Cha Ŭi-sŏk (Easurk Emsen Charr) was a student, along with L. George Paik, at the Presbyterian-run Park College in Missouri when the March First Movement broke out in Korea in 1919. Having been converted to Christianity in Korea by the Reverend Samuel Moffett, Charr came to the United States in 1905 along with 7,500 others in the first wave of immigrants, many of whom also had contact with American missionaries, and was directed to Park College by an alumnus, the Reverend George McCune. While there, Charr joined the League of the Friends of Korea and went on a speaking tour to several area churches decrying what the Japanese were doing in Korea, particularly to Korean Christians and their American missionary mentors. Charr's anti-Japanese speeches were well received by his American audiences, and yet that same America denied him citizenship despite the fact that he had served honorably in the U.S. Army during World War I (see Wayne Patterson, ed., The Golden Mountain: The Autobiography of a Korean Immigrant, 1895–1960, 2nd ed. [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996], 203–10).

Although Charr's story does not appear in David K. Yoo's book, it very easily could have, for it illustrates one of his main arguments—that Christianity was inextricably linked with nationalism among Korean Americans. At the same time, as Charr's experience reveals, sharing the same religion as the majority of Americans did not shield Koreans in America from race-based discrimination. Using three diodes—religion and race, migration and exile, and colonialism and independence—Yoo examines the early Korean American experience through the lens of their (mostly Protestant) religion and its organizational structures. There are six chapters, five of which are geographically based, with three chapters on the Hawaii experience and two on the California experience. The sixth chapter, an analysis of the issues raised in the Korean Student Bulletin (1922–41), rounds out the discussion. Yoo, director of the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, is well qualified to undertake this task because, in addition to his training in Asian American history, his training in theology allows him to parse the religious issues that affected Korean Americans.

This book is notable on several fronts. First, it fills a gap in the literature on Korean American history, as it represents the first book to explicitly address the role of religion. In doing so, Yoo has uncovered and plumbed previously unknown or underutilized primary sources. In the process, figures such as Hugh Cynn, Diamond Kimm, and Hyun Soon will no longer be relegated to obscurity. Moreover, because most writings about Korean Americans deal with the post-1965 immigrants, readers who are familiar with these more recent immigrants know of the central role played by churches in the adjustment process, but the antecedents that Yoo writes about are less well known.

Second, Yoo clearly demonstrates that the history of Korean America is part and parcel of modern Korean history, particularly the independence movement that energized the overseas Korean communities. To illustrate that, he has brought to bear on his analysis the secondary literature on the history of modern Korea. American missionaries brought new religious concepts to Korea just at the time that Koreans were searching for answers to the problems of modernization, nation building, and, after 1910, liberation. Moreover, just as the nationalist movement in Korea suffered from factional divisions over how to respond to Japanese colonialism, these differences were mirrored in the United States—hence the title Contentious Spirits. For example, the rift between the Kungminhoe (Korean National Association) and Syngman Rhee's Tongjihoe (Comrade Society) was manifested not only in rival congregations—the Korean Methodist Church and the Korean Christian Church—but also in other facets of Korean American society. It goes without saying that one cannot fully understand modern Korean history without taking into account the activities of overseas Koreans. And the obverse is also true—that one cannot fully understand the history of Korean Americans without sufficient grounding in the history of modern Korea.

Third, lest one assume that this book is narrowly focused, Yoo has included a discussion of the leftist impulse among the Korean Americans. Because of the division of Korea into a communist North and a noncommunist South, leftist impulses have remained largely unexamined in the scholarly literature because they might bespeak support for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the Kim family dynasty. By examining this underrepresented topic, Yoo has broadened the scope of scholarly inquiry in Korean American history. His discussion, for example, of the Korean National Revolutionary Party, with its affiliates in Asia, and its organ, Korean Independence, not only breaks new ground but also demonstrates the diasporic nature of the Korean American community.

In sum, this book represents a significant advance in our understanding of the prewar Korean American community. One hopes that there is a second volume in the works that will deal with the period from 1945 to the present.