Min Jin Lee’s debut novel Free Food for Millionaires paints a portrait of a Korean American community in New York from 1993 to 1997, centering on a recent Princeton University graduate named Casey Han and beginning with the line “Competence can be a curse.”
What a likable statement!
The following 560 pages, however, rescue this precocious thesis from the superficiality of similar sayings. (See: “My biggest weakness is being a perfectionist.”) Instead, Lee manages to plant the same universal truths from her biggest literary inspirations—Middlemarch seems chief among them—onto Korean–born, Queens–grown, and modern–mored soil.
If you know Lee, it’s likely through her second novel, Pachinko. Published in 2017, the book is also quite long (490 pages), features a third–person omniscient narrator, and centers a similar community—though this time spanning four generations of Zainichi Koreans living under Japanese occupation. The book was a smash hit, becoming a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award and ranking No. 15 on the New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
If Pachinko is like Tina, the rather perfect and beloved younger sister of the Han family, Free Food for Millionaires is, I am happy to report, like its protagonist—a little older, a little rougher around the edges, craving “glamour and insight” over “respectability and success.” Indeed, Casey mirrors the author herself: Both are Korean women, are raised by war–scarred parents in the working–class neighborhood of Elmhurst, N.Y., and are determined to harness the power of an Ivy League education to rise beyond their means and make it in the United States. (Penn audiences, this may hit close to home).
Free Food for Millionaires opens with a poignant dinner scene, during which Casey is violently exiled from the Han household. She has just returned home from her last year at Princeton, accustomed to an expensive lifestyle—the food, clothes, and tasteful décor—but now lacks the fancy school or cushy job to support it. It’s clear to our protagonist that, by accident of birth, she just wasn’t born into this social stratum—a fact that makes Casey resent her own family, ever so slightly.
Before the family has even lifted their chopsticks, Casey and her father, Joseph, get into a heated argument. It’s a tale as old as time: Joseph wants to give his upstart daughter some harsh perspective, and Casey wants Joseph to take her problems seriously. The fight escalates with breathtaking speed, and soon Joseph has beaten Casey silly. He disowns his eldest daughter, and she leaves the same night.
I swipe my first copy of Free Food for Millionaires (though I prefer the term “borrowed indefinitely”) from my high school’s multicultural center after being absolutely enraptured by Pachinko. Upon reading that first line, “Competence is a curse,” I don’t bother continuing.
To be sure, Casey embodies much of the unlikability of that line. It’s not so much that she has no flaws—she is headstrong, self–destructive, and morally objectionable—but that she is just so unbelievably competent. She dresses like she is “out of a magazine cover,” donning thousand–dollar outfits on any given weekday. At least five separate characters comment on how perfect her posture is. Her internal monologue emphasizes that, as a result of her financial insecurity, she is just so damn skinny! To top off her killer golf handicap and glamorous addictions (cigarettes and expensive clothes), she only graduated without a job because she cracked a Ronald Reagan joke during her investment banking interview and didn’t want to accept her Columbia Law School offer. One can only think of Casey as the product of a clumsy self insert. No, I think, I’m not reading a whole book about this.
I pick up Free Food for Millionaires again in my freshman fall, under very different circumstances. I’m questioning my pre–med trajectory and have just submitted an application—or two … or three—to consulting clubs. I question every day what I ought to do with my oh–so–esteemed Ivy League education, and lo and behold, here is the story of a scrappy, urbanite, down–and–out girlboss who has all the competence I dreamed of and yet feels the same unfocused ambition that haunts me at every moment.
I was initially worried that Free Food for Millionaires would be another hot diasporic text without anything new to offer the conversation. The two–dimensionality of her non–Korean characters suggests this. Doorman George Ortiz, for example, is one of the only non–Korean minority characters whose mind we inhabit, and he only exists to make sweeping observations about the Koreans of New York while helping his “hombre,” Unu Shim, talk through his financial and romantic issues. The white characters are more developed but function similarly: as satellites to the main cast of Korean characters. This makes sense: Lee’s writing and public advocacy centers on Korean people and culture, as this is what she knows.
Still, Free Food for Millionaires is wide enough in scope and rich enough in writing to compel Korean and non-Korean readers alike. Like George Eliot’s Middlemarch, whom she cites as her biggest literary inspiration, Lee writes with authority from the third–person omniscient perspective, giving readers the backstory and internal monologue behind dozens of characters, from war–orphaned Joseph to self–made Sabine; from the jaded gambler Unu to the deceptively complex Ella Shim. As daughter, mentee, lover, and friend, Casey has lived under all four of these characters’ roofs, and in the meantime Lee shows us their lives and psyches, which prove every bit as complex as her protagonist’s.
Like Middlemarch, this is done in the spirit of answering universal questions that define our early adulthood. In the aftermath of a breakup, we question for the first time if we will ever find love. In the midst of a soul–destroying job, we ask ourselves what makes life worth living. To hear Lee tell it, we spend the bulk of our effort chasing the answer we want, rather than the one we know is right. We see the familiar trappings of quarter–life (golden handcuffs, unhappy newlyweds) play out as a result. Finally, though, we make the choices that upend our ingenuine lives and let us be truer to ourselves.
This philosophy is, perhaps, why infidelity touches every relationship in the novel. In the third chapter, Casey finds that Jay is cheating on her, his ever–present desire to please others translating into a spectacular ménage à trois with two college girls. “Must keep the boat afloat,” he thinks to himself. The last we hear from Jay, he is engaged to a beautiful (and rich, very rich) Japanese MBA student who gives him the love, approval, and upward mobility that he truly, deeply craves.
Ted and Ella Kim, with whom Casey stays after being disowned, are more or less content with their marriage and the sheer attractiveness of their coming together. Ted is an investment banker, caught in the trappings of a good life: top–dollar banking job, a spacious new crib, and a lovely Korean wife with a baby on the way. He is also, as Casey describes, “a triple–A, self–made jerk.” He is distrustful, inconsiderate, and driven by the terror that he will never escape the indignity and poverty that his factory–worker parents have always been cursed with. Ella is the kind–hearted daughter of a widowed doctor who turns her admiration for Ted’s driven nature and her sympathy for his tortured inner self into a workable kind of love.
When Ted supplements the dullness of his marriage with Casey’s friend Delia, he does not expect to fall in love with her gritty personality, which is the perfect twin to Ted’s hawkish spirit. He leaves Ella, who eventually realizes her love for her gentle and wise coworker, David Greene. After a mutual confession, David leaves his fiancée for Ella, the woman he has always loved.
In the open-ended final chapter of Free Food for Millionaires, Casey must finally break that pesky curse. As the novel closes with a scene that is almost entirely dialogue, Casey is urged to question her idea of success and make a quietly radical decision.
I finished the book this past May, after a total reading period of two years. In that time, I have added majors and dropped clubs in a desperate effort to discover my “life’s calling,” and, in the process, experienced shame and pride to extents I’d previously thought impossible. I read Free Food for Millionaires much like Casey reads the Bible, as slow as a line a day and with deep meditation. I know I’ll keep asking myself these quarter–life questions; I only hope I answer them with the same courage and honesty I have seen in this book.
