Free Food for Millionaires
An Excerpt from a Novel
by Min Jin Lee
A modern interpretation of the American immigrant experience, Min Jin Lee’s debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires, chronicles the struggles of Casey Han, a first-generation Korean woman living in New York City in the 1990s. For Narrative, Lee read aloud an excerpt in which Casey and her family sit down for dinner shortly after Casey has graduated from Princeton. Her father asks the perennially demanding question, “Now what are you going to do?” and quickly everything in the household begins to go violently wrong.
Lee won the 2004 Narrative Prize for her short story “Axis of Happiness,” which can be found in our Archive.