The Assay Interview Project: Margaret Juhae Lee
October 1, 2025

Margaret Juhae Lee is the author of Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History (Melville House), which was named a best book of 2024 by the San Francisco Chronicle. A former editor at The Nation, she received a Bunting Fellowship from Harvard University and a Korean Studies Fellowship from the Korea Foundation and has attended the Tin House and Writer's Hotel workshops. She has been awarded residencies at Mesa Refuge, Mineral School, Anderson Center, Ragdale and the Carolyn Moore Writers House. Her articles have been published in The Nation, Newsday, Elle, ARTnews, Writer's Digest and The Rumpus. She lives in Oakland with her family. 
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. 
 Molly Tompkins: Margaret Juhae Lee, congratulations on Starry Field! This memoir extends beyond the limits of your memory as you probe the past for the stories that inflect your own. You unearth the buried history of your grandfather, Lee Chul Ha, who opposed the Japanese occupation of Korea. This book contains not only your findings, but documents your process of seeking answers from archives, academics, and family members. By chronicling your research journey, you include readers in your excavation of the past and allow us to share in your present discoveries. We travel with you from Houston to California to Boston to Korea to seek the displaced home that you eventually locate within your family. The story of Starry Field, your grandfather’s Communist codename, became a constellation that connects your ancestors and children. 
 
In the beginning of the book, you set out to uncover the story of your grandfather’s arrest. As you gather materials, however, your grandmother Halmoni’s story also emerges through her interviews. Rather than strictly adhering to your original search, you shift to incorporate Halmoni’s emerging character. Can you talk about your experience writing this evolving story? Did you initially resist or embrace the inclusion of Halmoni’s testimony? 
 
Margaret Juhae Lee: It was always my intention to include Halmoni’s testimony, since she was one of only a handful of living people who actually knew my grandfather, but it took me many years to figure out how. I incorporated her interviews almost word for word, because I wanted her voice to be heard. The prevailing issue for me was structure. It wasn’t until close to the end of the process that I realized that the three interviews I conducted with her needed to be the pillars of the book—that I needed to organize the other chapters of the book that centered my grandfather, my father and me around those interviews. Her story was the one that spanned almost the whole of the twentieth century—from Korea’s colonial era to South Korea’s technological boom. When I started Starry Field, the focus was on my grandfather’s forgotten life. As the years went by and I had a family of my own, I realized that Halmoni was the center of the story, not my grandfather. My grandfather died in 1936 at the age of 27 and left her a widow with two children to raise by herself. Halmoni was the one who ensured our family’s survival.
 
Rather than a fictional epic of heroes and villains, your memoir captures the realities of complex people. For example, you hold your grandfather’s brave revolt in tension with his neglect for his wife. You highlight both Halmoni’s reticence to rebel and her fortitude in sustaining her family. And when crafting the character of the Japanese police investigator who interrogated your grandfather, you humanize him, leaning on the written record to create a nervous, young officer. Can you talk about the process of writing such nuanced characters?
 
I unlocked the characters in Starry Field during a series of generative writing workshops I attended after my son was born in 2006. I had put the book away for a couple of years when I got married and was trying to get pregnant. When I returned, I was blocked and needed a way to reacquaint myself with the material in a fresh way. Since I worked as a magazine editor, I also realized that my editing impulse was a huge impediment to first-draft writing. I found myself self-editing too early in the process. Through generative writing exercises, I learned the practice of putting pen to paper without crossing anything out, to let the words flow in an embodied way that isn’t possible, at least for me, when typing on a computer. This method freed me to focus less on “facts” and research and think about my family members as characters, rather than the people in my life. Looking back, I realized that I needed that time away from the book to let all the research I conducted sink in and to think about the book more like a fiction writer than a journalist.
 
Despite being about your ancestors, the memoir begins and ends with dedications to your children. By the end of your research, you realized that you needed to unearth your past to locate your future and family. Although confronting the past allows you and your children to find roots in Korean history, you also reflect on the unnaturalness of moving against time. What did you learn about family legacy and heritage while writing this book?
 
Having children during the writing process totally changed my reason for writing the book. I realized that the absence of family stories during my childhood was at the root of why I felt so unmoored throughout my life. I never felt at home anywhere until I had a family of my own in my 40s. My parents never talked about their own childhoods during the colonial era, and the Korean War was only mentioned as the reason that their high school education was interrupted, since the war started when they were both 16 years old. I knew very little about their lives before they moved to the United States as graduate students in the early 1960s.
 
Now I know how essential family stories are to identity formation in children. I was surprised how much literature there is on this subject in the fields of psychology, narrative history, sociology and a host of other fields, and how the lack of family stories often occurs in immigrant families, where the parents are focused on survival and the future, not confronting the past.
 
You wrote this memoir over the course of twenty years. How did your relationship with the story change or evolve over two decades? In addition to shifts in your writing style, can you talk about how it feels to write such a lengthy project? 
 
When I began the process in the late 1990s, I thought I would finish the book within a couple of years. I spent a year at Harvard learning about Korean history and then four months in Korea conducting research. My plan was to return to the US and write a book proposal and get a contract to fund my writing. I soon realized that a journalistic approach was insufficient to tell such a wide-ranging, complicated story over multiple generations. I basically relearned how to write by reading novels—from War and Peace to The Unbearable Lightness of Being to Black Dogs by Ian McEwan—as well as any literary memoir I could get my hands on. I put the book away several times as my life unfurled, through motherhood, freelance work, caregiving, my parents’ illnesses and deaths.
 
You ask how it felt to write for such a long time. For at least a decade, my family’s story felt like a huge weight dangling over my head. The weight of colonialism and war and how they affected my family’s lives almost crushed me at times. Another reason it took me so long was that I needed time to digest all the stories, to work through what had happened in my family. Therapy helped. As did cultivating a community of writers, especially those also grappling with “generational trauma,” which is a term that wasn’t in common parlance when I began my book journey.
 
Before writing this memoir, you worked as a journalist at The Nation. Throughout the book, you demonstrate your investigative skills by following leads, obtaining interviews, and even acquiring stolen documents. What aspects of being a journalist transferred to writing this memoir? How did recording your family’s story depart from your prior journalistic experience?
 
Journalism helped more in the research process than in the writing. I had to unlearn many of the rules of journalism—like “objectivity,” the concept of “truth,” and not writing about yourself. Writing about myself was the most difficult part of the journey. I felt much more comfortable writing about others and being the observer, rather than the main character. I basically had to free myself from journalism, in a way, and write the book without all my notes to find the narrative thread. As I mentioned before, I had to learn to write more like a fiction writer.
 
There are other aspects of journalism that helped sustain me, like the structure of deadlines and a doggedness to find the story and never give up. Or maybe that has more to do with my innate stubbornness (I’m a Taurus) which made me well suited for journalism.
 
On several occasions, your research comes to a dead end because many of Korea’s archives were destroyed in the bombing of Seoul during the Korean War and because Koreans had neglected to document unfavorable history. The lack of colonial-era archival materials does not surprise you because “documents might reveal a past with which the present is not comfortable.” While interviewing your relatives or seeking lost documents, did you worry about uncovering a past that might destabilize your present?
 
During the long process of writing the book, I did worry that parts of my book might offend family members or cause friction in the family. Early on, I had my father read parts of my book and soon realized that his input was impeding my writing process. His view of history and what happened in our family sometimes didn’t align with mine. As a statistician, he was concerned with verifiable “facts” and not conjecture or subjective views of the past. I was more interested in how different family members viewed the same events, sometimes in differing ways. Because my book took so long to write and be published, all of the family members I interviewed—including my great uncles, Halmoni, and my parents—had passed away by the time it appeared in print. My generation of family members seem to be fine with the book, as far as I know.
 
The erasure of archives suggests that history is, in part, the product of who narrates the story. Your memoir inspired me to consider the fickleness of history. The Japanese colonizers labeled your grandfather an insurrectionist. However, under an independent Korean government, your grandfather received an honorable reburial. You recall that your uncle also suffered from the whiplash of regimes. Over the course of the memoir, people’s reputations and fortunes reverse themselves based on Korea’s political context. As a writer of a lost history, how did you grapple with narrating such a shifting past? 
 
The shifts of history are what intrigued me about the story in the first place. After my grandfather was honored as a Patriot of South Korea, my father told me that I shouldn’t tell people that he was a Communist, that “Communist” was still a bad word in South Korea (and still is today for certain factions). When my father filled out the application for the Patriot’s medal, he was even advised not to mention my grandfather’s affiliation with the Communist Party. Whereas his being a Communist is what I found to be the most fascinating thing about my grandfather. That fact explained certain things about my family—our liberal political leanings, my parents’ harboring of Korean dissidents who had been exiled by the Park Chung Hee regime, why my parents were the only ones I knew growing up in suburban Houston who didn’t vote for Reagan.
 
How did a teenager from the countryside become involved in the student arm of the Korean Communist Party during the colonial era? That was the initial question at the heart of my investigation into my grandfather’s life. As I educated myself about the violent shifts of history that characterized twentieth-century Korean history, my focus shifted to how my family members navigated such upheavals and how living in such an environment took such a toll on their sense of identity.
 
Lastly, let’s talk about revolution. While working at The Nation, you compared your grandfather’s protests, secret communications, and withstanding of torture with your own urges to fight for freedom. You wonder if, to a lesser degree, you inherited his spirit of rebellion. Was there anything about writing this book that felt like participating in a revolution? 
 
Wow, what a great question. I have never thought of myself as a revolutionary, but I guess writing about forgotten history is a revolutionary act, in providing a view of history that prioritizes the people who were forced to live through it rather than the ones who inflicted their power over others. When I began research back in the 1990s, there were very few sources on Korean colonial history written in English, and none of those centered the point of view of Korean people who lived under Japanese rule. Same with books on the Korean War. Almost all concerned military history, not on the experiences of the people who had a war imposed upon them. And all of these books I read twenty-five years ago were written by men. By the time I finished Starry Field, there was so much more wide-ranging and nuanced research from a new generation of scholars, many of whom were Korean American and/or female.

In a wider sense, some consider the act of writing itself a revolutionary act. Writing can be an instrument of social change. Maybe this is even more true in the age of AI, where all my google searches present amalgamated AI accounts first and actual writing by humans underneath that layer. 

I’m glad that you carried your grandfather’s revolutionary torch by writing Starry Field. Thank you for including us in your search for lost history, and for inviting us into your writing journey through this interview.
Molly Tompkins’ writing appears in Texas Highways, Hothouse Literary Journal and Terrain. She is a Creative Writing and English student at the University of Texas at Austin.

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