Hansu's Journey by Philip Jaisohn: The First Fiction in English from Korean America

Abstract

January 2001 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Philip Jaisohn. In modern Korean history Jaisohn remains a national hero for his leadership in Korea's independence movement against the Japanese colonial regime during the first half of the twentieth century. He is widely known to be the first Korean to become a naturalized American citizen in June 1890. In April and May of 2001, to commemorate the anniversary, The Dong-A Daily News, a Korean daily newspaper headquartered in Philadelphia, published in daily installments a long obscured novella by Jaisohn, Hansu's Journey. According to the newspaper, the novella was first published as a series in 1921 in The Korea Review, a monthly magazine printed in Philadelphia by the Bureau of Information for the Republic of Korea. At some point later the series was published as a monograph by the author's own printing company, Philip Jaisohn and Company in Philadelphia. In 1978, urged by Muriel Jaisohn, Jaisohn's second daughter, Tong Suhr, an attorney- at-...