MARGARET JUHAE LEE knows how to write into healing, as her new memoir clearly shows us. Her articles, interviews and book reviews have been published in The Nation, Newsday, Elle, ARTnews, The Advocate, The Progressive, and most recently in The Rumpus and Ploughshares blog. She also writes for Writer’s Digest, and received a Bunting Fellowship from Harvard University and a Korean studies fellowship from the Korean Foundation in support of her research for her recently published book, Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History published by Melville House. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to write into healing, and so much more.
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Margaret: Hi, Marion. Thank you for having me on.
Marion: Well, thank you for agreeing to come on. You’ve done what so many memoir writers want to do and you’ve done it successfully and against some fairly high odds. You’ve gone into a complicated family history and unearthed a relative whose story, told correctly, unlocks an alternate family narrative and in the process releases some healing. My audience is writers and I teach memoir and work with memoir writers every day. And I regularly hear about the desire to do this, to go in and find this family member and really get the story. Because after all, everyone has family, which means that everyone has story, but story is fallible. So let’s start there, for this book, Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History, you went in search of your grandfather’s tale. He is Lee Chul Ha and you went into his tale despite having your family’s narrate of him, that he was a criminal. What made you look for your own version of his tale rather than accepting what you’d been told?
Margaret: Actually, my search came as a way to help my father because my father was the one who really wanted to know who his own father was. And my father was a professor and he went on sabbatical in Korea and found out that my grandfather was part of the Student Communist Movement during the colonial era of Korea when the Japanese ruled the country. And previously my father thought that my grandfather was a very naive high school boy who got caught up in a movement he didn’t understand and was arrested just by chance. So he was the one who began the research. And then when he was in Korea, he actually fell ill and I was going to journalism school at the time at NYU. And after he had some surgery, he was losing parts of his memory and my mother really encouraged me to take up this research project in concert with my father. So we definitely worked together. So it began as a way for me to help my father and then as I dug further and further, it became my search as well.
Marion: As it can. And you mentioned the history of Korea and Americans are of course woefully ignorant of history, particularly that of Eastern countries. As you state in your opening author’s note, “Korea has a complicated history.” So I’m going to set this up a little bit. Korea is an ancient civilization, of course, with a rich cultural history. And proof of its ancient existence, dating back, we’ve got Korean pottery from 8,000 BC. There are long periods of peace and prosperity followed by colonization. And in 1910, the country was annexed to Japan and Korea remained a Japanese colony until 1945. So most Americans know about the 38th parallel and how the country is divided into North and South and was so at World War II.
But this Japanese colonization period really is important to this story, but it also makes research really difficult. And you do yours employing investigative journalism, oral history, archival research, scene reconstruction and family testimony. And I should add that it took more than 20 years to write. And as you set that up so nicely talking about how you took this on through your dad, I want to talk a little bit about tenacity and what kept your light lit for you. This is a complicated country with a complicated history, which means that getting this material must’ve been so complicated. I know from reading the book that it was. So how’d you keep your tenacity? How’d you keep your perseverance up for 20 years of this pursuit?
Margaret: Well, when I started, I was a journalist and I knew that this was a story of a lifetime. And that kept me going for a while. And then I realized that as I was speaking to family members, I was learning about history that I did not grow up with. My parents never talked about their lives during colonialism and rarely talked about the Korean War. They were teenagers during the war. And the way that they would speak about the war was that that was the reason why they graduated from high school in their 20s and not in their teens because there was a war. So it became, as I said, a way to help my father, but it also filled in all these family stories that I never grew up with and never had the privilege of knowing about my parents’ childhood. My father talked about colonialism, talked about how he was forced to use a Japanese name, which was what the Japanese inflicted on the Koreans. And I think it helps to be a naturally stubborn person, like I am.
Marion: I think so too.
Margaret: And I’m a Taurus, I’ll just mention that. But a lot of it was the journalist, I want to search for this story. I think I felt a sense of duty as the oldest child to help my father. I think that was at first part of what spurred me on. And I did get an agent very early in this process. So there was that professional urgency there. He did leave the business after I came back from Korea, so I did feel a little bit high and dry. When I first started this book, I thought it was a book of journalism and I soon realized that it needed to be a memoir and it needed to have my own reflections. And I didn’t know how to write that at first because I’d been trained as a journalist. So looking back, it’s a blessing that my agent left the business because I don’t think it would’ve been the book that it is now.
Marion: That’s a wonderful entree into some questions about making that shift. Jogging over. The journalist is taught, and certainly a journalist of a certain era. I grew up in journalism where there was no I in the story and you’re trained to get the facts and use the facts to perpetuate the facts, but not put yourself in the tale. So the discomfort around putting yourself in this tale must have been considerable. What did you do? How did you get yourself to get yourself in the story?
Margaret: I read a lot of novels. I think that was the most helpful thing. I also read a lot of memoirs. When I started this book, it was 1998, so memoir wasn’t as, I guess, developed a genre. But the biggest memoir back then was Angela’s Ashes. That was a big, I think, influence because I think Frank McCourt made the reader feel like they were there with him in Ireland. Yes. And I wanted that immersive feeling. So there was a lot of training. Also, I have to say, going to therapy and really delving into why this story was so important for my own development. And that has been a constant throughout this journey. And I don’t think I could have done it without outside help.
Marion: That is so generous, and I so appreciate that. And I wondered about that because it takes a lot of courage to challenge the predominant narrative of a family. When people say, “He’s a criminal,” or people say he’s a whatever and it gets passed along, to have an alternative narrative to that is very difficult and it takes some sort of goal usually in the form of a question. And we’ve all read memoirs of people who have had slaveholders in their past or criminals, murdered relatives or someone who has disappeared. I’ve delved heavily into my own family’s past based on one single genetic trait. So did you have a question? And how did it form against the prevailing story you had been told?
Margaret: I think the initial question was who was my grandfather? I did know some of the basic facts that my father first uncovered. I did know he was involved in the Student Communist Movement. And then I did find some documents that relayed his actual involvement. So that was the initial question. But I also interviewed family members. There were three family members that I could find who actually remembered my grandfather because he died in 1936. And the main one was my grandmother, halmeoni. Halmeoni means grandmother in Korean. And I knew I had to interview her. And when I did, she was very reluctant, but I did convince her to speak to me. But only because I told her it would help my career. That was the only reason why she would even deign to speak to me because she was a very practical person.
But once she started speaking about her own life, which she had never done before, she couldn’t stop. She would just go on and on and on. And she told me things that my father never knew. And it’s her testimony that forms the heart of the book. And it made me realize my grandfather was eventually honored as a patriot of Korea, as a hero, as someone who really fought for Korean independence. But it was my grandmother who actually had to survive as a widow of two young boys through colonialism, through the war, through military dictatorship, and all the way to the year 2000, which is when she died. So she lived in almost an entire century and she lived so much longer than my grandfather. And I realized that her story was the one that became the heart of the book.
Marion: It’s so fascinating. The book again is called Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History. And the whole idea of a history being lost is of course completely compelling. I can see why a writer would fall into that and try to go get that. And as you say, you find out in your research that your grandfather was a student revolutionary imprisoned in 1929 for protesting the Japanese government’s colonization of Korea. And he was a hero and eventually honored for being a hero. So talk to me about what actually shakes out for you, the writer, the journalist, the questioner, when you lose one narrative and take on a new one. Do you think differently about your whole family? Do you think differently about yourself? What kind of reclamation of this man happens and what happens to your own emotional experience?
Margaret: Well, the initial reclamation really changed my father’s personality, which was amazing to see. I grew up, my father was a mathematician, he was a statistics professor, and he was a very quiet, stoic man who never showed his emotions. And my mother was always translating my father to me and my brother because we knew what he was really thinking. And he would blow up sometimes, but he would never express himself. But once he found out about his own father, his demeanor changed totally. He became friendly, he became gregarious, he was hugging us all the time. We saw a different father than who he grew up with.
And that was this amazing transformation because he felt so much shame growing up. On my parents’ first date, he told my mom that his father was a criminal. He just blurted it out while they’re having dinner somewhere in Seoul. And my mom said that she didn’t know what to say and she thought he was kidding, and she just ignored it. But he just felt this weight on him his entire life until he found out who his father was. And so that was the first initial breakthrough.
Marion: It’s a remarkable concept. I loved that scene. I was so taken by that detail about on the first date he told this to your mother. And shame is such a heavy burden. And you write that shame lay under your father’s big life decisions, like moving an ocean away and coming to America. And so what do you think? I mean, you’re the expert here and so many people carry shame in their family. So what does shame do to our version of ourselves do you think?
Margaret: Well, definitely for my father, it tampened his true personality. And that was something I feel so privileged that I was actually able to ask my father before he died about his childhood. I think he was a rambunctious boy who, as he grew up, never got to be the person that he really was until he found out about his father. He was the first child of the first child, so in the patriarchal structure of Korean society. So he was seen as the head of the family. And since his father died so young, even as a child, he was seen as the heir to the patrilineal line.
And I think he felt that burden his whole life. He supported my grandmother’s whole life. His relatives would come ask him for money. There was a lot of burden there. And I felt like he didn’t grow up with a father so I feel like as a young man, he didn’t know how to do any of these things. He felt very lost. So I think he felt that shame. And the residual of that was that I grew up in suburban Houston with very few Koreans around, not knowing almost anything about the past that my parents left behind. My mother was a little more open about her childhood stories, but my father did not talk about it.
Marion: So it seems like you’ve got this, I mean, we can flip this on its head and talk a bit about what truth does to shame. I think it’s remarkable, but you’re the expert. So what would you say the truth does to shame?
Margaret: I think it transforms it or it can. I mean, sometimes the truth is maybe even more shameful and can be. And what I’ve realized in this very long journey is that what is really important isn’t exactly what I actually found, it is the journey itself. That’s what’s really important. I found my grandfather’s records, but in the end, what I realized was that these records are present for my father. But I made the journey, I went to Korea, I looked into the past. And at the time when I went to Korea, I was a single woman in my 30s, didn’t have a family, and it took me until I had children, I had a family of my own to realize that this story is for them, so they would grow up with family history. Because these stories are so essential to identity building for young people. And I realized as I had children, I really missed something growing up.
Marion: Yes. Absolutely. This is why I encourage people all the time, I say that, “Memoir is the single greatest portal to self-discovery.” And it is, done right. And yours is certainly done right. And it lives so vividly in the small details. I mean, this is a huge story, encompassing war and a division of a country, international intrigue, family story, and so much more. And yet there are these little details that to me must have been astonishing to discover, but they keep the story percolating with life.
There’s this list of books your grandfather had when he was imprisoned and it reveals who he is as they include a biography of Abraham Lincoln, four volumes of the Social Life of the Insect World, two books on philosophy, lectures on political economy and algebra. In the quest for the big tale, it’s easy to overlook the small details, but you didn’t and you utilize them magnificently. So talk to me about the small details of story and their value. Remember the audience is writers and it’s easy to just brush those aside and say, “I’m looking for the big stuff here.” To me, this is the big stuff. But what do you think?
Margaret: Oh, totally. I mean that’s what I’m interested personally in anyway. I did not want to write a sweeping history of my family or of Korea. What I was interested in was these scenes from my family’s past. I’m an extremely visual person, so when I read, I see everything in my mind. I have an art history background. And one thing I did when I was interviewing my father and different relatives, I had my father draw a floor plan of his house growing up. And that was so valuable to me so I could picture him as a teenager living in this house with his grandmother. And that helped me immensely. Asking these questions. And because he is a mathematician and pretty good at drawing, he drew an incredibly detailed floor plan like an architect so I could picture it spatially. And as a reader, the details are always the things that I latch onto in writing. That’s what I’m interested in. But I think it has to do with me having to visualize everything in my head before I can make it into a scene.
Marion: I think that’s, again, so generous because I think we don’t know what we have on us or we don’t appreciate what we have on us when we go into story. And if you’re a visual thinker, ask someone to draw the floor plan. If you’re not a visual thinker, think of something else. The whole idea of interviewing family members seems appalling to so many of the memoir students I deal with every day. And I tell them all the time, “You’ve got to get these skills because you don’t know what your parents were like as young parents before you were born or right after you were born. You don’t know what they were like as young people, ask someone, interview people.”
So with this journalist’s training and with the eye on being prepared for what you might hear, I mean you say your grandmother suddenly just opened up. What tips would you give to people who are inevitably going to have to speak to family members to be prepared for the intimacy, to be prepared for someone to be more loquacious than you expected them, to be prepared for things to turn up? What would you advise? I mean, notebook, tape recorder, set aside more time. Give us a couple of essential tips on how to go in and speak to family about story.
Margaret: I think with most, I get this question a lot, I think it helps to start in a place where you both feel comfortable. Like if you’re at a family gathering, asking questions about what foods did you eat at a certain whatever you’re celebrating. And start somewhere where everyone feels comfortable and then think about digging in deeper. With my father, he was a very formal person, so I could ask him questions in a very academic kind of way, and that’s how he felt most comfortable.
But it’s really knowing your audience. I’ve had students ask me, it’s like, “How do I ask my auntie about this uncle no one talked about?” I was like, “You need to start somewhere easy for both of you.” Like, “Oh, do you remember a birthday party? Do you remember family gatherings? What about your brother?” And just start with a conversation. And now that we have phones with recording, you could do it extremely easily. When I was doing all these interviews, I had a tape recorder, I had my notebook, it was a little more formal. But now I think you can be a little more casual. And I think for many people that’s an easier way to speak to someone so they don’t feel on the spot.
Marion: I think that’s great advice. And I think you’re right. I think putting a phone down on a table is a very different thing than putting a tape recorder down on a table. I think that to utilize the familiarity we all have with the phone is a great thing. And I also think that if you go in with your hardest question first, you’re going to shut down the communication. Especially in, I know with family members that are dealing with abuse or adoption stories, you don’t want to go in with those questions first. You want to really soften the environment a bit as much as possible.
Margaret: Definitely.
Marion: What was the most, I don’t know, surprising or informing? What was one of the larger moments you had in these conversations?
Margaret: I think with my grandmother, I interviewed her with my mother who is not her blood daughter, is her daughter-in-law. And it was so interesting that my father was not invited in the room. She did not want him there. So he actually listened outside the frame of vision of my grandmother. I could see him in the corner of my eye and he was listening the whole time. I did three pretty long form interviews with her and he would just stand there listening. And it was just interesting, my grandmother felt much more comfortable just with women there. My Korean is not great, so I needed my mother’s help with some of the translation. And in a way, the language difference was a hindrance to me, but in a way there were some positives. I could really focus on my grandmother’s gestures and what her face looked like and what memories triggered emotions. And it was nice to have someone else there who could do more of the nitty gritty and I can focus on something else. That was surprising to me.
Marion: What a scene. You, your mother with your father out of eye contact, that’s wonderful and fascinating. And now I think liberates some people to consider how you might stage this. So as we wrap this up, it’s worth discussing the high emotional content of discovery and what memoir can do. You mentioned earlier about your parents being forced to have Japanese names and your parents were forced to learn Japanese as children during the colonization of Korea. And when you brought back the interrogation records of your grandfather, which you located in Korea, your parents had to rely on that same Japanese to translate for you these remarkable records.
And I found myself holding my heart and thinking about that being imposed on them again. I found it very emotional and really good for me to know, to understand what we’re asking of them to do this. So there’s of that in your story, high emotional components, lots of reveals. So can you talk about that? I think not all memoir writers understand that you’re going to be riding some pretty rocky territory if you investigate the past. And you said before you did this with therapy, but I wonder just about preparing others for that as well.
Margaret: It’s interesting, when I started this book, the term “intergenerational trauma” was not one that was used at all talking about anything except for PTSD. And once I heard that term, I mean wasn’t even that long ago, it made so much sense to me. This is what my book is about, intergenerational trauma. But it was not something I even knew about when I started. So I mean, I think that’s another reason why it took me so long to write. There’s a lot of very difficult emotions involved, information. I found out that my grandfather was tortured in prison. He was in the most notorious prison in Seoul and just the Japanese were just horrendous to the prisoners. And just holding that and realizing this very young teenager had to go through that. And all the prisoners there did. So it took a while to process and you have to give yourself the time. And if it is super difficult, maybe it’s not the healthiest thing to just motor on through. That’s my advice. You have to take care of yourself during the process. It’s essential.
Marion: I so appreciate that. I think it’s true. I don’t think doing your best means grinding yourself into dust. I think that in memoir, the discovery, it sounds like it’s going to be just nothing but fun, but it can be… Well, living with the facts of your grandfather being tortured. Yes, that’s a huge assignment emotionally now to take on. And the intergenerational trauma, I think, does allow for a phrase that explains a lot of what you would experience and what people will experience as they unearth these stories. I can’t thank you enough. You’re very generous and the vulnerability here just I think is going to help so many writers. Thank you. And thank you for writing this beautiful book. It’s a terrific piece of work and you should be very proud of it. I’m sure you are. And I hope you enjoy enormous success with it. Thank you, Margaret.
Margaret: Oh, thank you, Marion.
Marion: The author is Margaret Juhae Lee. See more on her at margaret juhae lee dot com. The book is Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History, just out from Melville House. Get it wherever books are sold. And if your library does not carry it, ask them to do so. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes in how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you’d like what you’re here, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.
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