‘Pachinko’ Author Min Jin Lee’s Bold Message to the ‘Anxious Generation’

Kairos, the divinely appointed moment of destiny. Our lives are filled with countless kairoi.

‘Pachinko’ author Min Jin Lee, excerpt from her 2026 Yale commencement address

[Herald Economy = Reporter Moon Young-gyu] Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko, empathized with graduates stepping into society and sharply critiqued the social problems they now face in her Yale commencement address.

In her speech on May 17 (local time) at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, Lee said, “People call your generation the ‘Anxious Generation.’ I’ve thought a lot about that label. I believe you have every right to be angry.”

She then catalogued the major challenges confronting graduates today, underscoring how difficult this era has been.

Lee listed pandemics, brutal wars, school shootings, wildfires, climate change, inflation, voter suppression, artificial intelligence, the clip economy and the attention economy, erosion in the quality of major tech platforms, and extreme economic inequality. She added, “With mutual distrust rampant on the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, and now even a hantavirus scare — it’s maddening.”

Students responded with cheers for Lee and boos aimed at the injustices she described.

She went on to cite the difficulty of buying a home, the rise of neoliberal and authoritarian tendencies, ICE enforcement practices, memes and cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin, health-care inequality, the fear of unemployment and precarious work, government corruption, steep cuts to science research funding, and the decline of local news and legacy media — remarks that amounted to an indirect critique of recent policy failures.

“You’ve been forced to stay vigilant, to live in a near-constant state of tension,” she told the graduates. “That’s why you deserve credit for adapting so well to your times.”

Where some recent celebrity commencement speakers lost students by fixating on topics like AI, Lee’s address resonated by recognizing graduates’ anxieties and offering reassurance.

Lee spoke for about an hour, sharing recollections from her time at Yale.

She emigrated to the United States at age seven in 1976, the country’s bicentennial, and matriculated at Yale in 1986. Her parents ran a small wholesale jewelry shop in Manhattan’s Koreatown.

As a sophomore majoring in history, she wanted to study Korea but found no formal courses. She organized a “Korean Studies Task Force,” appealed to the East Asian studies chair to offer classes, and encouraged classmates and parents to write to the school. In 1990, Yale introduced a Korean language course that continues today.

Lee also endured racial discrimination. A white professor, whose specialty was Japanese history, taught the Korea course and gave many Korean students low grades. She reported the issue to the student newspaper, and the situation escalated to the point that she received death threats.

She recalled classmates who branded her “paranoid” or a “politically correct terrorist,” and said she even received a death-threat letter. When a professor gave her a C on her senior thesis and suggested remedial English, she confronted him, saying, “You can’t read this,” and walked away from the class.

Addressing the graduates, Lee offered the guiding principle that helped her through difficult times: prioritize what matters over what feels urgent. She urged them to pursue change through kairos — opportune, fateful moments — rather than relying only on measurable, scheduled chronos.

“Time is not your enemy; it’s your friend,” she said. “All dreams grow messier and more uncertain as they move toward reality. That’s when you must open your eyes wide and confront reality honestly.”

Lee is the author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko. Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction and was named one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books. Apple TV adapted Pachinko into a series starring Youn Yuh-jung and Lee Min-ho.

She is writing her third novel, American Hagwon, which she intends to complete as the final volume of a three-part series titled The Koreans.