To complete and produce her coming-of-age story took Montclair-based writer Margaret Juhae Lee 57 years, including a process of more than two decades.
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Nevertheless the results in her new book, “Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History” (mhpbooks.com/books/starry-field) are phenomenal. Lee leads readers on an experiential journey that she herself traveled, tracing her family’s ancestral Korean history in a quest to unlock long-kept secrets and discover her Asian American identity in the buried truths.
Lee is The Nation magazine’s former literary editor, the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship from Harvard University and the recipient of a Korean Studies Fellowship from the Korean Foundation. Her work has been published in The Nation, Newsday, Elle, ARTnews, The Advocate and other places.
She has a master of arts degree in journalism from New York University’s Cultural Reporting & Criticism Program and a master of arts in art history from the University of Texas at Austin. Lee has lived since 2008 in Oakland’s Montclair district with her husband, Steve Olson, with whom she has two children, Owen, 17, and Kiki, 15.
Lee will appear in-person March 15 for a conversation about “Starry Fields” at A Great Good Place for Books in Montclair Village (ggpbooks.com/event/StarryField). In an interview, she reflects on her childhood in Houston and describes the intense, creative process required to bring her story forward.
The decades-long effort involved investigative journalism, gathering oral histories from reluctant family members, traveling internationally to conduct archival research and countless rewrites. Her grandfather, Lee Chul Ha, had long been described by her family and judged by his native Korea to be a communist war criminal.
Nearly 60 years after his death in 1936 at age 27, Lee says she discovered that her grandfather was instead actually a patriot and brave revolutionary who resisted the Japanese government’s colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945 (bit.ly/4bZwXWB).
“My father began researching his past in the ’90s, and I joined him to get the ball rolling,” Lee recalls. “Later, when my father fell ill and after lung surgery, he lost his memory and had to stop his research.
“He was very depressed, and my mother — my father had never spoken much about his father — urged me to help break him out of depression and ask him questions about my grandfather’s life. As I learned about his childhood during colonialism, the research became mine. It filled a hole in my understanding of my history and knowledge of Korean history, which was spotty.”
Lee says she did not identify as Asian American until after college, when she first moved to San Francisco.
“Growing up, there was only one other Korean family in our neighborhood. We were the family that ate weird food. I didn’t have friends over; it was a hermetically sealed existence.
“My high school was 99% White. I was treated like a foreigner — an Asian and not an American, even though I spoke with no accent. I remember the first thing my English professor at the University of Texas asked me in 1974 — it was if I was a Vietnamese boat person.”
As described in her book, that sense of unease, of existing in a gap — neither American or Korean — impelled her life choices ranging from “bad decisions about men until my husband” to preferring the “safety” of journalism over writing fiction or autobiography.
“In journalism, ‘I’ is one of the big no-nos. It took a while psychologically. I had to think of myself, my father and grandfather as characters. I learned to write in scenes, use dialogue, pushing the writing past reporting, recording sensory details to transport readers into time and place. It was writing beyond observing.”
Writing “Starry Fields” included many stops when she set it aside to have children and again when her parents (who have since passed away) became ill. Restarting when her kids began preschool, she enrolled in generative workshops during which free-writing sessions caused her to entirely revise the book.
“What came out was the emotional arc of the book. I had had the three interviews with my grandmother, Halmoni, and began to write in her voice.”
Throughout, she read voraciously, valuing Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes” for how it conveyed time and place; Mary Karr’s memoirs that “are visceral and read like novels;” and books by Amy Tan, Paula Fox, Maxine Kingston, Jessica Hagedorn and more.
Lee says her greatest challenge was structuring the memoir, having tried writing chronologically but finding that going from beginning to end left holes and that the number of characters was confusing.
“I had to be the conduit and wanted the reader to go through the story as I did: finding identity, home, community and centering my grandmother who lived through a tumultuous era while raising two children on her own as the entry. And there’s telling the history of Korea going from an agrarian economy to one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world.”
Adding to the complexity, Lee says she fought an overwhelming reticence to write about herself. Having established community in her Montclair neighborhood and writing groups and found identity in writing her memoir, one of her most cherished memories likely relates to her father.
She says after he learned that his father was a patriot, not a criminal, her father went from “stoic and very quiet” to “gregarious and so talkative he wouldn’t stop.” She unearthed memories, some revelatory and welcome, many painful. She says the lengthy process let her discover the reasons for writing and sharing her story publicly.
“I was writing it for my kids, so they would know their family’s stories and not grow up as I did, with so many secrets. I wrote it for a broad audience, but especially for second-generation immigrants and to put Korean history out into the public.
“Explaining what has happened in North and South Korea and humanizing that story was important. The book encourages people to talk to their elders and find out what they don’t know. I tell them to start with something light, like food or traditions and customs of their family gatherings. Once elders start talking, they go deeper.”
Lou Fancher is a freelance writer. Reach her at lou@johnsonandfancher.com.