Juancho Lee  ·  이진우

The Book

MŌNAANI is a Korean-American literary memoir spanning eighty years and three continents across three generations of Korean men: from his grandfather Jaisun, who in 1944 walked through buckwheat fields in Japanese-occupied Gangwon-do — muddy straw sandals on his feet — to court a nobleman's "ugly daughter" and built a business empire from a half-bowl of rice; to his father Kenneth, a Seoul travel agent whose first child was the abandoned son of a Korean film starlet before Lee's mother walked into the office looking for Humphrey Bogart; to Lee himself, the "American Experiment" born in 1974, raised across Paraguay and Chicago, piecing together masculinity from the wreckage of men who couldn't stop running.

The unlikely teacher: Juhyun — Mōnaani — "the ugly one," "the foolish one," the one who saw the boy as real when his father saw him as a brand.

The Author

Juancho Lee (이진우) is a Korean-American industrial designer who spent decades shaping physical objects before turning to prose. Born in Seoul in 1974 and raised between Paraguay and Chicago, he founded an international design firm in 2009 supplying HP, Motorola, Urban Outfitters, and Dell, later co-founding an Austin-based commercial and land brokerage bridging Texas and institutional Seoul capital. He works across Korean, Spanish, and English, and has been sober since May 2018.

He lives in Texas with his family: his wife, a former pastry chef from Charlie Trotter's and Alinea now completing an Executive MBA; their son Enzo, an actor in Juilliard's monastic drama division; and their daughter Ingrid — her name an intentional nod to her great-grandmother's tragic romance with classic Hollywood glamour — an aspiring academic and percussionist.

Lee comes to writing because MŌNAANI is the book no one else was going to write. We were trained to be grateful for scraps and never the leading man in our own lives. He wrote this so the next generation has language for what his generation couldn't name.