53 pages • 1 hour read
Free Food for Millionaires
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Background
Authorial Context: Min Jin Lee
Min Jin Lee was born in South Korea in 1968; she and her family immigrated to the United States in 1976. Like the fictional Han family, Lee’s family settled in Queens, New York; she eventually studied at Yale University. Lee then went on to study law at Georgetown University before working as a corporate lawyer in New York City in the 1990s. In 1995, Lee stopped practicing law, partly due to health problems; she hoped to pursue writing as a new career path. These experiences and choices may be reflected in some of the struggles that Lee’s protagonist experiences: Casey grapples with the possibility of law as a career path, torn between a desire for stability and a desire for creative fulfilment.
Between 1995 and 2006, Lee honed her writing abilities, often by studying writers she admired. Though she encountered further health challenges, she was able to research and draft the manuscript that would become her first novel. Lee has commented that her protagonist in Free Food for Millionaires, which she began writing shortly after the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, is named after a Korean American woman named Casey who died in the attack. Lee’s first novel was accepted for publication in 2006 (it was published the following year) when she was 37 years old. Lee has since written a second successful novel, Pachinko, which was published in 2017 and adapted into a television series in 2022.
Literary Context: 19th-Century Realism and The Bildungsroman
Min Jin Lee has frequently cited novels and authors from the 19th century as inspiration for her work; authors she cites as influences include George Eliot, Honore de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, and Thomas Hardy. Within the world of Lee’s novel, Casey Han regularly reads and rereads novels by these authors and by other authors of the same time period. Many of the novels that inspire Lee and have appeared as allusions in her own work can be categorized as examples of 19th-century realism. In the 1800s, particularly the latter half of the century, many European writers experimented with producing long fictional works detailing everyday events and revolving around characters who are not obviously significant or heroic. In some cases, these characters could be middle or working class; depicting characters from a range of social positions, and endowing them with a rich interior life, was less common in earlier works of literature. The turn toward literary realism in the 19th century reflected new interests in everyday experiences, individual psychology, and the personal dramas concealed within seemingly ordinary lives.
The bildungsroman is a literary genre focusing on a protagonist’s maturation from child or adolescent into an adult; within the genre, arrival at full adult maturity is often marked by marriage and the establishment of a secure career. Well-known examples of the genre include Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Many prominent examples of the bildungsroman were published in the 19th century, and there are also examples of overlap between the bildungsroman genre and the broader category of literary realism. By describing Casey’s experiences in her mid-twenties, as she struggles to build a meaningful life for herself, Lee updates and adapts some traditional features of the bildungsroman genre.
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