STARRY FIELD

A respected journalist unravels buried secrets and a complex historical context.

Lee, former literary editor of the Nation, was born in the U.S. to Korean parents, and for years, she felt a deep sense of cultural dislocation. In an attempt to bring solidity to her unsettled life, she started to investigate the story of her grandfather, a shadowy figure whom nobody wanted to talk about. She found that he’d been a vocal opponent of the long Japanese occupation of Korea that ended in 1945. That revelation only deepened the mystery, as most dissidents were later hailed as heroic martyrs. Lee eventually discovered that her grandfather was also a communist, which carried a great stigma in the postwar era. The author conducted a series of interviews with her grandmother, although her research was hampered by her family’s reluctance to discuss painful issues. Nevertheless, she was able to piece together the fragments of her grandfather’s life, and she located records of his arrest and imprisonment. Lee also began to understand the brutality of the colonization period, which she had not fully grasped. Most importantly, the project allowed her grandmother to move past the resentment toward her late husband that she had carried for decades. In the end, Lee also found what she needed to find. “I didn’t fully understand why I was embarking on this search,” she says. “Now, I realize that confronting my family’s forgotten past was an essential step in paving the way to the future.” The book could have easily become sentimental and self-indulgent, but Lee manages the difficult task of keeping the narrative layers organized, and the result is an engaging, intriguing account of how we discover who we really are and what we might become.

A poignant reclamation of a hidden history, leavened by a sense of personal growth and understanding.