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| Namdaemun in the early 20th century Robert Neff Collection |
By Robert Neff
Lee Chong-gun was born in the spring of 1881. According to him, he was enrolled in his local So Dang, or traditional school, but he was not one to study. His father was exasperated by the lack of ambition in his son and warned him that he had been provided with the opportunity to study and this his future failures would be his own responsibility.
Eventually Lee matured enough that he realized his father was correct so, in order to turn his life around, he went to Seoul in the winter of 1902 with the intention of making his father proud by resuming his studies. It was near Namdaemun that he saw the large posters pasted to the walls offering a new life in Hawaii:
"[We] will give [you] an opportunity. The farms will pay wages, water and hospital, and the government provides free education. The work is ten hours every day and the wages of 598 chon [cents] daily, 26 days for fifteen dollars."
Lee quickly returned home and told his father that he intended on going to Hawaii. At first his family was hesitant; after all, he was the only son, and they pointed out that he would be a stranger in a foreign land far from Korea. But he was determined and they acquiesced.
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| A Korean wedding circa 1920s Robert Neff Collection |
Like many young men, Lee arrived in Hawaii alone. It is unclear how he found companionship but some men used the mail to find a wife. Of course, there were dangers.
Apparently, in 1917, single Korean men in Hawaii could choose a woman living in Korea (by her picture) and then pay a fee of $150 to have her brought to Hawaii. That was an enormous amount of money, but there were not that many young Korean women available on the islands.
One man entrusted his friend to buy him a postal money order so that it could be sent to the broker in Korea, but his friend, instead of buying the money order, used the money to buy a ticket to the continental United States and disappeared.
Lee Bong-soo had a similar experience. He allegedly gave the money to the postal clerk who failed to provide him with a receipt but told to come back later. Lee returned but the postal clerk claimed he had returned the money.
Lee denied this. According to a Hawaiian newspaper article: "He says he paid the money for a postal order and that he now had neither money nor postal order receipt nor picture bride."
On May 21, 1993, the Honolulu Advertiser published an obituary of "Bong Hak Shin, one of Hawaii's oldest Korean picture brides who survived five husbands." She was 95 years old when she passed and her story is one of epic perseverance.
Born in the summer of 1897, she was married and widowed for the first time by the age of 17. It would not have been easy for her to remarry in Korea so she took another approach ― picture dating. At 19, she was shown a picture of a young man named Chung Yong Bae and she agreed to be his wife. She sailed to Hawaii and upon arriving discovered that she had been catfished. Chung Yong Bae was not the handsome young man in the picture, but a much older man in his 60s!
Rather than return to Korea, she reluctantly married him and two years later he passed away from sickness leaving her with a child. She then met another man, this one in his 40s, and together they shared 10 years of marriage, raising an additional four children ― but he died in 1929 leaving her once again a widow and a mother of five children.
There was something about Shin ― likely her spirit and her will to persevere ― that attracted the attention of a younger man (he was 35) named Samuel Lee. It is said that he was so smitten with her that he told her he would marry her even if she already had 10 children. She took him up on that offer.
They were married for four years and had four more children before he died from a disease.
Undaunted, she strove to make a living for herself and her nine children by doing whatever jobs she could find. And then she met Sam Shin ― a man she fell in love with. He was only a couple years older than her and their marriage lasted for 32 years before he died in 1975.
What kind of woman was Mrs. Shin? Her granddaughter described her as "a feisty, very vivacious and happy woman." She lived life to its fullest ― even attending and graduating from night school. Right up until her death she was a strong independent woman who made her own meals.
It is too bad I never had the opportunity to meet her for I am sure she could have taught me so much about not only life in Joseon Korea but about life itself. Perhaps in the near future one of her family members will write a book about her so that her experiences will not only inspire her family but the rest of us as well.
I would like to thank Diane Nars for her assistance.
Robert Neff has authored and co-authored several books, including Letters from Joseon, Korea Through Western Eyes and Brief Encounters.
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