Memoir 'Starry Field' tells an uncovered history in colonial Korea

Growing up, Margaret Juhae Lee knew her grandfather died at age 27 in Korea. Her grandmother refused to tell her anything else about him except that he was a criminal.

Lee’s father, a professor, took a sabbatical in Korea to look more into her grandfather’s story. When her father fell ill, Lee — who was in school to become a journalist at the time — stepped in to help him, using her research skills to gain access to prison and interrogation documents.

Through that process, Lee discovered her grandfather was jailed for his political beliefs and is now seen as a patriot in Korea. During the Japanese colonial rule of Korea, Lee’s grandfather was identified as a teenage communist revolutionary involved in the student arm of the Communist Party.

Through interviews with her father, her grandmother and other reporting, Lee tells her grandfather’s story in her memoir "Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History.” But Lee’s work wasn’t without critics, namely her grandmother, who at first preferred the painful past to remain buried. And she says that’s the dominant attitude among older generations of Korean Americans.

“I think that separation is at the heart of the Korean American experience, and our elders have been loathe to speak about it because it was so, so painful,” Lee says. “Almost every Korean American person I know has some story of a family member or a friend of the family whose families were split during the Korean War … It's a huge part of the diaspora story that just hasn't really been told because it is so painful.”

By Margaret Juhae Lee

From "Starry Field."Used with permission of the publisher, Melville House Publishing. Copyright © 2024 by Margaret Juhae Lee.

Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Grace Griffin adapted it for the web.