<PERSON> is the last Korean standing at Tajikistan’s hardscrabble border with Afghanistan · Global Voices
<PERSON> surrounded by family in her house in the village of Sukhrob, Farkhor district, Tajikistan
With her long, colourful dress, covered hair and accentless ownership of the local tongue, <PERSON> does not stand out from the other women in her village a few kilometres from Tajikistan's border with Afghanistan. But her surname, which she retained even after marrying her late husband, is a reminder of another homeland some 5,000 kilometres east of the one her parents adopted.
Up to 200,000 ethnic Koreans were deported to Central Asia from the Russian Far East during the 1930s as Soviet dictator <PERSON> ordered the forced displacement of entire minority populations suspected of lacking loyalty to Moscow.
The Kremlin's specific fear regarding the Korean population was that it was being infiltrated by agents of Japan, which was occupying the Korean peninsular at the time and casting an expansionist glance across the Asian continent.
Many Koreans were initially placed in labour camps in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where unknown numbers perished from malaria and other diseases working in abominable conditions.
Over time the ‘Koryo Saram’, as Soviet Koreans were known, gradually shed their native language for the Union's lingua Franca, Russian, and, in rarer cases, the titular languages of the countries they settled in, such as Tajik and Uzbek.
For 65-year-old Pak's parents, Tajikistan was a second stop in Central Asia after the steppes of Kazakhstan. Farkhor, the district in which she grew up, got married and raised 10 children, hosted a collective farm growing rice where mostly Koreans worked.
Today she is the only Korean left in Farkhor, where the gruelling soundtrack of war between Afghan government forces and the militant Taliban can sometimes be heard in the distance.
“I never felt unwelcomed or uncomfortable among the locals. I grew up among Uzbeks and Tajiks, and later, when married, started dressing like local women, converted to Islam, and began praying five times a day,” <PERSON> told Global Voices, circled by daughters, son, in-laws, and numerous grandchildren.
The great exodus
During the 1990s, Tajikistan was consumed by a war of its own. Koreans, along with other minorities, including Germans and Russians, fled the republic over the course of a five-year civil conflict that cost tens of thousands of lives and deepened the economic devastation wrought by the Soviet collapse.
<PERSON> inside her home in the village of Sukhrob, Farkhor district, Tajikistan. Photo by author.
If there were 13,500 Koreans in Tajikistan in 1989, there were just over 600 in 2010 according to a national census carried out that year. 148
Most of those remaining live in the capital Dushanbe.
In Farkhor, where <PERSON> grew up, Koreans sold their homes to local Tajiks and Uzbeks. The rice-growing ‘sovkhoz’ where they lived and worked has been privatised and its workforce has doubled.
Life here has grown less comfortable since the dawn of Tajikistan's independence in 1991, <PERSON> says. Water lines have broken down, the medical point consistently staffed during the Soviet era no longer has a doctor and electricity is inconstant.
<PERSON>, however, never thought of leaving southern Tajikistan, where she spent most of her working life as an accountant for local authorities.
“I gave all my daughters into Tajik and Uzbek boys following the local customs. My sons also married local girls. Now I have so many wonderful grandchildren, daughters-in-law and neighbours,” <PERSON> said.
<PERSON> was just 18 when she married her neighbour, an ethnic Uzbek boy, <PERSON>. The language of their household was Tajik, although <PERSON> can also speak Uzbek and counts Russian, the language her parents spoke, as her mother tongue.
<PERSON> calls <PERSON>'s death several years ago her “only sadness.”
<PERSON>'s husband, <PERSON>. Photo used with permission.
A foot in Korea, a heart in Tajikistan
While <PERSON> spoke of her in-laws in glowing terms, her eldest daughter, 47-year-old <PERSON>, told Global Voices that her mother's journey to becoming an honorary Central Asian wasn't always a smooth one.
Key to her acceptance in her husband's family, <PERSON> recounted, was the love and respect of <PERSON>'s father, who singled her out as his favourite daughter-in-law. 148