Shi Ho Kim, 23, from Pyong Yang Province, was aboard one of the first boatloads of surrogate slaves who came to the Hawaii plantations during 1903 to 1905.

In 1916, 19-year-old Choo Chei Lee left her family in Busan all alone to marry the stranger as his picture bride, 17 years younger.

Choo Chei’s two younger sisters Young Soon and Pil Duk (Agnes) would later follow in her footsteps as picture brides to be with their homesick sister.

Her married life on “paradise island” was unforgiving. Pregnant with her first daughter Martha, Choo Chei kept working along with her husband in the fields.

In the summer of 1920, unbearably homesick, the mother with 3-year-old Martha returned home to Busan to visit with her closely knit family. On her return trip to Hawaii, pregnant with Mary, she was stopped by Japanese authorities and forced to return to Korea, where her second daughter was born at the rice farm of her maternal grandparents on Feb. 20, 1921.

Mary’s maternal grandparents, aware of their daughter’s lonely existence in Hawaii, decided to send her two younger sisters to marry much older men Pil Koo Low and Sung Yun Kim, respectively, to be close to her.

Thus began the odyssey of the three Busan sisters who grew closer, tighter and more determined in their lonesome journey of han (everlasting woes) punctuated by interminable cries of “Aigo, jugketta!” (“Oh, I could kill myself!”) in the New World.
Theirs is but a prototype of some 951 “picture brides” — mostly from the impoverished rural Kyungsang Namdo Province under Japanese control — who were given exit permits  to join the Korean enclaves of 7,226 contract laborers in Hawaii during the 1910 to 1924 period. A total of 115 picture brides — largely from Pyongyang Province in what is now North Korea — reached the mainland.

The 1908 Gentlemen’s Agreement between Japan and the United States had stopped the flow of Japanese immigrants to the U.S. — except Japanese family members and picture brides, along with Korean picture brides then under Japanese rule.

The arrival of these teenage and twenty-something brides through the 14-year window of opportunity marked the genesis of family, church and community formation and the independence movement both in Hawaii and the mainland.

Armed with steely stamina forged under the barbaric Confucian customs and brutal Japanese oppression, these survival warriors brought new life, stability, purpose, passion for education, enterprise and, above all, hatred of Japanese colonialism to the transient and often fractious pockets of single and unschooled men.

In Hawaii, the Korean assimilation process outpaced other ethnic groups. The wartime industry came as a boon to the fired-up anti-Japanese Korean population. The picture brides, daring, cunning and tenacious, parleyed their wartime gains into successful real estate ventures. At home they enforced discipline on their children to strive for degrees and professions.

With the second generation forming a majority, their educational and professional achievements were nothing short of spectacular in the 1950s, accompanied by mounting out-marriages and divorces. Within two decades, the third generation grew into adulthood.