tennis and piano, went to a respected university, then a mediocre law school on scholarship. Kevin did not have natural talent, but he had the fire. He played tennis for a Division 1 team and turned pro, but he didn't last a year. In sports, fire will never get you the whole way if you don't have the gift. You must have both. Athletics are stingy that way, not like other vocations where they say it's about talent, but really it's the fire that begets success. Kevin didn't last long on the professional circuit because there's no money in it unless you're winning, and you need financial backing to train and tour. I'd heard our dad lecture Kevin many times over the years that a man supports himself and his family. Kevin announced that upon graduation he'd join the police force. He'd picked up a part- time job with the campus police, pinning parking tickets underneath the windshield wipers of illegally parked cars, and the cops he worked under praised him and encouraged him to follow in their footsteps. With a college degree, a police officer's starting salary was higher than most office jobs. While our mom had wanted him to be a lawyer or doctor if he couldn't be the next Michael Chang, our dad was proud. He'd wanted to be a policeman himself, but citizenship was a prerequisite and America didn't grant it to him until he'd reached middle age. Our parents both worried that policing was a dangerous job, that Kevin would get hurt or even killed. Neither of them thought of the possibility that Kevin could be the one to cause harm in the line of duty. I didn't know what to think of any of it, too preoccupied with making something of my life that was separate from all of them.

My dad was like me, or I was like my dad. But unlike me, he was self- taught at everything, all instinct, all desire. Musically gifted, he learned to play the piano by watching his sister at piano lessons, taught himself the guitar, and sang in a beautiful deep baritone, like the Korean Elvis he dreamed of being. When I heard him sing, it was as if he had been saving up all his softness just for those moments. He was even better than most people I knew at tennis, though he'd never had a lesson in his life. He'd never gotten to pursue anything he really cared about. You go your whole life like that and you feel like you wasted your time on earth. That's the story I've been learning about my family. My mom and my dad wanted to get back what they'd lost. All either of them wished for was the chance to choose. My dad had always wanted to see all of America and make money doing something he enjoyed, not work that was just work. He got pushed into owning and running a string of small businesses, starting with a carwash and a 7- Eleven, then a diner in Sacramento, which helped him work his way up to our town's beloved Swensen's diner/ice cream shop, and ending his career with an auto shop, which was supposed to ease him into retirement. Swensen's was strongest in our memories because we owned it the longest, it was the most difficult to run, and because we all worked there, making it our one true family business. Now that my dad was retired, he'd picked up a job as a long- haul truck driver and was finally getting to tour America. My mom wanted to be young again, free to dream of a future as a city- girl business tycoon. I was trying to avoid the kinds of regrets my whole family had, regrets from choosing money and stability over happiness and then convincing yourself that you'd never had a choice. Kevin had been stuck for a long time. I think it started from the day he was born, before he was even named.

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.