Margaret Juhae Lee’s Starry Field weaves family history and memory into an unforgettable memoir.
Before cassette tapes became obsolete, I made dozens of mixtapes for myself and friends, like kids make friendship bracelets today. Later, I became a college radio DJ at the University of Texas. These days, squarely in middle age, I do put together Spotify playlists for special occasions, like milestone birthdays. Even when music isn’t playing, I still have a running playlist in my mind.
I began researching my book Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History around 1999, way back when I was single, living in a shared loft in the East Village and working at The Nation magazine as an editor. The book chronicles my family’s search for information about my grandfather, Lee Chul Ha (Sung Ya or “Starry Field” to his Communist comrades), who protested Japanese rule as a student revolutionary in colonial Korea. He died at age 27 in 1936, leaving behind my grandmother (Halmoni) to raise two small boys on her own. She was reluctant to discuss the “painful things” in her life, but eventually did so. Her oral history and my father’s remembrances form the backbone of the book. Their testimony and my discovery of my grandfather’s prison records reveal the missing holes in our family’s history.
It took me over 20 years to finish this book. I needed to live my life to figure out why I embarked on the journey to discover my family’s history. It wasn’t until I had children of my own did I realize the real reason I wrote the book. The book is for them, so they will know the story of our family.
Some of these songs appear in Starry Field; some were on repeat in the ongoing soundtrack of my life.
Arirang- Korean folk song
My parents didn’t play much Korean music while I was growing up in Houston. They mostly listened to classical music, but my dad did play the Korean folk song “Arirang” on the harmonica. The song is hundreds of years old. During the colonial era, it was sung as a resistance anthem, because the Japanese made it a criminal offense for Koreans to sing patriotic songs. I can imagine my grandfather singing it with his comrades as a high school student protesting Japanese rule. It’s the one song all four generations of my family have heard.
Doubleplusgood- Eurythmics
This song appears in the chapter called “Escape” which describes my disaffected high school years. The song was written for the movie 1984, which I saw with “the Gang,” which is what my group of friends called ourselves. 1984 was also the year we first saw the Eurythmics at the Hofheinz Pavilion, which is also where our graduation ceremony was held. That day was one of the top ten moments of my life—the day I escaped the confines of suburban Houston. [Doubleplusgood is not on Spotify, so another song from the soundtrack, Sexcrime (1984), is on the actual playlist.]
Seoul, Seoul, Seoul- Cho Yong Pil
In 1988, I graduated from the University of Texas and planned to stay on for a grad program in art history. My plan for the summer was to hang out in Austin and drink margaritas and go to shows every night, but my parents enrolled me in a summer Korean language program at Ewha Womans University in Seoul as a “graduation present.” It was the first time I spent time in Korea without my family. This slightly cheesy, synth-heavy song by Cho Yong Pil (who is known as “the King of Pop” of South Korea, as per Wikipedia) was everywhere.
Bullet with Butterfly Wings- Smashing Pumpkins
A snippet of this song—“despite all my rage, I’m still just a rat in a cage”—appears in the scene where I meet my boyfriend Ciaran at a bar in 1996. I had just moved to New York to attend grad school in journalism after my art museum career in San Francisco didn’t work out. NYC bars were teeming with drunk investment bankers and one self-aware corporate lawyer who quoted this song because he knew he was working for the man. That line also reminds me of the scene in 1984 where Winston is tortured by the rabid rat in the cage that is attached to his face.
I Don’t Understand Anything- Everything but the Girl
Everything but the Girl provided the soundtrack to my life when I lived in New York from 1996 to 1999. I played their Amplified Heart CD pretty much constantly after borrowing it from my roommate. It’s hard to pick one song from the album, but I chose “I Don’t Understand Anything,” because that’s how I felt at the time. I had a dream job in a dream city while my boyfriend was unraveling. My other dream of starting a family was never further away, and I felt completely unmoored.
Kid- the Pretenders
When I went to Korea in 2000, I took a handful of CDs with me, including the Pretenders’ first album. I listened to it on my red Sony Discman on the subway, to steel me up for whatever appointment I had that day. I needed to remind myself to be as badass as Chrissie Hynde, to squint my eyes and not take “I don’t know where your grandfather’s records are” as an answer from anyone. It took almost four months, but I did find copies of his records, not where they were supposed to be, but I found them, nonetheless. The “kid” in the song is the one I want to have, but it’s also the beginning badass in me, even though I’m in my 30s at the time.
Moon River- Andy Williams and Audrey Hepburn
“Moon River” was my dad’s favorite song. He preferred the Andy Williams version from 1962, which was the year my parents came to the United States for graduate school. I think of my parents as the “two drifters” in the song, since they were the first ones in their families to emigrate to the US. My husband Steve and I danced to Audrey Hepburn’s version at our wedding reception in 2005, as a tribute to my father. Steve is my “huckleberry friend.”
Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)- John Lennon
When my son Owen was born in 2008, I, of course, made a playlist. This was the first song, John Lennon’s ode to his son Sean. It’s my favorite song by him. I especially love the sound of the ocean at the beginning and the end. Owen was my parent’s first grandchild, the child I always wanted, the next generation, the subject of the chapter called “Heir.”
Sunset- Kate Bush
The prologue and epilogue of Starry Field is set at the end of 2019, when my family and I traveled to Korea to scatter my parents’ ashes. My father died in March 2018 while undergoing radiation therapy for stomach cancer, and my mother passed almost exactly a year later after ten years with protracted dementia. To me, this song is what grief sounds like. “A sea of honey,” “a song of color.” “We may live on in comets and stars.” This is what my book is ultimately about: living on.
Margaret Juhae Lee lives in Oakland, CA, with her family and Brownie, a rescue dog from Korea. She is a former editor at The Nation and has written for The Nation, Newsday, Elle, ARTnews, Ms., The Rumpus, Writer’s Digest and other publications. Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History is her first book.