Book Review: Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History by Margaret Juhae Lee

To begin a memoir with the iconic fictional opening "Once upon a time, " is to cue readers from the outset that part of the project will necessarily be questioning the notion of storytelling itself.In Margaret Juhae Lee's, Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History, we follow her journey as she attempts to correct a long-held familial and national narrative.By doing so, she repositions her family sensibility from "a history previously characterized by forgetting the past [to one transformed, and] characterized by reclamation and renewal" (261).That this opening is in third person point of view, too, sets up a narrative distance, which Lee expands and collapses at will as it serves the various lenses through which she is investigating this story.This arms-reach opening, combined with historical timelines, family tree, and author's note, sets the stage for the various tools Lee will utilize to take readers on this journey: a reporter's approach to recording fact, a researcher's gift for maneuvering and interpreting the archive, and a creative writer's attention to the tools of storytelling to imbue this search with meaning.The essential story is one of repair: Lee's mother asks her to carry on the work that her father, Eun Sol Lee, can no longer do on his own (32).This work is investigative, and centers around the time Lee's grandfather, Lee Chul Ha, spent in prison during the Japanese occupation of Korea.For two years, the pair work together on the project, Lee from New York where she has a day job as a reporter at The Nation, and her father from their family home in Houston.Lee is simultaneously trying to figure out her life via typical-for-the-age moving between professional opportunities, failed love affairs, and an increasing feeling that she might want to someday start a family of her own.It is in helping her father research this story, with her burgeoning skills as a journalist, that she finds purpose for her life (32).And so, we begin with grief, partially inherited, partially lived, arising from the feeling of living in between countries and cultures, and a loss that perhaps her father feels most acutely, when a parent dies while their children are young.The diasporic family narrative shapes Lee's lived experience, with a series of trips back to Korea since the age of 10, a largely unknown plan that her parents will likely move the whole family