Chapter 1. A Bright City

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This early Kodachrome picture was probably taken by Tommy Brown on an exploratory trip to Kwangju in 1952, after the retreat by the North Korean army.  I have the original image but no proof of when it was taken.   anmy mother and siblings arrived about a year later, from Japan.   It is taken from the Wilson's house on missionary hill.  Yangnim church would be built in front of the treed area. 

Kwangju, or Gwangju in the modern Korean transliteration, is the first place I called home, and it still often seems that way.  It might have been Pyongyang, city of peace as Americans used to call the current capital of North Korea, where my parents first met.   Or Xuzhou, along the old Yellow River course in east-central China, near the birthplace of Confucius, the first home of my father.  Or Mokpo, a seaport on the far southwest corner of Korea, the same for my mother.  Or simply Gastonia, North Carolina where I was born in September 1951, the hometown of basketball great James Worthy and once the “yarn capital of the world”, then home of some of the largest textile plants in the world and a big labor strike in 1929. A troublesome town, in a way, like Kwangju.  

Kwangju also has a troubled past and a large textile plant, the Il-Shin Cotton Spinning Mill. I remember visiting it on a school field trip, the owner was an elder in one of the churches. And a pencil factory, taking advantage of South Korea’s one large natural resource, graphite—helpful above all to North Korea and its graphite modulated nuclear weapons plant.  Home of the Kumho Asiana conglomerate, originally a local taxi and bus company that expanded worldwide, shifting from bus support to its famous auto tires.And even linked to Asiana Airlines for modern transportation. In typical Korean fashion, both firms were highly leveraged, their owners taking on debt rather than selling equity, and thus fell to take-overs when interest rates rose—Kumho Tire to a Chinese firm and Asiana Airlines to Korean Air.

In many ways Kwangju is an average city in East Asia, large, with a million and a half residents, but not huge. Industrial in a new way, now producing KIA automobiles. My latest car is a sleek KIA Stinger, expensive for a KIA but cheap for comparable BMWs.  I was disappointed to learn from the door plate that it was built in another town close to Seoul, but the company’s main export factory is still in Kwangju.  Its predecessor in Kwangju, Asia Motors, built odd looking Jeep knockoffs and had its start as Korea’s first bicycle manufacturer.  Now KIA is building lots of cars not far from our family home in Atlanta, Georgia and is aiming at the electric car market in China. I would say lots of luck with that. China will return the aim.

Kwangju is in the center of a traditional large rice paddy region that feeds the country and will never throw off its rural and agricultural roots.  Famous for its opposition politics, especially what it calls a massacre in 1980 and what the rest of the country, until recently, referred to as an incident. And it is the home region of former “democracy” president, Kim Dae Jung, but no other president, yet.  Chatting with a Korean-American woman in our cul-de-sac in Oak Hill, Virginia, walking our dogs, I mention I am just back from visiting Kwangju, and she beams; “Oh the birthplace of our democracy”. Always a thorn in the side of the Seoul government and famous for its watermelons and its big “peerless” mountain, Mudungsan 无 等 山. 

Many South Korean males have been to Kwangju but don’t like it much since it’s the site of one of their basic infantry and artillery training camps.  It doesn’t seem to attract many visitors from other parts of the country, or from abroad, but it does have a big airport, built by the US Air Force, not the old metal strips but concrete runways long enough to accommodate B-52s so that they could attack Vietnam, back in the 1960s. I don’t think it was ever used that way. I remember thinking as it was being built, these things use up a lot of rice paddies.  

Modern Korea can’t stay still and a new airport, unfortunately with a shorter runway, has been built at Muan, 20 miles southwest toward Mokpo, the site of the disastrous Jeju Airline crash in December 2024 killing 178 passengers and crew. A flock of geese likely brought it down; we used to hunt them in that area back in the 1950s.  A more positive influence, but still a bit dark, may come with the election of Kwangju native Han Kang, the first Asian to win the Nobel laureate in literature based on her poetry. According to the Nobel committee, she “confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. The Kwangju massacre figures importantly in her story. She was born there just as I was leaving for college in Tennessee. 

But why, for me, Kwangju, or even Korea?  It’s my favorite story.  In 1937 my parents, two East Asia-born American teenagers, met each other in of all places, Pyongyang Foreign School (PFS), a missionary boarding school in Japanese occupied Korea, four years before Pearl Harbor.  She was a junior having grown up in Mokpo where her parents were Presbyterian missionaries and he a senior, a refugee of sorts from China, also of Presbyterian missionary parents.  The Japanese, not satisfied with Korea and Manchuria, which they had taken in 1910, had just started their war on China proper, bombing Shanghai and forcing Dad from his boarding school there, and from his parents’ home in Xuzhou 徐州, now in Jiangsu Province, causing him to transfer to the Pyongyang missionary boarding school for his senior year. From Chinese government controlled Xuzhou, he travelled by train to the German influenced and US Navy protected Qingdao, where the family often sought refuge from Chinese warlords, by ship to Japanese owned Dalien, then known as the earlier Russian named Port Authuor, and by train across the Yalu River into Japan’s Korean territory and Pyongyang.  He writes he had to get his first independent US passport to cross all the fluid border lines. Other young Americans from China had come also, including the Bell sisters, Ruth and Virginia, also missionary kids. Ruth married the famous evangelist Billy Graham several years later in a wedding attended by my parents in Montreat, North Carolina. My dad liked to joke about hiding their wedding rings and swimming in ice cold Lake Susan. And Virginia married John Sommerville, a long-time missionary professor in Mokpo and Taejon, Korea, and our high school baseball coach. They also settled in retirement in Montreat. 

Also from China, were Frank and Jack Lilley, older brothers of James Lilley, later CIA Station Chief in Beijing and US Ambassador to Korea and China. I worked closely for Ambassador Lilley on North Korean and Kwangju issues in the US embassy in Seoul in the mid-1980s, one of my most interesting assignments and my favorite high-level boss. He moved my office from the innards of the chancellery, behind prison-like security bars, to a little anteroom with a window, right next to the door to his suite, where he could look at my intel material and I could see everyone coming and going from his office.  The downside was I had to take all the material back to my secure barred office and lock it up every evening. 

One day, discussing our China backgrounds during my morning intel brief, he pointedly told me his brother Frank did not like the Pyongyang school, thinking it was too strict in a Presbyterian kind of way.  I’m sure it was. They had a chapel service every morning and bedtime at 9 PM. But I got to tell him my mother was the valedictorian of her graduating class in 1939 as the Japanese were closing in.  

Ten years ago, I helped him climb the stairs to the podium in the Director of National Intelligence Headquarters auditorium in Mclean, Virginia, getting his last accommodation from the Intelligence Community. He was appreciative of the honor but, like me, more than a little frustrated with our tied-in-knots Intelligence Community. 

In the late 1930s, northern Korea was firmly in Japanese control and was far safer, at least for an American, and more prosperous, than China which was in full revolt.  Dad and his new roommate, Joe Hopper, later his brother-in-law and my uncle, remembered watching Japanese war equipment rumbling by on the trunk Pusan-to-Siberia railroad track right next to their dorm room window on the way to Mukden, Manchuria, and Japanese pilots practicing bombing runs from an airfield in downtown Pyongyang, sometimes buzzing their school—this in 1937.  Uncle Joe had been born in Kwangju in 1922, as there was no mission hospital in Mokpo. And Kwangju, or more accurately, the Honam region, including Chonju, its ancient capital, never seemed to let him go, either.

Looking back through the mists of history, it is hard to imagine my parents not taking us to southern Korea and Kwangju in 1954, following two big wars, the war with Japan that liberated but split Korea, and the war with China and the Soviet Union, fought over that split.  Everything seemed to work out so well for us there.  But there was nothing inevitable about it.  First was my dad’s decision to go into the ministry after his World War II service and become a missionary, following the path of his parents and older brother, Frank, my “Japan uncle”, a medical doctor in China and thirty years in Japan. 

One isn’t born a missionary. As they say, it’s a “calling”.  I don’t think he made up his mind until he was finishing up his army tour which had taken him back to China for a year after the Japanese surrender, where he investigated missing or killed US soldiers for the US Army Signal Corps.

His parents had already returned to Xuzhou and while visiting them, on leave from Shanghai, but still with his jeep, he happened to come across the gravesite of perhaps the most famous killed in action (KIA) of all, John Birch, an intelligence officer for the OSS in China, and former Baptist missionary, who had been slain by communist troops near Xuzhou just days after the Japanese surrender.  Birch had gotten into an argument with a PLA officer during an argument as both of their companies were trying to take over a surrendering Japanese base, and the famous viciously anti-communist and right-wing society was later named after him. Dad probably knew none of this but came across Birch’s obscure grave site on the hill near his home. The base of the monument is still there although the remains are said to have been moved to America in 1952. With help from the friendly museum historian, I found the site deep in the brush years later. 

As daddy was preparing to end his four-year Army enlistment, his father, Frank A. Brown Sr., Grandpa, sent a letter to his friend, General Joseph Stillwell, former commander of US forces in China’s wartime capital of Chengdu, and Chief of Staff to the Chinese president, Chiang Kai Shek. Grandpa suggested his son would be useful as an intelligence officer in China as World War II was ending.  Stillwell responded positively, thanking him for his hospitality, pointing back to when he was an army attaché in Xuzhou covering one of few Chinese victories against Japan, just south of the city.  So, it seems Grandpa would have been happy with my career choice. He also may have had some sway with the General of the Army, then Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, also from Virginia and with whom Grandpa and Grandmother visited in Xuzhou during Marshall’s fateful, historic, and failed effort to bring the Communists and Nationalists together amid their civil war. 

I doubt many young soldiers wanted to stay in the army after their four-year war enlistments ended.  It seemed Dad thought he might join the US Foreign Service, as would be natural for anyone with his background and experiences, and at Davidson College in North Carolina he had majored in history, good preparation for that. But he once told me he much preferred the “shirt sleeves” of the US AID officers compared to the stuffy diplomatic service, possibly thinking of his good friend, Rufus Long, a down-to-earth USAID officer in Seoul with Presbyterian roots also in North Carolina.  But in 1947, closing out his army tour with a flight out of China, he decided to enter the ministry and become a missionary, like his father and brother, and on returning to the states, took mother and his two young kids, Mary, and  George, to Union Seminary in Richmond and then to Princeton Seminary in New Jersey.  Shortly thereafter he applied, and with Mother was selected by the Southern Presbyterian Mission Board to go to China.  

I don’t know how much mother influenced him.  While they had met in Pyongyang, they hadn’t dated until college and had married after he graduated from Davidson and, in the World War II Army, was doing signals intelligence work in Arlington Hall, where the Foreign Service now has its training institute, and Vint Hills Farm, near where we live in Oak Hillnorthern Virginia. She graduated from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, near his mother’s home town of Atlanta. Both sets of parents had lived in Montreat, North Carolina, thea retreat center from the mission field where their parents often visited and lived in retirement, and they were married in Gaiter Chapel there.  Maybe her choice was the missionary, Korea part, and Dad’s choice the China part.  But I’m just guessing. If so, Mother eventually won out on both counts. 

In late 1948, as they were preparing to go to China while at Princeton Seminary, Mao’s Communist forces—the newly organized People’s Liberation Army—were crushing Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies all around my father’s hometown of Xuzhou, the decisive Huaihai Campaign of the Chinese Civil War.  Grandpa and two other American missionaries remained in Xuzhou after the fighting began, carrying out relief work and keeping the mission hospital functioning as roughly a million Communist and Nationalist soldiers fought across the surrounding plains in the climactic struggle of that war. It was a catastrophic defeat for the Nationalists, who lost or were captured in numbers approaching half a million—comparable in scale to total U.S. military losses in all of World War II.   The Nationalist army defense effectively collapsed in late November, 1949, with the PLA capturing Xuzhou. After weeks in what might best be described as quiet house arrest, Grandpa—already in his late sixties—was discreetly issued a military rail pass by his Communist captors, allowing him to leave the city and flee south, crossing the Yangtze on a little boat near Nanjing into rapidly shrinking Nationalist territory, then on to Shanghai and back to the United States, rejoining Grandmother Charlotte after forty years in China—a sad and final journey home.

He published a little pamphlet about the whole experience.  It might have been like his father, George Henry Brown, experienced as a young soldier in the Civil War battle of Petersburg, Virginia eighty years earlier, who also wrote up his war experiences. Both Brown men were helpless observers at the losing ends of disastrous siege battles that ended hopeless civil wars, two of the deadliest in world history but a world apart. His father was a young teenager. Grandpa was my age, close to 70. Both were captured; George Henry may have defected at the last moment to the Union army, but both were ultimately released to write about what had happened. 

Back in Princeton Seminary, with China closing off to Christian missions, my parents shifted sights and aimed to go to Korea, now liberated from Japan but split in two, no doubt my mother’s preference as she could return to the land of her birth.  For Dad he could join with his former roommate, now brother-in-law Joe Hopper, already a missionary in Chonju, seventy miles north of Kwangju, Korea, but it meant he had to learn Korean.  

Nothing was easy. I have a church bulletin of a worship service, June 25, 1950, the date with a penciled circle around it. Two brothers, Frank Brown and Dad, always known as Tommy, would be leading the service that Sunday morning. They were in Welch, West Virginia visiting their father, Frank Sr. and their mother Charlotte, who was dying of bone cancer, just two years after fleeing the Communist take-over of Xuzhou.  

The bulletin noted that Frank Jr. and his family were medical missionaries assigned to war- torn Osaka and Kobe, Japan, having for the moment, they thought, given up on China, and Tommy and our family were all packed up to go to Korea. Daddy’s sermon was titled, “The Uttermost Parts of the Earth” and the scripture lesson: Acts 1:8 “And ye shall witness unto me in Jerusalem, in all Judea, in Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth”. This at the very hour that communist tanks were crossing the 38th Parallel, entering Seoul in their assault against the Republic.

As they were in the receiving line after the service, someone asked Dad if he had heard the radio news that morning. No, busy working on his sermon, he had not heard of the North Korean attack. Their immediate concern, no doubt, was Mother’s family in Korea.  Her parents, Joseph and Annis Hopper, Aunt Margaret Hopper, and brother Joe and his family, living in Mokpo and Chonju respectively, had all returned to Korea soon after its liberation. In a near repeat of their evacuation nine years earlier at the beginning of the Pacific War, the Hopper’s managed to travel with other missionaries by jeep across the rugged southern Chiri mountains to Pusan and on to America. Mother’s father, Joe Hopper Sr., returned to Taegu and then back to Mokpo and Kwangju after McArthur’s Inchon landing pushed the North Koreans out of the region.  

The massive Chinese intervention soon afterwards pushed back my parent’s plan for two years, fortunately for me since I was born a year later in Gastonia, North Carolina, where Dad was serving temporarily as pastor of two small churches. A few months later things had settled down enough in southern south Korea that we embarked from Galveston Texas on a freighter, the SS Doctor Lykes, through the Panama Canal to Tokyo, Japan, for Dad’s Korean language training; two years later we took the CIA plane to Kwangju, our home for the next fifteen years.