Paper long abstract:

According to the Kazakhstani national e-history project, the first account of a Korean in Central Asia was in 727 A.D. As part of his pilgrimage to India, a Korean Buddhist monk named Hyecho purportedly traveled through parts of Western China, which was considered part of Central Asia. By some historians' accounts, travel between the Silla Empire on the Korean peninsula, the Tang rule in mainland China, Nara Japan, and the Silk Road accounted for the appearance of precious gems in Imperial Korea (Kim, 2014). It was the Treaty of Peking (1860), however, that established the path which would eventually result in the 1937 Korean deportation. According to the Treaty, China ceded parts of outer Manchuria to Imperial Russia. This included the territory of Ussuri Krai, which includes part of Primorye oblast (Wada, 1987). Lankov (2011) notes that historically, Koreans and Russians encountered each other as early as the 17th century when Imperial Korean forces joined Qing imperial forces against the Russian Cossacks during the Albazin conflict (1680s). However, according to Kim (2003a), immigration from the Korean peninsula up the coast into Imperial China and Tsarist Russia began around the 1860s and continued through the 1920s (Diener, 2009; Wada, 1987). Eventually, after being granted Russian (then later Soviet) citizenship, Stalin ordered for the mass deportation of entire Korean villages from the Far East (Primorye) with the intention of resettling them in the Central Asian autonomous regions.

As noted in Ahn (2019), there has been a substantive body of work exploring the lives of different Korean diasporas in the US (Abelmann, 1995, 1996, 2003, 2009; Choi, 2012), China (Gao, 2010). Kazakhstani historians like German Kim have prolifically produced historiographical works on Soviet and Central Asian Koreans (Kim, 1993, 2003a, 2003b, 2005, 2009a, 2009b). However, the collective memories of Central Asian Koreans have not been fully explored, particularly in connection to notions of "homeland" and identity. This paper explores the linkages between participants' family histories regarding the Korean deportation, notions of historic homeland, and participant identities regarding their "Korean-ness". Twenty-seven ethnographic interviews were conducted between May and October 2015 primarily around two Kazakhstani oblasts, Almaty and Shymkent. The interview questions were based on a study looking at the lived experiences of other diasporic communities in Kazakhstan (Li Wei, 2016; Smagulova, 2016). The broader study explores questions related to issues of social mobility, socio-economic access, and identity construction among ethnolinguistic minorities in Kazakhstan.