Juancho Lee · 이진우
Two phone calls split my life in half.
The Book
MŌNAANI is a Korean-American literary memoir spanning eighty years and three continents across three generations of Korean men: from the Author's 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 entrepreneur whose first child was the result of seducing a Korean film starlet before Lee's mother walked into his office looking for Humphrey Bogart; to the Author 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, raised between Paraguay and Chicago, he now writes from Texas. He works across Korean, Spanish, and English, and has been sober since May 2018.
He lives in Austin with his family: his wife, a former pâtissière currently completing her Executive MBA; their son Enzo, an actor in Juilliard's monastic drama division; and their daughter Ingrid, an aspiring academic and percussionist.
Lee wrote MŌNAANI because no one else was going to. He wrote it for those taught to be happy with America's leftovers. Leftover neighborhoods, leftover jobs, leftover schools. Leftover lives, never the leading man in their own. He wrote it so the next generation would have language for what his generation couldn't name.
