Journal of the Third Daughter: Growing Up in Korea

by Frances L. Peterson

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1891929380
• ISBN13: 9781891929380
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Four Seasons Publishers
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Loved it!

Frances Peterson has a wonderful, often funny, remembrance of her years growing up in North Korea. I thoroughly enjoyed reading her book and passing it along to the rest of my family to read.

A compelling and highly recommended book.

"In Korean culture the third daughter is very special. It is said what when arranging a marriage there is no need to look at her face. She will be very beautiful with a sweet disposition and become a fine wife, dutiful daughter in law and good mother. I was the sixth child of eight and the third daughter."So Frances Lampe Peterson dedicates her 152-page first installment on the narrative of a childhood growing up in a missionary family in Korea. She begins the story in 1908, long before her birth and two years before her parents were married. Her father began his 'mission' in Korea in 1909 and then married her mother, brought her to Korea and began a long life of raising children (eight) and making Christians of some of the Koreans. This installment ends when Frances, destined to marry a minister, leaves from Yokohama, Japan, to return to the U.S. and attend college, meeting the man she will eventually marry. While she converts the contents of this personal narrative into her own story, it is extracted from a variety of sources, made up of memories, stories, letters and 'diary' entries of her own, her brothers and sisters, parents and friends. Perhaps the most interesting parts of her stories to contemporary readers are details of how the small bands of often isolated missionaries and their families coped with daily life, and kept in touch with the progress of the modern world through letters, newspapers and, eventually, radio, and accommodated themselves to the rule of Korean, Japanese and rebel or communist forces which are part of the 20th century history of Korea. Ms. Peterson narrates her own birth, the birth of her two younger siblings and the actions (and sometimes extrapolated thoughts) of her parents. She describes with equal lack of detail the gardens, the networks of trading and the friendships among the missionaries which depended on railway systems created by the Japanese and included missionaries in the nearby provinces of Southern China. For example, while commenting on the irritations of travel passes and daily encounters with soldiers caused by Japanese in the 1930s Korea, she also notes that these innovations of a totalitarian state also insured an orderly flow of life in Korea and allowed for modernizations that were not possible for the less sophisticated Korean infrastructure. She seems to have had a relatively normal life for an 'American' girl amidst the chaos of East Asia in the early 20th century. Many of her experiences were those of a normal teenager. For example, she acquired braces for her teeth, but only by traveling regularly 8 hours by train to a Western dentist. She attended High School but it was a boarding school somewhat distant from her parents and largely restricted to the children of Western missionaries and diplomats' children. Her family took summer holidays on the beach with bathing suits and halter-tops in the 1930s and she simply describes crushes

Remembrances of an American missionary's daughter

Not since "Inn of the Sixth Happiness" has such a remarkable account been offered about missionary life in pre-war North Korea. It is the delightful journal of an American girl who was the third daughter of eight children in a pioneer Presbyterian family. Her unique young life is recalled with insightful humor as she records her family's challenges and triumphs.