“‘Oh, Lord, bless these poor souls who do not yet know the Gospel!’”
It is said that even as he was dragged to Yanggakto along the Taedong River, Reverend Thomas never ceased calling out the name of Jesus Christ. On September 6, at dusk, the twenty-seven-year-old Thomas was beheaded. Thus was the first seed of Protestantism sown in the northwest region of the nation. Church history states that Pak Ch’un’gwŏn, a Chosŏn government military officer, was Reverend Thomas’s executioner. It is claimed that this man later repented and was baptized, becoming the first Protestant believer in Pyongyang.
The first Protestant church in Chosŏn was established in Hwanghae Province in the 1880s, when Protestant ministers who had settled in China began traveling back and forth across the border to Ŭiju, spreading the word of God. One of Chosŏn’s first Protestant believers, a man named Sŏ Sangnyun, later left the area to avoid government persecution and went into hiding with relatives. It was Sŏ who would eventually become the founder of the Protestant church in Hwanghae Province.
Sollae in Changyŏn is a beautiful place — a stream flows down from Hunam, running through a luxuriant forest of pine trees and into the ocean. Kumip’o, too, is lovely, with its gold and silver sands that stretch out for miles on end. Fifty-eight households were then living in Sollae; fifty of them became believers. In 1887, the Reverend Underwood visited Sollae. He chose seven among the believers and baptized them. Over the seven years that followed, the villagers put enough money away to build what would be the first church in Chosŏn.
In old photographs, the church appears to be nothing more than a rundown tile-roofed house of about a dozen square yards. In front of the latticed sliding door a small, covered porch has been built in place of the usual wood maru.17 That would have been where they took off their shoes when they entered the church. A tall zelkova tree stands behind the house, big enough to cover the roof; more likely than not, it had served the entire village as a shrine before the arrival of Christianity. Neat rows of perennial plants line the front of the yard.
After Underwood came Appenzeller, who passed through Sollae on his missionary journey across the northwest region, and after him was the Reverend Gale, who stayed for a while to learn the language and customs of Chosŏn. Gale, in turn, was followed by Moffett, a missionary. The one who actually settled down in Sollae for life was a farmer-turned-missionary named Fenwick, but it was the Reverend McKenzie who ultimately formed the deepest ties with the Ryu family. McKenzie had been working as a minister in a Presbyterian Church in Labrador, Canada. In the fall of 1893, he just happened to come to Chosŏn.
Cho Pansŏk, a childhood friend of Yosŏp’s grandfather, was three years his senior — which would mean that he was born in 1877. Cho’s folks were originally a tenant family, but with the money they saved from croaker fishing at Yŏnp’yŏng in Paengnyŏng they were able to buy a boat and some rice fields, elevating themselves to the status of middle-class farmers. It was after Reverend Underwood’s visit that Cho’s father, one of the founding members of the church, first became a zealous believer of Jesus, and it is said that he was baptized immediately upon the church’s completion. Later on, when the Fenwicks and Underwoods took up residence in Sollae, Cho Pansŏk’s father not only arranged for his son to participate in their Bible studies, he also insisted the boy run errands for the Westerners and frequent their homes. Yosŏp’s grandfather first became acquainted with the young Cho Pansŏk at one of the annual farmers’ gatherings in Sinch’ŏn. Pansŏk had learned a method of tomato and cabbage cultivation from Fenwick and was traveling around the Changyŏn area to teach this new method of farming and, of course, hand out copies of the Bible in vernacular Korean. As luck would have it, this was around the same time that Yosŏp’s grandfather Samsŏng had started opening his eyes and embracing the word of God. Before long, they say, Yosŏp’s grandfather was always at Pansŏk’s heel, trailing after him as if he were a real, blood-related big brother.
“Samsŏng, would you like to visit our village?”
“Do you mean it? Oh, Brother Pansŏk, I can’t wait to see the church in Sollae!”
Grandfather’s heart was filled with excitement at the prospect of finally seeing it alclass="underline" the picture of Jesus, the globe that was said to show the world in one glance, the Bible with the leather cover, the cross figure on which Jesus was crucified, and, most of all, the real, live Reverend Mae Kyŏnsi.
In Korean, the Reverend McKenzie’s name was spelled Mae Kyŏnsi. He was known to go through his daily routine in a coarse, cotton farmer’s outfit, even wearing ordinary straw shoes. He only wore his suit and tie on Sundays for worship. This was probably due to the influence of his predecessor, Fenwick. Fenwick had been known as missionary P’yŏn Wiik. Right at the outset, Missionary P’yŏn had chosen the outer wing of Cho Pansŏk’s house as his residence. Because of this, Pansŏk was able to learn English and read the Bible from a very early age; he came to realize that the world outside of Chosŏn was enormous, not to mention enlightened and civilized. Pansŏk’s knowledge of such things would no doubt have impressed Yosŏp’s grandfather immensely. In his youth, Yosŏp’s grandfather, Ryu Samsŏng, had attended the Confucian academy in his village and studied very diligently, all in accordance with his family’s hopes that he would pass a provincial examination offered in Haeju and perhaps even earn a low-level government position someday — a dream born of the fact that the Ryus had lived in servitude for generations upon end, harboring resentment and envy of anyone with a government post of any kind. By the time Yosŏp’s great-grandfather had started following the Eastern Learning movement, however, it is likely that his son Samsŏng had already given up on the idea of taking the government examination. It became clear afterwards that in the Year of the Horse, the year Grandfather first met Cho Pansŏk and became a believer, the Eastern Learning rebellion was already sweeping through the nation; this fact greatly increases the likelihood that Yosŏp’s great-grandfather either dropped dead on the road from some random disease or was beaten to death somewhere along the way. In any event, by that point the Ryu family was by no means financially uncomfortable: they owned acre upon acre of rice fields, fields they had hoarded for untold generations, a little bit at a time, as they managed the land in the name of the royal family.
Yosŏp and Yohan, listen carefully.
I will always remember the first time I visited Sollae with Presbyter Cho Pansŏk. Reverend Mae Kyŏnsi was living in front of the church in a mud hut with a thatched roof. Brother Pansŏk told me a thing or two before I went to see him, so I bought two dozen eggs in Changyŏn. Western people like eggs, pheasants, dried fish, flour, and things like that. The Reverend Mae was about thirty or so. Brother Pansŏk went up to the wooden porch and said, “Are you in, Reverend?” Then the Reverend said, “Come in, please”—all in our language, perfect and clear. He was wearing round glasses and he was wearing hanbok, woolen vest and all. When Pansŏk said I was someone who studied the Bible with him, Reverend Mae nodded and held my hands — his hands were warm. He had a calendar on the wall. It was a solar calendar, they tell me. Also on the wall was a wall clock. I’d never seen a wall clock before, and every time the pendulum swung back and forth I couldn’t help swinging my head back and forth along with it. Reverend Mae Kyŏnsi showed us the Bible with the thick leather cover, then he showed us a picture framed in glass. That was the first time I saw Jesus. The first Jesus I saw looked like Reverend Mae in many ways — you see, both had brown hair on their heads and grew hair under the nose and chin. Jesus had his hair grown long, like a woman, but he, too, had a big nose because he was a Westerner. Reverend Mae Kyŏnysi asked me, “How long have you been studying the Bible?”