Page xv →Preface “Footprints on the Sands of Time”

Lulu E. Frey (1868–1921) was a first-generation missionary deployed by the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS) of the Methodist Episcopal Church (North) to Korea in 1893. She served as teacher at Ewha Haktang (School), the first girls’ school in Korea founded by the WFMS in 1886, and principal from 1907 until her death in 1921. Frey established the college program at Ewha in 1910. In 1970, Ewha Womans University was able to acquire Frey’s letters to her family from 1893–1918 as well as the short journal (1919–21) that covers her activities during her last furlough, when she met and communicated actively with fellow missionaries as well as Koreans in America working for independence from Japan, including Seo Jaepil (Dr. Philip Jaisohn) and Syngman Rhee, later to become the first president of the Republic of Korea. The daughter of Frey’s younger sister Georgia, Myra (née LeSourd), Mrs. Willis T. Bradlee, gifted the letters to the school. They were accompanied by a letter Frey received from Syngman Rhee in 1920. Though they are meticulously preserved, the task of transcribing and publishing the 105 letters has been delayed for several reasons. Although Frey’s handwriting is on the whole quite clear, the fineness of the writing paper, often written on both sides, meant that Frey’s words were not always readily legible. Some of the letters written during illness or times of turbulence display a much more hurried hand, and the fragile condition of others rendered them difficult to read. The personal nature of the letters demanded painstaking research into family members, friends, and professional associates in America for whom the university had no records. The references to the many fellow missionaries not only in Korea, but also in Japan and China also took time to unravel. The process of puzzling out names of steamships, warships, local businesspeople, and acquaintances both in America and in Korea, was at times a guessing game that took further detective work. On the whole Frey’s spelling and punctuation have been preserved throughout. Her emphasis by underlining, however, has been changed to italics in the printed text. The Page xvi →format of locations and dates that open each letter has been edited for consistency, and locations have been added to the headings of Frey’s journal entries.

The letters are addressed to three members of Frey’s immediate family: father (10), mother (82), and younger sister Georgia (16). As the table of contents reveals, there are a few letters kept by the family written by other people and forwarded to or by Frey. They include notably a letter written by the founder of Ewha Haktang, Mrs. Mary F. Scranton, dated July 20, 1894, addressed to Frey and fellow missionary Josephine O. Paine. The two were summering in Japan as war broke out between China and Japan on the Korean peninsula, and they were unable to return as planned. There is also a letter to Frey from a teacher, Yukiye Nakao, at the Methodist girls’ school in Nagasaki, who had studied art in America and returned to Japan on the steamer China that brought Frey out on her first journey in 1893. The last letter of the collection is from Syngman Rhee writing to Frey, who was on furlough, from Honolulu. Frey asks her mother soon after arriving in Korea to keep her letters as a record for future reference to recall all that seemed so fresh and new to her as she embarked upon her career. She writes, “So if you can keep my letters for me I will find them helpful when I come home and am expected to talk. I shall forget about those things which seemed strange to me at first and the same to you and others, by that time, for already I am becoming accustomed to many things” (February 20, 1894).

As a result, the bulk of the letters covers the earliest years, with 75 letters from September 1893 to the end of 1896 when Frey’s mother was most faithful in preserving them, not only as a record for her daughter’s future use, but also for the family to send out to various local and evangelical publications as foreign news from a young female missionary in an exotic land. Such material was important for keeping aflame the female missionary movement that was the largest organized woman’s public cause in the second half of nineteenth-century America. There are no letters from 1897, and letters thereafter are sparse and few and far between. The last of the five letters from 1898 dated November 23 and addressed to her father reports fully on the political upheaval caused by the Independence Club’s activities at the time. There is a sudden surge of letters (16) from 1904 that covers the tension building up to the Russo-Japanese War. The years covered in Frey’s letters were some of the most tumultuous in all Korean history when the tiny nation became the choice morsel sought out by all the neighboring great powers. Frey’s letters report on the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), the queen’s assassination by the Japanese (October 1895), the king’s exile at the Russian legation (1896–97), and the Russo-Japanese War Page xvii →(1904–5), amid the day-to-day school activities of teaching, provisioning, nursing, and burying the dead.

These letters provide a fascinating glimpse into the day-to-day workings of running a school, building for school and church, traveling, evangelical itinerating, even while witnessing war and political turmoil that mark the close of the Joseon Dynasty. The tone and tenor of the letters addressed to her father, mother, and sister Georgia—the three main recipients of the letters—are quite different. The most personal and intimate details are reserved for her mother who is her primary confidante and mentor in the early letters. The deep love she expresses for her mother reflects the kind of affect often demonstrated in female friendships and mother-and-daughter relationships in the Victorian period. When Frey realizes that her mother often reworks even some of the personal missives directed to her for publication, she pleads that she cease to do so, because she does not want to think of a larger public when addressing her own mother. Discussion of patterns, fabrics, gloves, and hats as well as financial details concerning insurance and loans take up a large part of many letters and provide a valuable overview of the day-to-day concerns of women trying to maintain a certain standard of living in the period. Living in decency and comfort is not merely a personal ambition, but the foundation for Victorian women’s ideal of “civilized” life centered on female taste and judgment. Assurances of financial assistance and ideas for fiscal planning make up a large portion of letters written after the sudden death of the father in 1900. Georgia is only a child of 11 in 1893, and so the earliest letters addressed to her reflect the care and admonishments to a beloved baby sister. Frey often advises her mother on how to best perfect Georgia’s education, wishing for her a more complete education than the one she herself received. As Georgia grows older and once their father passes away, Frey begins to rely more on her sister for the care of their mother.

The letters to her father are from the outset to his death more focused on official business of historical and public concern. For instance Frey reserves a full report on “the affair of the top-knots” for a lengthy historical explanation to her father about why the political mandate to cut off the topknots of adult men represents such a traumatic historical turning point for the nation (February 13, 1896). Similarly the arrest of members of the Independence Club recounted with citation from a published version of the events in The Korean Repository (November 23, 1898) demonstrates how Frey carefully planned and crafted letters to her father with confidence of publication. The daughter’s official position as missionary in a foreign country seems to have been cause Page xviii →for great pride and increased family prestige. Frey repeatedly begs her parents not to try to publish every letter she sends home, pleading that she is only an “ordinary missionary”:

You can easily tell when a letter is proper for print. I write you or father a letter which might be printed with one or two omissions on an average once a month and that is much too often. They will soon get tired of me and laugh about them appearing so often. I wrote about the eclipse some time ago which, I thought if you liked could be printed and a letter to father about my walk outside the city which I wrote with a thought of the “cold printer’s ink.” I don’t know what more to say to make you understand me fully. When you cut and arrange my letters, change the rhetoric and correct all mistakes it is no longer mine but yours. If a letter is long you can omit personal things here and there but don’t mix several things out of as many letters together. If there are any special things you want me to write about, tell me and I’ll do what I can. I feel badly that you care for none of my letters except those with which you can show me off, as it were. I am only an ordinary missionary even if I am your daughter. (her emphasis, May 22, 1894)

The letters on the eclipse and her walk outside the city mentioned above are not part of the collection held by the Ewha Archives, and we can assume that many of the letters written with publication in mind were sent off and never retrieved.

The letters that are published here in full for the first time with a critical introduction and notes provide important primary source material for students and scholars interested in the history of evangelical movements, missionary work, modern Korean history, reception of Western ideas, education for women, and incipient feminism both in America and in Korea. Because the letters are deeply personal and not primarily dealing with matters of official business, they do not offer any substantial new material on matters of school or Korean history. Rather the intimate accounts of encounters with individual students, fellow missionaries, other foreigners in Korea at the time, and the frank depictions of customs, scenery, food, and travel offer us a rare glimpse into the close texture of the lives and sentiments of the first-generation missionaries in the country known to the West as “the hermit kingdom.”

The quote that heads this preface, “Footprints on the sands of time,” is from the well-known nineteenth-century poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow titled “A Psalm of Life” (1838):

Page xix → Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time.

Frey recounts how the American Minister at the US legation in Korea, John M. B. Sill (1831–1901), employed the quote in a talk given on Tract Sunday to urge why even ordinary people must try to follow the tracks (pun on tracts) of Jesus: “He said Longfellow called them ‘footprints’ and gave the quotation ‘footprints on the sands of time.’ Spoke of the footprints of Jesus and how while tracts were good, ‘tracks’ or the Christ-like life before the people was better. Think of it—A diplomat preaching to missionaries” (October 22, 1894). The effusive Victorian sentimentality that made “A Psalm of Life” one of the most popular poems of its time also renders it less popular today, but its optimistic spirit and religious enthusiasm urging Christian action espoused the spirit of many young Americans who joined organizations like the Student Volunteer Association (SVA), which sought to evangelize the entire world in their generation. Frey always thought of herself as merely an ordinary missionary, and she is not celebrated enough even in Korea where she played such a pioneering role in female education. It is my hope that these letters, her “footprints on the sands of time,” will demonstrate how faith and quiet fervor can effect transformative change despite the self-perceived smallness and ordinariness of the actors who take part in this history.

I would like to thank my coeditor, Duk-Ae Chung, for her enthusiasm and passion for this project. Thanks also go to Hyunji Son at Ewha Archives, who provided assistance and research every step along the way. The project could not have reached completion without the leadership of the Director of Ewha Archives, Ok-kyoung Baek, and the generous support of Ewha Presidents Eun Mee Kim and Hyang-Sook Lee. All shortcomings and errors are my own.