Juancho Lee · 이진우
Two phone calls split my life in half.
The Book
MONNAANI is a Korean-American literary memoir spanning eighty years and three continents — from my grandfather Jaisun's 1944 walk through wartime buckwheat fields to court a nobleman's "ugly daughter," to my father Kenneth's abandoned life across Seoul and Chicago, to my own reckoning with fatherhood at Juilliard's dormitory in 2023.
At its center is the woman my family called Monnaani (못난이) — "the ugly one" — the grandmother who taught the grandson what her sons and husband could not learn from a lifetime of loving her.
The Author
Juancho Lee (이진우) was born in Seoul in 1974, raised between Paraguay and Chicago, later returned to Seoul with his own family, and now writes from Texas. He is trilingual in Spanish, Korean, and English.
Before writing MONNAANI, he ran an international industrial design firm in Seoul from 2009 to 2018, serving Fortune 500 clients including HP, Urban Outfitters, and Dell. With his wife, a former pastry chef currently pursuing her Executive MBA, they founded an investment company in Austin serving Seoul clientele.
He has been sober since May 2018. Everything before that year cost more than everything since — since being the most meaningful part of his life.
His son attends Juilliard's monastic drama program; his fourteen-year-old daughter is an aspiring international diplomat and percussionist.