At the dawn of the Diaspora century, they fled the suffocating feudal kingdom for a patch of freedom in the “paradise” island of Hawaii and the “prosperous” Yucatan territory and the American Dreamland.

In my decades-long pursuit of the lost trails of these pioneer women, mostly unschooled and destitute, I was awestruck by their mystic will and power to endure the unendurable in both the Yucatan slave land and the apartheid West.

In the end, their Koreans-never-die spirit prevailed, despite all the forces on earth that had conspired to defeat their will to survive and raise children all alone in the New World.

Meet one of these subterranean woman warriors.

In 1984, I ran into 81-year-old Mary Lee Park Kim of Sacramento who came to the Hawaii sugar cane plantation, bundled in the arms of her mother, Sarah, in 1904. Abandoned by her father, she had “walked and worked” with her mother in the field since age 8. At age 16 she married a Korea-trained dentist who couldn’t practice because of the anti-Asian exclusionary law.

In the Central Valley of California, her educated husband remained “sick all the time” while she picked grapes (“200 boxes a day and drying them”).

Suffering a hemorrhage, she was committed to a sanatorium while her five children were well taken care of at a county orphanage for three years.

Her weakling husband left for Korea to start a new family there, leaving behind their five children. Mary slept on the ground with her kids in a makeshift tent. “I never thought of committing suicide; I was so ambitious,” she said. “My kids all helped me.”

She met another field hand and married him. They started a boarding house for old bachelor farm hands and she worked as a camp cook until her retirement.

Her only regrets: “The sky fell on me when I was told my only son George Park was killed in Okinawa. A machine gunner, he had stepped on a mine. The war would end in three months. All my daughters kept me going.”

She passed away at age 90. Her parting words: “God bless America.”

In 1976, oral historian Sonia Sunoo, the American-born daughter of a picture bride in San Francisco, was reunited with her childhood neighbor Mrs. Sung-Jin Hahn Kim, 96, at her Oakland apartment for retirees.

Recalled the Oral History Project interviewer: “It was remarkable to witness that she was not only healthy, but retained her earthy sense of humor.”

And hers is another echo of her contemporary survivor Mary Lee Park Kim’s journey of han (the everlasting sorrow).

In the old Korea, her tenant farming family had “nothing to eat.” In 1905, Sung-Jin Kim, 22, came to Hawaii along with her weakling “Old Man,” her mother and younger sibling Young Dae. “We were so poor … there was absolutely no way we could survive.”