In her debut memoir Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History (Melville House, 2024), Margaret Juhae Lee uncovers both lost and hidden family history, set against the backdrop of Japan’s colonization of Korea. Drawing from her training as an investigative journalist for The Nation and both archival research and oral history, Lee weaves together twenty-five years of storytelling, trips to Korea, interviews with family members, and ekphrastic writing on sparse photographs in an effort to bring light to her grandfather’s revolutionary nature. Throughout this stitched narrative, Lee reveals the deep power of long-form research in the pursuit of truth, filling in gaps in a family story pulled apart by a history of silence, colonialism, and enforced shame.
Most strikingly, Lee refuses to leave any family member invisible in her memoir; instead, she allows a chorus of voices to echo what knowledge has been saved. Through three gorgeous long-form interviews, Lee reveals the central role her grandmother, Halmoni, played in maintaining their family’s history, and her project, through time, becomes a communal act of remembrance. This maternal heart of Starry Field intersects with other forms of generational knowledge, as Lee leans on the portions of her father’s research to continue a story he began for his own healing. There’s a constant back and forth movement through time, from her father’s childhood to Lee’s own upbringing, mimicking memory in an attempt to demonstrate what a family history can grow into through generational retellings.
I spoke with Lee over Zoom about how it feels to debut a book twenty-five years in the making and the mental-emotional synthesis required to make a true narrative out of a history with empty spaces at its center.
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The Rumpus: The nature of interviews in this memoir is really special, and I was wondering if you could talk a little about how your journalistic impulse shaped the way you approached source material when writing this work.
Margaret Juhae Lee: When I began this book, I think it was 1998. I was in journalism school at NYU, so it’s definitely coming from a journalist’s perspective. I came to this book to help my father do research on our family. It was actually my mother’s idea because he was recovering from a difficult surgery and lost some of his memory. He was also very depressed, so it was a way for us to work together. I knew I could help him, and I began asking him to write down things he remembered from childhood. I had never heard childhood stories from when he grew up during colonialism. The book began as a project to help my dad. I was definitely interested in family history, but as I got deeper and deeper, learning about my father’s childhood, learning more about Korean history, it became my own journey too. When I started, it was a journalism book because that’s what I knew, and that’s how I approached writing. I knew that this was an amazing thing, the story of a lifetime.
The book definitely changed over the years because I realized that journalism wasn’t the best way to approach this material. It wasn’t the way that I felt honored my family’s story because it’s a complicated story. It’s not a story that can be told in a linear fashion. There’s a lot of back-and-forth, there’s a lot of holes—that’s the way memory works.
I was working at The Nation magazine when I began the book, where I gained more and more experience, skills, and learned more about the context of communism around the world. The Nation has been around since 1865—it was a publication that was around when my grandfather was alive. I learned a lot about communism in the United States: the Red Scare, the Rosenbergs. I wasn’t introduced to it in school as much, so it was an education for me. And then I started delving into communism in Korea specifically and continued in that vein of research.
Rumpus: Along those lines, this book reads like a stunning archive in a way, with the inclusion of photos, email threads, and other forms of both formal and informal documentation. Could you talk a little about how you devised the structure of this book and how the process might have shifted and expanded as you garnered more material?
Lee: The structure of this book was definitely the most difficult part of writing it. I wrote these very short chapters, and a lot of them I wrote in a generative writing workshop, which is why I think some of them are so short, like scenes from my family’s history. I didn’t come up with the structure until the very end because there was a lot of shuffling. What I finally realized is that the central story is my grandmother’s story, which comes from the three long form interviews I did with her. They’re the heart of the book. It wasn’t until I was working on my book proposal that I figured out how to structure it around her story. I think it kind of worked at first without that structure, but it all kind of just locked into place once I figured, okay, these are the three pillars.
It took years and years of index cards and blackboards trying to figure out the structure, which was also my way of figuring out what the story really is. Because when I started, I thought, this is my grandfather’s story, an investigation into his life. But because he died when he was twenty-seven, because we have very little information about him and I only could find three people who knew him and were still alive, I realized that he’s unknowable, in a sense. We have his police interrogations, but I don’t know what kind of person he was just hanging out. Like was he funny? He probably wasn’t funny, but you don’t get a sense of the person from records.
It’s interesting because my father thought this was a history book when I was writing it. He’s no longer with us, but he was a mathematician and very fact and history-based and liked to explain everything. I knew that wasn’t the type of book I wanted to write: I didn’t want to write a Korean history book. That’s why I put the timeline in there, so readers can look back and see what time period I’m writing about. When I started, I think there was so little known about Korean history, especially Korean colonial history, I felt the burden to explain it. There were very few books about the colonial era in English, so it was really difficult to find source material, and my Korean wasn’t good enough that I could read Korean books. There wasn’t Google Translate twenty-five years ago. It was a different time, not everything was online. You had to go to the library and really look. Now there’s a whole new generation of Korean American historians studying that era in the United States. The pressure to write a history book kind of waned as time went on. But I did feel, when I started this book, I had to—even for my own sake—explain things because I had to understand it.
Rumpus: On page 88, you have this gorgeous line about that sort of imposed structure: “I will savor one story at a time before bedtime, which is my habit. Something tightly constructed with an epiphany at the end, but not too well-crafted so as to be sterile. The epiphany is crucial since I want to learn how to identify them in my own life.” What was your relationship to epiphany when writing this work?
Lee: I think it finally occurred to me that I was writing this to understand my father. That was the big epiphany because we were very, very close when I was a young girl and then grew apart. I was very rebellious as a teen, and I didn’t want to be a doctor like he wanted me to and dropped out of premed in college. So helping him with the research was a way for us to reconnect again and for me to understand why he was the way he was, what kind of burden he was holding his whole life: not knowing who his father was, thinking his father was a criminal, and thinking of himself as the son of a criminal. All the bullying that occurred because of that growing up and how that affected his personality. Once he found out about who his father was, his personality changed, and I realized that’s my real father.
The father that I grew up with was very stoic, did not show his emotions. My mother was an artist and was always “translating” my father to us, to me and my brother, which I think is common in some families generationally. So she would tell us, “Your father does this because of this, and you know, he has a lot of pressure because he’s the first son, and so on.” But once my father discovered who his father was and realized that he was a patriot who believed in something and was idealistic and part of a movement, I think this information opened him up. He became gregarious, he became huggy. My mom would complain that he would talk all the time and wouldn’t shut up. And that’s not the father I grew up with. So I think that was the first epiphany when I was in Korea: I am doing this to understand my father and also to feel closer to him. I don’t know if repairing a relationship is the right explanation, but I was trying to forge a different kind of relationship with him because I’d rebelled against him for so long.
I had an agent early on, but he left the business while I was working on my book proposal. I put the book down because of that and also because I realized I wasn’t writing the book that I felt truly captured the story. I think the second epiphany came after I had kids, when I came to the book again and rewrote the whole thing in generative writing workshops—without notes, without all my research, without the history books and without that weight of facts, that’s when the real story came out. Also, I was a mother with a different point of view. I wasn’t a single woman, moving around all the time. I was more settled. I had a family, which is what I really wanted. It was then that I realized that I was writing this book for my kids so they would grow up knowing about the past and feeling anchored to an identity and a culture. I didn’t have that growing up because there were all these holes in our history. I grew up with absence. Now there’s all these psychological studies that show how family storytelling is so essential to identity forming, especially for adolescents. Now I can put into words what I was trying to do.
So it took a while for me to realize the real story is my grandmother’s story because she’s the one who survived. She was born in 1908 and died in 2000, so her life spans almost a century. She grew up in an agrarian society where she was married at sixteen and was not educated. And when she died, Korea was one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. You know, so much change. There’s colonialism. There’s war. There’s dictatorship. And she survived it all. She was responsible for the survival of the family. My grandfather is lauded as the patriot, the hero, but he only lived twenty-seven years. She lived into her nineties. So that took me a while to get to as well. As my life changed, I finally realized why I was doing all of this.
Rumpus: This is an intergenerational story, not just because of its ancestral nature but because your father started this project initially, and you picked it up after him. How did you navigate the space of not only telling a generational story but honoring the physical work that had been done before the project reached your hands?
Lee: Luckily, my father is a mathematician and very organized and focused on facts. When I was asking him questions about his childhood, he would prepare documents, almost like term papers, which he called “Notes on Family History.” All his files were beautifully organized. After he retired, he actually wrote his own autobiography in a limited edition, less than a hundred copies, because he wanted to write his story for his grandkids. Also, I was taking so long to finish my book, and he wanted to make sure something was written down. I didn’t actually read it until after he died because I didn’t want his version of our family’s story to interfere with mine. I’m so glad that he wrote it. I knew that every single date in there was checked twice because that’s who my father was. I have his book as my fact-checking document. It filled in a couple of holes here and there that made the story richer. I don’t know if he ever thought my book was going to get published because it took so long. He passed away in 2018 fairly suddenly from stomach cancer. I can also hear my father’s voice when reading his book, which is so comforting after his passing.
Rumpus: You challenge empty, unanswered space in such a layered, multidimensional fashion, and I was wondering if there were certain works or authorial voices that aided in the development of this project’s approach to memoir?
Lee: In the beginning, when I realized that journalism wasn’t going to cut it, I started reading novels—tons and tons of novels. When I started, memoir wasn’t as developed of a genre as it is now. I think the biggest memoir when I started was Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, which I loved. I prefer reading novels. My father read War and Peace when he was in the tuberculosis sanitarium, so I read Tolstoy. I also read Maxine Hong Kingston, Jessica Hagedorn, Gish Jen, Milan Kundera, Ian McEwan, Paula Fox. In memoir, Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club was a big influence, as was Natalie Kusz’s Road Song. More recently, there’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Māhealani Madden, who I just adore and took a workshop from at Tin House. Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, Lydia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water.
I tried to play in writing Starry Field because journalism is fairly formulaic in a lot of ways. That’s why the generative workshops were so helpful to me—I felt a freedom there. You just write and write and who knows what’s going to come out. Because I am an editor, I tend to self-edit way too early, so the generative workshops really helped me get the words out. It’s now my favorite way to write—in community. There’s something safe about it, you feel held, and if you choose to read what you’ve written out loud, you get immediate feedback on what is working.
I think delving into fiction was a way to see how to take some liberties. I have some imagined scenes in Starry Field, and it was liberating to do that. My grandmother might tell me something, but who knows if her version is the right or the only one. There were certain parts of the book where my father didn’t trust my great uncle, saying, “You know, he embellishes,” but I knew in my gut that what he told me was true. It was nice to shed off those journalistic walls, those strictures, like facts having to be verified by two people or whatever. Oh also, Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story—that was a huge help. I realized that I was writing the situation when I started, focusing on the history of colonial Korea, and I wasn’t writing the story. So that was a very illuminating, very seminal book to me, and also, she was someone that I knew from The Nation. I love all her memoirs, I think she’s an amazing writer. You can get lost in the history and it can feel overwhelming. I definitely felt that weight of history, especially at the beginning of the writing process, asking myself, Am I telling this correctly? That weight inhibited me rather than letting me feel free. There’s also the weight of intergenerational trauma, which is a term that was not used widely when I started this book. I think psychologists have used it for a long time, but it wasn’t how people described books back then. But once I understood the concept, that was the final epiphany. I don’t say it in the book because I didn’t know what it was when I was writing.
Rumpus: Because this was a memoir many years in the making, I would love to hear you talk a little about the things you’re feeling now that Starry Field is out in the world. Looking forward, do you see yourself returning to this project in certain ways?
Lee: It’s so nice to actually hold it as an object after working on it for so long. I knew promotion was a big part of book publishing, but I didn’t realize how much hustle is involved. I’m still in the swirl of it. So I don’t think I’ve had time to really sit with what it means, what the rewarding parts are.
Speaking about my book and seeing in people’s faces something like recognition has been incredibly rewarding. I’ve done a couple of lectures and then readings and that’s something I want to pursue more, maybe at colleges. I’m speaking at UCLA in May, and I spoke at CalBerkeley to a freshman composition class, and I loved it. I love speaking to young people who are a little bit older than my kids. Everyone has secrets in their family, every single person. I see these kids’ eyes spark—Oh, I could ask my grandma about my uncle that no one ever talks about. Seeing the spark in peoples’ eyes, that’s probably been the most rewarding part of this book. I don’t think you have to be Korean American to get something out of reading it. It’s my dream that this book will be assigned in college courses and have a life that way, especially because I wrote it for my kids.
Starry Field is for the next generation so readers can understand what gets lost in immigration. Because that first generation, they’re just trying to survive—they don’t have time to look to the past. They don’t have time to explain the past because they’re concerned with very basic survival. It’s up to the second generation or third to really delve into the past and see what their history is, what their culture is.
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Author photograph by Kevin Meynell
