BookBrowse Reviews American Han by Lisa Lee

BookBrowse:

Lisa Lee explores the Korean American experience through the eyes of Jane, a floundering law student struggling to live up to her parents' expectations. When her brother commits a horrific act, family tensions resurface.

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The Korean word "han" is generally defined as a feeling that encapsulates sorrow, resentment, grief, and loss of identity. Han is born from years of systemic suffering—occupation, war, displacement—and seeps into the daily lives of Koreans and Korean Americans alike.

Han is never defined within the text of Lisa Lee's debut novel, but it informs every aspect of the narrative, which expertly distills this weighty, complicated concept into the story of one young woman. Raised in Napa in the 1980s by Korean American immigrant parents, Jane Kim and her brother Kevin grew up trying to make their parents proud through academic and athletic performance. Jane went on to law school in San Francisco, and Kevin attempted a professional tennis career. But now Jane has started skipping classes, and hasn't heard from her brother—who quit tennis to join the police force and has seemed increasingly miserable over the years—for months. Jane's parents have separated, and when her mom arrives on Jane's doorstep in her final year of law school, Jane is surprised by her indifferent demeanor. Her mom seems to be in denial about the fact that her family is unraveling at the seams—each of them embarking on new endeavors but none willing to confront the dysfunction at the heart of their family that has led each of them inexorably to unhappiness. Jane herself struggles perhaps most of all, trying to reconcile her parents' expectations for her with the life she actually wants.

American Han is structured into three sections: The Tycoon, The Truck Driver, and The All-American Boy, which respectively examine Jane's relationship with her mom, her dad, and her brother. We first meet Jane's mom, and we see that she is at once overbearing and emotionally neglectful. She always raised Jane to understand that she was inferior to her older brother, who is set to inherit everything, and who is expected to look after the parents in their old age. "[H]er daughter's success or failure would neither benefit nor hurt her, since a Korean woman's daughter belonged to the family she married into," Jane acknowledges. Still, Mrs. Kim has unrealistically high expectations for Jane, first insisting that she become a lawyer and then berating her for not having any income as a law student, then in the same breath insisting that she should be married with children by now.

Jane's father, in contrast, always chasing the American dream through a series of business endeavors and now embarking on a cross-country journey as a truck driver, has become a more distant presence in Jane's life, but his pursuit of Americanness, literalized into his journey to see the country, has pervaded the way Jane sees the world and her own identity. Though he raised his children to be bilingual, he refused to let Jane and Kevin speak Korean to each other in public as children, until they eventually lost fluency. "Sometimes I think that if we'd held on to our language, we would have known each other better," Jane reflects on her relationship with Kevin.

And that relationship is perhaps the novel's most compelling dynamic. Close in age, Jane and Kevin had a close relationship growing up, but where their parents' high aspirations could have further developed their bond, Jane finds that it's had the opposite effect. It's clear that Kevin resents Jane, and considers her upbringing to have been much easier than his own—as the girl, Jane was taken less seriously, which Kevin is only capable of seeing in a negative light for himself. "Kevin was right that I was given more stuff, but he was forgetting that he was set to inherit everything. He was wrong about everything else—nobody was getting what they wanted. But Kevin was so certain, so adept at making others believe in his victimhood and my role as victimizer, that sometimes even I believed him," Jane muses. When Jane sees on the news one day that Kevin has committed a horrifying act, it feels at once shocking and inevitable. It feels disconnected from the brother she once knew, but possible for the stranger who has taken his place.

Told in a vignette style, American Han is ponderous and slow moving, occasionally to its detriment, but what it lacks in plot it makes up for in sharp observation. It's an ambitious response to the Korean American immigrant experience, narrated with heartbreaking sincerity by its central character. Lisa Lee asks, what is lost when you sacrifice everything to assimilate to a new culture where you are never fully accepted? The answer can be seen in each of the family members; in Jane's mother's obsession with transposing traditional Korean family dynamics onto an unsupportive American landscape, in her father's relentless pursuit of an unattainable ideal, in her brother's burnout, in Jane's own loss of identity. American Han is a complex, layered portrayal of a single family, but also a window into a cultural experience that will resonate with many readers.

This review first ran in the June 10, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.