ABSTRACT
On December 3, 1888, a twenty-three-year-old Korean exile, Yun Ch’iho, wrote a letter from Nashville, Tennessee, reporting his experiences as a foreign student in the Theological Department at Vanderbilt University. The letter was addressed to his professor, Young John Allen, at Anglo-Chinese College in Shanghai, China, where Yun had studied from 1885 to 1888. As a scion of the prestigious and powerful Haep’yong clan, Yun was a member of the Korean aristocracy and enjoyed all of the privileges of the royal Court, which included wealth, education, and the opportunity to work closely with Lucius Foote, the first American Minister of Korea. Yun’s father was a military officer who was commissioned to Japan in 1880 to learn Japanese military techniques in order to train Korean troops. The following year, the Korean government sent Yun to Japan to study the country’s modern reforms under Meiji rule. In 1883, Yun was recalled to Korea in order to serve as Foote’s interpreter. From their government positions, both Yun and his father advocated civil and military reform in Korea, which placed their family directly in the maelstrom of fiery political clashes between conservatives, who wished to maintain traditional ways, and progressives, who called for modernizing changes. In addition to intra-national strife, Yun’s family was also involved in international affairs, as China, England, France, Japan, Russia, and the United States signed treaties with Korea during the 1870s and 1880s. 1
When Yun was wrongly implicated in the abortive Korean reform coup d’état of 1884, he fled to Japan. Once in Japan, Yun initially wished to go to the United States, in order to breathe what he called “the pure, healthful and civilized air of the New World,” but he was dissuaded by high living expenses in America and instead decided to go to Shanghai. 2 Upon his arrival in Shanghai, he approached the American legation with a letter of endorsement from Foote. The consul general in Shanghai, Julius Stahl, paved the way for the Korean exile to enroll at Anglo-Chinese College. 3 Allen, a missionary with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS) and founder of Anglo-Chinese College, served not only as Yun’s academic
MECS. By the fall of 1888, Yun had completed his study, which included courses in chemistry, physics, zoology, physiology, botany, history, literature, English, and Chinese. 5 Sensing Yun’s academic and ministerial potential, Allen encouraged him to study theology at Vanderbilt, promising to make all the necessary arrangements. Upon graduating from Vanderbilt in 1891, Yun went to Allen’s alma mater, Emory College, in Oxford, Georgia, for further study in topics beyond theology. 6
Judging from his encounters with American diplomats and missionaries in Asia and his reading of American literature, Yun believed that America was a promised land representing the peak of modern civilization and Christian influence. 7 After spending three days in San Francisco, he boarded a transcontinental train to Nashville and had his first experience of racial discrimination. Hotels in Kansas City refused him lodging and forced him to sleep at the railroad station. 8 He encountered the racial realities of nineteenth-century America. The white hotel managers in Kansas City did not receive Yun as a government official or a mission school graduate but saw him as an anonymous Korean, to be treated as other persons of color. Yun learned what it meant to be thrust into a foreign world. As he better understood the social scripts embedded in American culture, Yun received an education in racial inequality, white privilege, and sexual boundaries. Poised between the cultural traditions of his homeland and his American education, Yun used this interstitial space to observe other resistance histories, political approaches, racial ideologies, and Western theologies as he developed his own Protestant beliefs. 9 He supported the American Protestant mission to Korea, but he also came to oppose the missionaries’ paternalism and strict emphasis on evangelism. After studying abroad, Yun was convinced that Koreans needed to apply Christian moral teachings to enact educational and social reforms that would remake their nation into a modern civilization.
