What My Father Left Me

An excerpt of Margaret Juhae Lee's "Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History"

“One of the last photos we have of my father, Eun Sul Lee, with me and my daughter Kiki, 2018.”

We arrive in Seoul the last week of 2019. Brother Ed and family meet us from Portland, via Seattle. I feel comfortable in Seoul, even though I can barely speak the language. Seoul was my home for four months in the year 2000, when I was single and carefree but still burdened with sorrow. My grandmother, Halmoni, had died two months before.

My Korean language skills have deteriorated in the last twenty years from disuse, but I’m still able to understand or at least get the gist of conversations if they involve food, bath time, school, or some subject familiar to toddlers. I can even read hangul at a snail’s pace, which is handy when trying to pick a restaurant.

The type A members of my family need lots of interpretation and explanation. At the dumpling restaurant around the corner from the hotel, I explain that mandoo comes in six iterations—six dumpling servings, either pan fried, steamed, or in soup—in two varieties: veggie or pork. My brother’s kid wants half pan-fried veggie and half steamed pork. I tell him that you can’t special order at neighborhood restaurants in Korea. You must pick from the clearly delineated choices on the menu. His mother requests that I ask the server if a special order is possible, just this once. I take a deep breath and go find the young man with the BTS bowl cut who handed us the menus. I ask as politely as I can in my broken Korean if he can make an exception to the choices on the menu. He shakes his head, “anneyo,” and in English, “just pick one.” We have better luck at the hotel buffet the next morning, where there’s a variety of mediocre American breakfast food to satisfy everyone.

The day after, we take two taxis to Seoul Station, one for each family. I ask the nice concierge who speaks perfect English to write down the address for my brother and family to give to their driver since they know absolutely zero Korean. My kids jockey for seats—no one wants to sit in the middle. For them, each and every interaction is a competition. The red heat of irritation crawls up my neck and into my cold cheeks. My annoyed inner voice begins to yap.

Jesus Christ, just get in the car. Hurry up, it’s fricking cold. Why do we only travel to Korea in the dead of winter?

Steve—the buffer, the wingman, the wrangler of rambunctious children—booms, “Owen, Kiki, you will take turns sitting in the middle!” My dance card is already full, tour guide duties wrapped in a heavy blanket of grief.

My father saved so much and invested so wisely that, for their final years, he and my mom were able to live at Mirabella. The high-rise retirement community in Portland with the best memory care facility in the city. They died earlier than expected, almost exactly a year apart.

WE ARE VIPS FOR THE first time ever. As benefactors of my father and grandfather’s alma mater, Kongju High School, we are provided first-class, high-speed train tickets. Never in my life did I think our family would be benefactors of anything. We were a middle-class immigrant family with no generational wealth in the United States. My statistician father, Eun Sul, provided us with a stable existence in the low-cost Houston suburbs.

All of his so-called wealth was tied to his retirement account, which he had faithfully contributed to each month for the entirety of his appointment at the School of Public Health, even if it meant cutting back on other things for the family. Each month, he sent money to my grandmother in Korea. He gave Chong, my artist mother, a weekly allowance for groceries and other sundry items. Mom earned extra cash sewing prom dresses for the neighbors’ kids and silk blouses for rich River Oaks ladies she met at church. She bought all items for the family on sale or at the Blue Bird Circle consignment shop downtown.

My father saved so much and invested so wisely that, for their final years, he and my mom were able to live at Mirabella. The high-rise retirement community in Portland with the best memory care facility in the city. They died earlier than expected, almost exactly a year apart.

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DURING MY CHILDHOOD, MY FATHER described himself as a country boy from Kongju, the former capital of the Paekche dynasty, who no one dreamed would be accepted to Seoul National University after the Korean War ended. He had even surprised himself. He claimed he was only an average student. What I didn’t realize until I was an adult was that his family was descended from yangban landowners, just like my mother’s, but ones whose fortunes did not expand during colonialism or after the war.

On my first trip to Korea in 1976 when I was ten years old, we visited members of my mother’s family in their Seoul mansions and fancy high-rise apartments. My father’s side still lived in the countryside. One of his cousins was a taxi driver. His brother’s house didn’t have indoor plumbing. Even so, my father’s family still owned land in the hills between the cities of Kongju and Taejon, including various plots where our ancestors were buried and an entire mountain made of granite. It used to house my grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s tombs.

“My grandparents gravestone from the National Cemetery.”

In 1995, my grandfather’s grave was exhumed from the mountain site and moved to the National Cemetery near Taejon. There, he joined a growing number of South Korean Patriots, generals, presidents, and politicians. From obscurity to renown, almost sixty years after his death. This event changed my father and the trajectory of my family completely.

When he and my mother moved into Mirabella in 2015, I had urged my father to sell off the land that was still under his name. He was the patriarchal head of the family—the eldest son of the eldest son, the one supposedly in charge.

“Dad, I don’t want to have to deal with land in Korea after you die.” My father discovered that a family member had forged his name on one of the land deeds, as did another relative from the generation before him. My father lived across the ocean—his relations were hoping he wouldn’t notice. My father sued the family member for wrongful ownership in 2010 and won. For a cut of the proceeds, he asked a more trustworthy relative to help broker the sale of the granite mountain to a developer. My father wanted to donate his portion to Kongju High School to establish a scholarship in my grandfather’s name, honoring my grandfather’s protests against the Japanese principal when he was a second-year student in 1927. The protests that caused my grandfather to be expelled before he could graduate.

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ON THE TRAIN, THE KIDS pick window seats, on opposite sides of the aisle. I sit next to Kiki and Steve next to Owen. Springy cushion, retractable footrest, glossy travel magazine in the pouch in front of us—it’s a plushy, comfortable ride. As soon as the landscape changes from extreme urban density to apartment building domino pieces, my brother’s wife offers to take the kids to the snack car for treats. I close my eyes and focus my attention on my breath like my grief counselor taught me.

Breathe in, breathe out. Stay calm. Don’t get irritated by the children. Remember why you are here.

WE NEVER THOUGHT MY FATHER would go first. My mother was the one with dementia, the one clearly fading away. Dad had his octogenarian ills, for sure—Meniere’s disease, high blood pressure, balance issues—but overall, he was healthy and physically active. At Mirabella, he attended exercise classes, joined the Foreign Affairs club, and led an origami class, folding one thousand paper cranes to display in the memory care ward where my mother lived.

When he and my mother moved into Mirabella in 2015, I had urged my father to sell off the land that was still under his name. He was the patriarchal head of the family—the eldest son of the eldest son, the one supposedly in charge…“Dad, I don’t want to have to deal with land in Korea after you die.”

He hated to go to the doctor but he did so right away when he found blood in his stool. He needed to take care of my mother when she returned from memory care: “She might get better and be herself again,” he told me, knowing that dementia was degenerative. He wanted to see Owen, his firstborn grandchild, graduate high school. He had so many reasons to live.

Stomach cancer, he explained, was more prevalent in the U.S. for those of Asian descent. It was also the number-one type of cancer in South Korea. Diet and the bacteria H. pylori, which he most likely encountered as a child before the war, were to blame. He sailed through chemo with all the hair on his head. Radiation was another matter. Horrible stomach pain, no appetite, sleepless nights, loss of bladder control. Ed bought him CBD gummies to help him sleep. I saw him fall over the bedside table on a visit. He fell again after I left, trying to get up from the recliner in the living room. The falls continued—some he told us about, some he didn’t.

“Family photo from the National Cemetery in Daejeon, South Korea, 2019.”

The blows to the head showed up on his final visit to the emergency room. Here, here, and here. The young resident pointed to the CT scan, to the dark spots in the right hemisphere of my father’s brain. The cerebral tissue swelled over the fissure line that used to divide it into two equal halves.

My father waited until Ed left with his family for spring break for the fall to end all falls. He could still speak when I arrived at the OHSU Hospital on the hill, dragging my jumbo wheeled bag behind me. I walked past a padded cell with a screaming woman in a straitjacket, indigent men in wheelchairs parked in the hall. My father’s room was at the end of the hallway.

We never thought my father would go first. My mother was the one with dementia, the one clearly fading away. Dad had his octogenarian ills, for sure—Meniere’s disease, high blood pressure, balance issues—but overall, he was healthy and physically active. At Mirabella, he attended exercise classes, joined the Foreign Affairs club, and led an origami class, folding one thousand paper cranes to display in the memory care ward where my mother lived.

“Ma-ga-ret,” he said. “Take this thing off of me.”

He clawed at the spine-stabilizing doughnut pillow placed around his neck. Tore it off.

“Dad,” I re-Velcroed the doughnut, “I’m as stubborn as you are, you might as well give up.”

He glared at me with his “how dare you” face and ripped off the pillow again. I strapped it back on while looking straight into his eyes without my usual smile. He eventually got tired and dozed off before being transferred to the ICU. I didn’t realize that this would be our last exchange of true emotion.

He was never himself again.

Order the book.

HIS NURSE TOLD ME THAT we didn’t have to listen to the doctors, the ones who recommended brain surgery. “Surgeons always recommend surgery, because that’s what they do.” The decision was up to the family, not them. If we didn’t think my eighty-four-year-old, cancer patient father could survive the cutting open of his skull and the long recovery period, where he would most likely need to relearn how to speak and walk, we didn’t have to follow the surgeon’s recommendation. I conferred with Ed and my father’s geriatrician.

My father’s identity was tied to his intellect. A life without reasoning would be a life not worth living. Dad would rather be dead. We all agreed.

April 2018, his final days. We elected to transport him back to Mirabella so he could be near my mother. She wasn’t able to speak, but she could still hear and held my father’s hand as he took his last labored breath.

Needless to say, my father died without dealing with the family land. As my mother’s power of attorney and the executor of their estate, I was left in charge.