The men, women and children in AMERICAN HAGWON struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children find their lives upended --- first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California --- where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures.