I’m thinking of a male American author who was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and at Yale University, has previously taught at Princeton University, and has won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. I am, of course, thinking of Chang-rae Lee, but if you thought of John Knowles, then you’re almost right – Knowles won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The uncanny similarities don’t stop there. While reading Lee’s A Tender Age, I couldn’t help but think of Knowles’s 1959 classic A Separate Peace. Both books are written in first person and feature an adult man looking back at one pivotal year from childhood, and both books deal with, among other themes, identity, rivalry, and loss of innocence. However, whereas Knowles outright states that Gene Forrester has “made [his] escape from [fear],” Lee makes it painfully unclear whether or not Jeon-Gi has ever moved on.
A Tender Age opens with Jeon-Gi as a middle-aged man. He has a wife, two daughters, and a cute little dog named Pu-chu. At a glance, he seems well-adjusted, and that’s all he allows before launching into 1976, suburban New York, the year that he turns eleven. He lives in a two-room apartment with his Korean immigrant parents and his little sister, Ella. Every time he leaves the safety of his home, he is subjected to bullying and humiliation, starting with racist name-calling and escalating all the way to physical and psychological endangerment. His refusal to speak up subsequently ruins his relationships with his friends and family, and after a horrific incident within the juvenile justice system, Jeon-Gi is whisked off to his church’s two-week summer camp, where his life is forever changed. Still, in moments of pain and terror, he stays silent, tight-lipped. Jeon-Gi isn’t a teenager yet, and he already sees no difference between suffering and endurance, or for that matter, suffering and life.
Perhaps I should rephrase. Jeon-Gi isn’t a teenager yet, so he doesn’t know the difference.
Lee does an excellent job of capturing past-day Jeon-Gi’s youth and naivety. Simply put, little kids have big feelings. When Jeon-Gi plays Running Bases with his neighborhood friends, all he sees is a battlefield, complete with fallen comrades and metaphoric gunfire. When Jeon-Gi is tasked with making stew, the boiling kettle transforms into an active volcano, ready to unleash mass destruction on every tastebud. For Jeon-Gi, something as ordinary as a game or chore has life-or-death consequences. Moreover, as little kids so often do, Jeon-Gi hears everything. When his parents talk between themselves over dinner, they wrongly assume that food and drink will be sufficient distractions, when in fact, it’s their very secrecy that makes Jeon-Gi hang on to each word. Too young to understand their argument, Jeon-Gi instead absorbs their tone and volume, leading him to adopt his own tension and anxiety. Most of all, Lee conveys Jeon-Gi’s troubled thoughts with gutting finesse. As Jeon-Gi experiences and witnesses more and worse torment, he convinces himself that he deserves to suffer. His child’s logic determines that he’s at fault because various peers from various spaces target him, and that he should both hate himself and hide himself. Passive suffering gets confused for active endurance, and without knowing that breaking the wheel is possible, active endurance gets confused for the only way to live.
This all leads to my biggest conflict with the book, which is what about present-day Jeon-Gi?
Traditionally speaking, if an older narrator is recalling his younger self, then there should be a clear reason as to why. Idealistically speaking, the older narrator should also impart some wisdom, some reassurance that he’s matured. For Lee to have present-day Jeon-Gi offer little to no insight on how his thoughts and feelings might have changed over the last few decades not only challenges widely accepted writing conventions, but also forces the reader to ask, maybe Jeon-Gi hasn’t changed? If A Separate Peace represents an ideal story where the narrator is able to let go and heal from his childhood trauma, then maybe A Tender Age represents a tragic truth. Some people, no matter how old they get, will always be a scared, scarred child within. Some people, no matter how many so-called “milestones” they achieve, will forever be of a tender (read: soft, sensitive, vulnerable) age.
FICTION
A Tender Age
By Chang-rae Lee
Riverhead Books
Published August 11, 2026
