Free Food for Millionaires | Min Jin Lee

Free Food for Millionaires | Min Jin Lee | Brilliant novel helpful for all who face East-Meets-West issues

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Free Food for Mill...

	Free Food for Millionaires Min Jin Lee Grand Central Publishing, 2008 - 592 pages average customer review:based on 57 reviews view larger image
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"Competence can be a curse." So begins Min Jin Lee's epic novel about class, society, and identity. Casey Han's four years at Princeton have given her many things: "a refined diction, an enviable golf handicap, a popular white boyfriend, an agnostic's closeted passion for reading the Bible, and a magna cum laude degree in economics. But no job and a number of bad habits."
Casey's parents, who live in Queens, are Korean immigrants working in a dry cleaner, desperately trying to hold onto their culture and identity. Their daughter, on the other hand, has entered into the upper echelon of rarified American society via scholarships. But after graduation, Casey's trust-fund friends see only opportunity and choices while Casey sees the reality of having expensive habits without the means to sustain them. As Casey navigates Manhattan, we see her life and the lives of those around her: her sheltered mother, scarred father, her friend Ella who's always been the good Korean girl, Ella's ambitious Korean husband and his Caucasian mistress, Casey's white fiancé, and then her Korean boyfriend, all culminating in a portrait of New York City and its world of haves and have-nots.
FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES offers up a fresh exploration of the complex layers we inhabit both in society and within ourselves. Inspired by 19th century novels such as Vanity Fair and Middlemarch, Min Jin Lee examines maintaining identity within changing communities. This is a remarkably assured debut from a writer to watch.

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This book has it all

This is the story of Casey, daughter of first generation Korean immigrants living in New York. Casey comes from a poor background but has struggled all her life to fit within the "upper class". She is stubborn and proud, and throughout the book we see how she has to make choices between being true to herself and remaining stubborn or letting down her guard and accepting help, even though this might go against her belief that people should be self sufficient.

This story touches on a lot of subjects: love, friendship, family values and relationships, immigrants, class, money. All of the people around Casey including herself go through life changing experiences where they have to make choices about who they really are, what they really want and what they are willing to sacrifice to move on. They also deal with the expectations placed on them by their friends, envrionments or themselves. By following the intertwined stories of the people around Casey - her mother, her sister, best friends, we see that people are only human afterall and that by desperately clinging to what feels "normal" you might be missing out on a fuller life. Highly Recommended.

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Brilliant novel helpful for all who face East-Meets-West issues

I'm in love with this novel for many reasons.

As a novelist, I could appreciate Min Jin Lee's uncommon clarity of personal voice, the exceptionally well constructed dialogues, the authenticity of each character, the marvelous plot.

Shakespeare comes to mind as my favorite comparison. I'm not kidding. He really loved his characters, always saw their full point of view (crazy or not), and that is the most striking stylistic quality of this fictional work. You can't find a single character, major or minor, who isn't fully conceptualized, consistent, and presented in a balanced way. Min Jin Lee has found a way to love everyone of those characters, a huge feat of compassion.

My perspective also is that of an East-meets-West person. I'm due to go to Japan in a month, making my eighth trip, teaching students and doing personal sessions. Based in America, I often have Asian-American clients for my sessions, especially first- or second-generation Asian-Americans.

On the surface it doesn't make much sense why this would be one of my specialties for emotional and spiritual healing, except that I just was born with an Eastern sensibility this lifetime around. And maybe it helps that I am first-generation American on my father's side and second-generation on my mother's.

In any case, my clients continue to educate me about the pain and the privilege of expanding the personal self to comprise the best of both worlds, the quest for self-expression and independence plus the deep honoring of family and a completely different figure-ground relationship where each person is PART of the picture, rather than the only thing that matters in that picture.

The depiction of these struggles resonates deeply for me as a healer.

From the witty title on the cover all the way to the final cadences, FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES held my full attention, earning my greatest respect.

Rose Rosetree
Author, "The Roar of the Huntids" and "Empowered by Empathy"

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