Starry Field
A Conversation with Margaret Juhae Lee
The journey of self is a path many come across at least once, which questions our very existence and how we get there. Where would you start? Starry Field by Margaret Juhae Lee goes on a journey of self when she realizes she did not feel at home in the States or in Korea where her family is from. Her father was already in pursuit of uncovering the past of Lee Chill Hul (Lee’s grandfather) who died at the mere age of 27 for believing in communism back when Korea was still a colony of Japan. With a background in journalism, Lee decided to move to Korea for the four months to finish the task Lee‘s father started.
I am currently an undergraduate majoring in journalism who also lived with an identity crisis of feeling like I did not fit into either side that defined me. During Lee’s time in Korea, she learned the rich history that her family contains and traced the very lead-up to her existence, starting with her grandfather. He passed away at the age of 27, recognized by Japan as a criminal for sticking to his beliefs aligned with Korea. She learned about the strength it took her grandmother to raise children as a single mother. She ultimately recognized how that same resilience runs through her. She emphasized that knowing who you are is directly linked to your ancestry. Understanding who you are is understanding your past.
I connected with Margaret Juhae Lee through a series of emails where she also answered some questions about the book.
Roxana Dolores: You mentioned in your book that journalism prepared you to pick up where your father left off in looking into your grand-fathers past to trace back his roots. How have these skills helped you investigate your family’s history?
Margaret Juhae Lee: Asking questions and relentlessly following leads were two of the journalistic skills I used the most.
When I began helping my father in his search, the first thing I did was ask him questions, mostly over email. At first, the questions centered on what he knew about family history growing up. As he began the process of remembering, stories from the past began to flow. He gathered his answers in a series of “Notes on Family History,” which he sent to me on a regular basis over the course of a couple of years. The act of remembering opened a cascade of stories he had thought he had forgotten. As we dug deeper, I shifted my line of questioning to his own life during colonialism and into the Korean War.
During my time in Korea, when I was searching for my grandfather’s prison and interrogation records, I interviewed a dozen or so history professors, mostly in person. I had two research assistants who helped with translation and checking libraries, archives and government record depositories. I also interviewed my grandmother, Halmoni, several times, as well as two great-uncles.
RD: This book has been about the journey of self to understand better who you are, and you do that by tracing your roots as far back as your grandfather. How has learning the history of your family impacted you today?
MJL: I wrote this book for my children, so they would grow up knowing family stories that were previously “lost” or suppressed. I didn’t want them to experience the ramifications of not knowing about the past, like I did, which manifested in me not feeling at home anywhere. Recently, I learned that psychologists have been studying how critical family stories are in the development of emerging identity and well-being in children. Storytelling can even help families who have experienced trauma. When I began this book in the late 1990s, the concept of “intergenerational trauma” was not widely known. Now, I understand that this is what my family experienced living through colonialism and war. My grandfather experienced numerous traumas, including torture, while imprisoned by the Japanese.
RD: Based on your book, The title Starry Fields was selected because it was the name of the poem engraved on your grandfather’s stone at his grave. What made you want to make this moment the title?
MJL: Actually, Starry Field is the translation of my grandfather’s nom de plume, Sung Ya, the name he used with his Communist comrades. My father discovered this alias as a child, when he went snooping in his mother’s dresser. He found a letter addressed to “Sung Ya” in one of his father’s books, which my grandmother later burned. I love how poetic the name is—how it expresses my grandfather’s idealism, hope for the future. I knew when I heard it that it needed to be the title of the book.
RD: Throughout your entire journey in discovering your family history, which moment was your favorite to live through?
MJL: Oh gosh, that’s a tough question. There are so many moments. What stays with me so many years later is the first time I sat down with Halmoni to interview her. She really didn’t want to talk to me, and I had to plead with her to answer my questions. She was such a tough woman and had spent her life in survival mode, which meant not looking backwards. She only relented when I told her that the interviews were for a book I was writing, which was essential for my career as a journalist. She could understand the practical external reason, not my emotional need to know about the past.
What sticks in my mind is watching her resistance slowly melt and how the stories poured forth. She told much of her story in a monotone, like she was doing a voice-over in the movie of her life, but once she started, she couldn’t stop. The “interview” morphed into extended oral history sessions.
RD: In the book, many of the paths you took to learn about your family led back to your grandfather because of the way he was imprisoned and accused of being communist because of the realities that were happening during his time before his death. How have the discoveries of looking into his past reframed how you view him?
MJL: When I began research, I was focused on discovering who my grandfather was. I uncovered facts about his arrest and his role in the Korean independence movement through his police and interrogation records. I interviewed the three remaining family members who knew him. But what I discovered, really, was that my grandfather was unknowable because he had died so long ago. What I did discover is what I was really looking for were family stories, narratives, where there were none before.
RD: Halmoni is also a significant character because of how she raised your father and his siblings alone after your grand-fathers passing by herself and working in an orphanage, but also helping raise you and your siblings. How did she help you reach within yourself in your journey?
MJL: Even though I started this journey focused on my grandfather, what I came away with was a deep bond with Halmoni, and an understanding of all that she did to ensure the survival of her family as a mother. It wasn’t until I became a mother myself, years after Halmoni died, did I truly understand who she was and what she endured. This is the true gift of the entire journey.
RD: Your entire journey was about learning about yourself through discoveries of your past where you connected roots that you can teach your children. What is one thing you learned that you would teach others about yourself?
MJL: Another good question! What comes to mind first is to conceive of life as a journey and not as a series of static milestones or goals on a list that you check off as you achieve them. I had to unlearn the checklist mentality, which is part of the Asian model minority myth I was brought up with. Get straight A’s, study for the SAT, go to an Ivy League school, become a doctor or lawyer, marry another Korean American with an advanced degree, buy a nice house in the suburbs, have children, lead a comfortable life. That was the prescribed trajectory of stability and upward mobility, which I now understand comes from a place of deep instability and tumult in my parent’s lives growing up in Korea during colonialism and war. I rebelled against expectations in numerous ways while simultaneously internalizing them. As a mother of teenagers, I try to see my kids as who they are and not what society or elders think they should be while also trying to guide them in what type of possibilities there are for exploration. Not to say that it’s easy. I have to stop myself sometimes when I realize that I’m channeling my parents.
RD: If you go back into the past to see any of the moments you learned about in the past for yourself, which moment would it be and why?
MJL: My children are so active and are most at ease when they are running or kicking a soccer ball or throwing a football as hard as they can at a friend. I would have loved to see my father as a young boy, to see him at his most carefree. I have a handful of his childhood photographs, but they are posed, static. As an adult, he lived so much in his head and most of his movements were controlled. I wonder what he looked like when he was unguarded, when he was playing with friends, when he was in motion as a child, especially now since he has passed.
RD: You mentioned at the end of your book in everything you learned that your past contributed to the individuals we all are today. Can you explain how the past is linked to an individual's present?
MJL: Again, I go back to our collective need for origin stories. They are so important in developing our identity. Now, we have psychological studies reporting that the outcomes of knowing about family history include higher self-esteem, lower anxiety and sense of meaning and purpose in life.
For me, investigating the past was essential. I needed to go on that journey before starting a family of my own and creating a home for them and myself.
RD: If you could answer any questions about your book, what would it be?
MJL: The question I get the most is, “Why did it take you so long to write?” It took 25 years. Now, I have the benefit of hindsight. If I had written a book after I returned from Korea in 2000, like I planned, it wouldn’t have been the book I needed to write. It would have been a book of journalism, a book merely describing the search for information about my grandfather. I didn’t know the real purpose of the book until much later.
Margaret Juhae Lee: Margaret Juhae Lee is the author of Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History. She received a Bunting Fellowship from Harvard University and a Korean Studies Fellowship from the Korean Foundation in support of research for her book. Previously, she was an editor for the Books and the Arts section at The Nation magazine. Her articles, interviews and book reviews have been published in The Nation, Newsday, Elle, ARTnews, The Advocate, The Progressive and most recently in The Rumpus and Ploughshares Blog . She was a contributing writer at Oakland Magazine, where she covered the local maker community. Her article, “Seoul’s Celluloid Soul,” originally published in The Nation, was anthologized in Readings in Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture.
Margaret has an M.A. in Journalism from NYU’s Cultural Reporting & Criticism Program and an M.A. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin. She has attended the Writer’s Hotel, Lit Camp and Tin House writing workshops and was awarded residencies at the Mesa Refuge, Anderson Center and Mineral School, where she received a fellowship from the Sustainable Arts Foundation for parents who are writers.
In 2020, she was named “Person of the Year” by the Sangcheol Cultural Welfare Foundation in Kongju, South Korea, for her work in honoring her grandfather, Patriot Lee Chul Ha, with a gift from her family to his alma mater, Kongju High School.
A former college radio DJ, Margaret spends her free time listening to New Wave and indie rock while driving her extremely sporty children to soccer practices. She and her family survived the pandemic with the help of Brownie, a rescue dog from Korea.