The Reverend Soon Hyun
Collected Works
*
Preface
by David Hyun
1997
In 1991,1, David Hyun, youngest son of the Reverend Soon Hyun, a pioneer Christian minister
of the Methodist Church in Korea and Hawaii, and honored as a National Hero of Korea,
engaged Dr. Eun Sik Yang, Ph.D., who taught Korean Immigration History at U.C.L.A., 1981-
1993, to organize and to make museum-presentable nearly 5,000 pages of historical documents,
photos and other artifacts.
These documents were kept private during Rev. Hyun's lifetime and since his death in 1968. In
1992, after Dr. Yang completed the work of organizing and making the papers museum-
presentable, I continued to keep the organized "Collected Documents" private.
The reason for privacy arose from a personal fear of misuse and distortion by the historians of
modern Korea. This fear was based upon my reading of histories which made Hyun's former
colleague and later his bitter political opponent, Syngman Rhee, a much described Hero of Korea
while the same histories made Hyun an invisible National Hero: almost always without a
mention of his status or his contributions.
I have reasons to believe that copies and originals of documents retained by Soon Hyun have
been stored in secret archives and kept unavailable except for a few edited leaks. These leaks
were used to minimize or to describe Rev. Hyun's contributions as selfish, corrupt, and harmful.
In 1996, the arrest, trial, and conviction of two former Presidents of the Republic of Korea
Government for treason in the Massacre at Kwangju were reasons to believe that Korea's
dictatorial governments and their distortions of history had begun their endings and that
democracy was rising in Korea. With this thought, I ended my architectural career and
community activities to a write history based upon my father's papers.
To begin my writings in 1996,1 first sought more recent histories of modern Korea. In the
process I discovered Bruce Cumings, author ofThe Origins of the Korean Wgr, Vols. I and II,
and other historians who had already contradicted much of the prevailing histories of modern
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