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 philanthropy 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. Kwangju station had been opened five years earlier by Eugene Bell, middle row. 

I have always associated my father’s family with what seemed to 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.  It had been opened by pioneer missionaries Rev. Eugene Bell and Grandpa’s friend from Norfolk, Virginia, Dr. Clement Owen only five years earlier, and Owen had recently died of illness, a painful death since he had to be carried from an outlying village by pony cart before succumbing at the mission clinic. His tombstone is prominent in the little cemetery on top of our Kwangju compound. A Korean newspaper published my picture with his tombstone, exactly 100 years after Grandpa had visited the same spot. As kids we had played inappropriately all over the graves, and Owen’s monument was the most prominent, but I never knew of his relationship with Grandpa. Just behind his grave was that of Eugene Bell, who we knew to be the founder of the station. 

Despite the sadness, Grandpa, then 34, comes away with an optimistic attitude, writing to his benefactors in the States that they would be impressed by the devotion of the many Korean Christians already congregating and that they needed to provide more funds for the vibrant mission work. [See Appendix Log of a Newcomer.] And partly because of the increased funding, a little more than forty years later, I showed up in Kwangju as a three-year-old with my two older siblings and parents.

In March 1954, Kwangju might no longer have been the “most wicked” city in Korea as Grandpa’s colleague had described it. Mother would probably reserve that moniker for Seoul, but it was about as dismal and scary a place as you could find in the whole world, outside of famine and revolution plagued China that is.  I don’t remember it that way; for me it has always been a bright, sunny place, as the Chinese characters in its name (Kwang 光 for bright, Ju 州 for district) suggests. But this may have had a lot to do with the fact that my southern facing bedroom window, in our first house, that I shared with George until he and my older sister Mary went away to boarding school in Japan, had a wonderful view looking over a mysterious grave mound under a tall pine tree, then down and over the walnut and maple trees in the front yard of our compound, what we called the Triangle, and up at the spectacular Mudungsan.

Mudungsan is the most distinctive physical feature of Kwangju, forming its backdrop, one of the larger stand-alone mountains in a country filled with rugged  

ranges and valleys and series of mountains connected to each other.  Mudungsan, in contrast, stands alone.  Its name, “peerless mountain" in Chinese characters suggests this reputation which I’d say applies as well to the city.  Without peer doesn’t mean the tallest or the biggest, just that is not equal or copied anywhere.  Later, I will argue this moniker applies to Korea itself and helps account for some of its problems in the world.  Korea really doesn’t have a peer competitor or friend, certainly not in its region. Taiwan could be but sadly it isn’t, except in making semiconductors. Japan is similarly economically but is much bigger and within memory, colonized Korea. China and Russia, of course, are world giants. In this way Korea is like America, only at the smaller end of the spectrum.  “Without peer” sounds nice but, without friends, can be lonely. 

As much as I liked looking up at Mudungsan, I didn’t climb it very often. Five times in fifteen years living there, and, except half-way by Jeep or Land Rover, never in my many later visits.  Like much in Korea, it is a bit of a mirage, not quite what it seems.  Another way of interpreting its name is shaman mountain, or as we might have said, “witch doctor” mountain, reflecting the oddness and mystery of Korea, and even some fears.  At night, especially in late fall, it would burst into fire, as grave keepers and small farmers burned off the grass, thought to make it grow better the next year, leaving charred black spots all over its sides.  

The view of the mountain from the city perspective, moreover, is misleading, looking like one unified formation. In fact, there are multiple smaller rises in front which come together to look like one. At the rearmost top, near the ROK army radar site, are a series of perpendicular basalt rock formations, almost like ancient doldrums, stone gods that no one knows anything about, that I reached by foot just once.  Mother, whose family had a summer camp site near the top three decades earlier, said she remembered her mother, Annis Barron Hopper, talking about running into a Siberian tiger, although all we heard were dogs barking and men, singing at the top of their lungs, a health measure, early every morning.  The several Buddhist temples we visited along either of the two trails up to the peak were pleasant and beautiful places where my dad would get into interesting conversations with the monks about religion, using them in his Sunday sermons. I always liked the skilled but still handmade stonework, like something I would dig out on our compound, although much nicer.

Once, we were hiking with Dr. Ronald Dietrick, Uncle Ronnie, and happened upon the West German Ambassador and his aide who had holed up in the eastern side temple for several days.  They had been touring the countryside down from Seoul and he had become deathly sick, so Dietrick took him in his ambulance-red Toyota Land Cruiser (everyone else had grey or blue Land Rovers) back into town to the mission hospital where he recovered. Years later the Ambassador returned the favor and hosted us in his palatial residence in Munich as I travelled through Europe with the Dietrick's on the way back to college.

My strongest memory of the mountain, pleasant but scary at the same time, is of a picnic hike up the western side of the mountain with my dad’s entire Honam Seminary staff and students. It is something Koreans love to do in big groups, carrying with them their elaborate and wonderful, if complicated, picnic meals.  As I remember, but not too clearly as I was only about 8 years old, after dusk the women performed the famous ganggangsulae, bringing the little American boy into the line dance. It’s hard to describe, something you must experience, but hearing that mystical repetitive music and the endless dance on the edge of this big dark mountain, you know instinctively there is something different and more than a little mysterious about Korea and Kwangju.

My memories of sunny Kwangju aside, facts in 1954 suggest there was danger and trouble.  The Korean armistice had been signed only eight months earlier and I’m told we were the first foreign dependents allowed back into the country. The southwest corner of Korea is 300 miles from the DMZ, but this had long been the most rebellious part of the peninsula, far from the capital with leftist sympathizers prior to the war and now communist “guerrillas” marauding in the Chidi mountains south and east of Kwangju, having been cut off from the north by McArthur’s Inchon landing near Seoul three years earlier and never completely tracked down.

Kwangju’s history, of course, goes back much further, in fact at least two thousand years to 57 BC when it was listed as an administrative town of the southwestern Paekche Kingdom, complete with a short wall and a small castle, torn down about the time that Grandpa first visited. This history I didn’t know or appreciate growing up, certainly a failing in our American centric studies. 

Koreans refer to their “Three Kingdoms” era, before the Shilla Kingdom in southeast Korea (Kyongju), forcibly unified the country.  China’s Tang dynasty had allied with the then weak Shilla to defeat the powerful northern Koguryo Kingdom, considered a threat to northeastern China. It is now essentially the territory of North Korea, still with its long border with China and a small river estuary border with Russia.  The Tang Dynasty Chinese then tried to extend their influence to Paekche in the southwest, but distances were too far and they overreached, losing a major war with its former ally, Shilla which picked up the pieces, creating the first unified Korea in 667 AD.  

With its ports and easy access to China and Japan, Paekche, now essentially known as the Honam region, was a center of commerce and culture and held various alliances with Japanese and Chinese warlords to protect against attacks from other Korean kingdoms. Paekche always seems to have come up short despite, or perhaps because, it was by far the largest source of rice. Honam has a wetter and warmer climate and large fertile plains missing in the rest of the peninsula.  Consequently, it was densely populated in small villages and sought after by warriors from the north and east.

At least that is my Kwangju version of the story—and I should point out my major discipline is economics, not Asian history. But some things never seem to change. Koreans love to talk about unity, probably because that is often what they are missing.  It has not been unusual for them to reach out to others for help against domestic rivals.  And it is certainly true of the churches. My Dad’s saddest moments in Korea were a huge split in the Korean Presbyterian church in 1961 with both camps wanting the Americans to support their side.  But then I suppose our ancestors in America did the same in our Revolutionary and Civil Wars, as do our current stock of politicians.  

In 1954, all of this was changing. East Asia’s ancient imperial systems were in shreds, replaced with tenuous ties to an American occupation army in Japan and southern Korea, an unintentional artifact of Pearl Harbor and the opening phase of America’s “Cold War” active defense against Chinese and Soviet Communism.  Even in this bread basket of Korea grain was in short supply since the war had disrupted planting for two years, so barley was mixed in by the government to make rice go further.  Bags of wheat often had American “handshake” symbols emblazoned on them, “Aid from the people of America” provided by the United States Overseas Mission (USOM), later changed to US Agency for International Development (AID).  At the time, this was helpful to be sure as one of history’s worst famines was in full sway just across the shallow Yellow Sea in Mao’s newly “liberated” China.  The Communist Party there had taken the land from the large owners, often killing them, given it to the tenants, and then quickly taken it back in a massive “collectivization” program, just behind what we obliquely referred to as the “bamboo curtain”. 

Bamboo, my favorite vegetation on our station, was much too nice a characterization and I’m sure to our parents it didn’t seem like enough of a barrier, especially to my dad who had been born in inland China and had grown up just 400 miles to the west of Kwangju in the similar sized ancient Chinese city of Xuzhou. Hundreds of thousands of people must have been dying there simply for lack of food.  And as with any gardener who has experienced it, bamboo, like revolution, spreads like wildfire. 

But in southern Korea, behind the strong arm of the US military, hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid, and even a little help from the CIA, there were glimpses of light.