“Free Food for Millionaires” - Min Jin Lee

🎩 Read this book! It will not disappoint. It’s an intergenerational tale filled with a dazzling array of complex characters. I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

🎩 Lee is an expert storyteller - throughout FFFM there were multiple points where I thought a climax had been reached only to discover the novel was nowhere near finished. Lee’s character development is thorough; you feel like you understand not just Casey Han, but all of the secondary characters as well.  Lee deploys the third person omniscient narrator to its full advantage; more on this below.

🎩 Lee examines intergenerational conflict by juxtaposing the immigrant struggle to survive with the first generation struggles to succeed socially and financially. Casey Han, is a first generation Korean-American with a cap full of educational laurels. She is living the glamorous NYC life she has always dreamt of, but she is also mired in NYC-size debts while she struggles to chart her own course in life. Her parents, and the close-knit elders of her community, can’t make sense of her aimlessness. But then, nothing and no one, are what they seem on the surface. 

🎩 Casey plays dutifully by the “good Korean-American girl” playbook at first. But she slowly senses that success might mean different things for different people. As she tries to find her own way, she engages in quite a bit of self-sabotage. Perhaps this is her intuition telling her that this is not her path? We wonder whether she will she have the courage to listen?

🎩 To say that Casey and her father, Joseph, have a fraught relationship, would be an understatement. She has no patience for his rose-colored nostalgia, and he has none for her search for satisfaction; to Joseph, the idea of self-fulfillment is simply absurd. Joseph fled from North Korea to South Korea at the start of the Korean War. Though his family was wealthy, he lost all those advantages and would never see his family again. He carries this crushing weight of loss as a badge of honor, and Casey feels “she’d never suffer the way he did”. The gulf of misunderstanding between them is wide. 

The opening scene might be triggering due to the violence between Joseph and Casey. Lee is circumspect about it - she does not justify his violence. Casey is entitled to recoil and flee. But she does unpack Joseph’s bewilderment at what he sees as his daughter disrespectfully playing with her freedoms and casually discarding the advantages he struggled to provide.

Again, Lee never supports the violent eruption of Joseph’s frustration with his elder daughter. Lee says that while Casey is a victim and is as angry as Joseph, she does not suffer from as much emotional illiteracy as her father. She can name her emotions, and control her reactions. He cannot.

🎩 Casey is oppressed by the unspoken suffering and unique loss of Koreans. Beyond the traditional immigrant narrative of leaving one’s homeland, Joseph’s nostalgia is as close as he ever gets to naming the grief of loss. But as it is unspoken, it rings hollow and annoying to Casey (“Encanto” theme alert!).

🎩 Despite having a large number of secondary/tertiary characters, Lee excels at providing perspectives and back stories for all. I don’t recall wishing any particular character had been fleshed out more. Leah reminds me strongly of Sunja Baek from Lee’s second novel “Pachinko”. All of the secondary male characters are flawed, and honestly, rather terrible (the choir director is awful. Period.). Ted is an awful character too, but I thought that after Casey and Ella, that Ted evolved the most. 

The Jay and Joseph/Leah interactions were cringeworthy. I wanted to sink into my sofa and disappear rather than witness those scenes. They were incredibly well written and oh so uncomfortable!

🎩 Lee alternates between the POV of most of her characters at a brisk pace. I would almost feel irritated because she would jump to a different POV as things were getting very interesting, but my irritation was fleeting because I’d immediately get lost in the latest POV. By using the third person omniscient POV, Lee worked in different characters’ reaction to the same events. It made for fascinating reading!

TW: domestic abuse, rape