Starry Field
A Memoir of Lost History
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"In this immersive, erudite memoir, Margaret Juhae Lee unspools her long- buried family history; centrally, her grandfather’s imprisonment in Japanese- occupied Korea." - Vanity Fair
“Absorbing...Starry Field reminds us that even knowing where we came from won’t tell us where we’re going - but it will help along the way.” Susan Choi, National Book Award winning author of Trust Exercise
A poignant memoir for readers who love Pachinko and The Return by journalist Margaret Juhae Lee, who sets out on a search for her family’s history lost to the darkness of Korea’s colonial decades, and contends with the shockwaves of violence that followed them over four generations and across continents.
As a young girl growing up in Houston, Margaret Juhae Lee never heard about her grandfather, Lee Chul Ha. His history was lost in early twentieth-century Korea, and guarded by Margaret’s grandmother, who Chul Ha left widowed in 1936 with two young sons. To his surviving family, Lee Chul Ha was a criminal, and his granddaughter was determined to figure out why.
Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History chronicles Chul Ha’s untold story. Combining investigative journalism, oral history, and archival research, Margaret reveals the truth about the grandfather she never knew. What she found is that Lee Chul Ha was not a source of shame; he was a student revolutionary imprisoned in 1929 for protesting the Japanese government’s colonization of Korea. He was a hero—and eventually honored as a Patriot of South Korea almost 60 years after his death.
But reclaiming her grandfather’s legacy, in the end, isn’t what Margaret finds the most valuable. It is through the series of three long-form interviews with her grandmother that Margaret finally finds a sense of recognition she’s been missing her entire life. A story of healing old wounds and the reputation of an extraordinary young man, Starry Field bridges the tales of two women, generations and oceans apart, who share the desire to build family in someplace called home.
Starry Field weaves together the stories of Margaret’s family against the backdrop of Korea’s tumultuous modern history, with a powerful question at its heart. Can we ever separate ourselves from our family’s past—and if the answer is yes, should we?
20 memorable photographs will be included.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
