Chapter 2. A Bright City in a Wicked World

Picture:  Kwangju Mission Meeting, 1910.  Frank A. Brown, in black suit, is representing the Layman's Movement on his way to his permanent post in the Presbyterian mission station in Xuzhou, China.  He is the first of our family to visit Kwangju. The station had been opened in 1905 by Eugene Bell, middle row. 

I have always associated my father’s family with what seemed o me like a distant China, and the city of Xuzhou, but an irony in my story is that he was the first in our family to visit Kwangju. Not the Hoppers on my mother’s side of the family who moved to Korea ten years later. In August 1910, Grandpa undertook a whirlwind trip through the Southern Presbyterian Mission stations in East Asia on his way to his permanent posting in Xuzhou. He had been tasked by the Mission Board to do a survey of East Asian mission property and to write a report for the Laymen Movement, a large group of American businessmen who were providing millions of dollars in funding church mission projects. After two weeks travelling by train though a flood ravaged Japan, taking a ferry from Fukuoka to Pusan, Korea, a coastal steamer around to Mokpo and upriver to Naju, then the provincial capital, he was met by the Henry Bell, (top row in picture) the son of station founder, Eugene Bell, (middle row) and by horse they rode into Kwangju, reaching there, according to his diary, at 11:30 PM, August 28, 1910–a date time stamp for our family’s connection to my favorite city.

A colleague had told him Kwangju had a reputation of being “the most wicked in the country,” a frightful statement given the shape of society in the late Chosen Dynasty, but it seemed to him the city was turning a corner. Grandpa spent nine days there with 40 some American Presbyterian missionaries from the southwest part of Korea who were holding their annual meeting at the new mission station.   --- Continued)