December 1, 2023
A respected journalist unravels buried secrets and a complex historical context. Lee, former literary editor of the Nation, was born in the U.S. to Korean parents, and for years, she felt a deep sense of cultural dislocation. In an attempt to bring solidity to her unsettled life, she started to investigate the story of her grandfather, a shadowy figure whom nobody wanted to talk about. She found that he'd been a vocal opponent of the long Japanese occupation of Korea that ended in 1945. That revelation only deepened the mystery, as most dissidents were later hailed as heroic martyrs. Lee eventually discovered that her grandfather was also a communist, which carried a great stigma in the postwar era. The author conducted a series of interviews with her grandmother, although her research was hampered by her family's reluctance to discuss painful issues. Nevertheless, she was able to piece together the fragments of her grandfather's life, and she located records of his arrest and imprisonment. Lee also began to understand the brutality of the colonization period, which she had not fully grasped. Most importantly, the project allowed her grandmother to move past the resentment toward her late husband that she had carried for decades. In the end, Lee also found what she needed to find. "I didn't fully understand why I was embarking on this search," she says. "Now, I realize that confronting my family's forgotten past was an essential step in paving the way to the future." The book could have easily become sentimental and self-indulgent, but Lee manages the difficult task of keeping the narrative layers organized, and the result is an engaging, intriguing account of how we discover who we really are and what we might become. A poignant reclamation of a hidden history, leavened by a sense of personal growth and understanding.
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January 15, 2024
In this touching if uneven debut memoir, journalist Lee investigates the life of her late grandfather, Chul Ha, who was imprisoned by the Japanese during their colonization of Korea in the first half of the 20th century. Chul Ha was incarcerated in 1929 for protesting the Japanese takeover and died in 1936, three years after his release, of tuberculosis he likely contracted in jail. While he was not freely spoken of in Lee’s family when she was growing up in Houston, the author remained curious about his life, and eventually decided to piece his story together. She first sought out her grandmother, Halmoni, who shared that she burned her husband’s books and records out of a fear the government would discover his communist beliefs. While recovering from lung surgery, Lee’s father shared his own recollections of the shame he felt about his father’s imprisonment through a series of emails. Further encounters with friends, family, and acquaintances provided Margaret with more clues, and the account culminates with her presenting Chul Ha’s prison and immigration records to her father, who had previously submitted portions of Chul Ha's history to the Korean government in order to have him re-buried in South Korea as a patriot with national honors. While the pace sometimes flags, with certain sections reading more like a personal journal than a polished memoir, Lee’s quest to lift generations-old stigma inspires. For the most part, this winding investigation of long-buried family secrets succeeds. Photos. Agent: Ayla Zuraw-Friedland, Frances Goldin Literary. (Mar.)Correction: A previous version of this review mistakenly stated that the author petitioned the Korean government to have her grandfather re-buried. It also mischaracterized the timing of the emails she received from her father.
February 15, 2024
Growing up, Margaret Juhae Lee always felt displaced, never quite belonging in any one place. As an adult, she became determined to uncover her family's origin story: the story of her grandfather Lee Chul Ha, who was imprisoned as a leader of the student revolutionary movement against the Japanese government that controlled Korea at the time. He died young from an illness contracted in prison, leaving Lee's grandmother to raise two children by herself and under a cloud of shame. Pursuing her grandfather's story became a way for Lee to connect with her father, her taciturn grandmother, and the family members who remained in Korea. While this book follows the compelling narrative of Lee's search for her grandfather's prison records, its central narrative is about the author finding her place in the world. "What I want you to know," she writes to her son and daughter, "is that who you are and who you become are connected to the past." Starry Field is a heartfelt story of diaspora, belonging, and family connections lost and found.
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