You're reading: Koreans in Ukraine try to reconnect with ancestral homeland

MALA OLEKSANDRIVKA, Ukraine – It’s hard to guess from where this Asian family in Kherson Oblast originates. Neither their flawless Russian, nor their typical two-story stone house offers any clues. Only when they sit down for lunch and serve kimchi, a traditional Korean dish made of napa cabbage, does their story come to light.

Farmer Trofim Tegay, 63, living in Mala Oleksandrivka village, is the head of the ethnic Korean community of some 1,600 people living in Kherson Oblast. His family story is similar to the ones experienced by more than a million of ethnic Koreans who now live on the territory of the former Soviet Union.

Tegay’s grandparents lived in Primorskiy Kray, the coastal land sandwiched between the-then Russian Empire and Korea before it split into South and North republics in 1948.

As the Soviets ousted the czars in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, many Korean farmers, who were mostly growing rice in sunny and moist climate, lost their plots.

Under the orders of Josef Stalin, thousands of them had to move to the remote steppes of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to die or survive. “They persecuted mostly educated people,” said Tegay, with a sinking expression in his face.

Lev Khvan (L) and his wife Klavdia Lyan (C) have to mortgage their house to sow the next season’s crop. (By Laurent Geslin)

“Even in the Kazakh steppes, they tracked down my grandfather, former head of [agriculture] production, and gunned him down on some false accusation.”

Looking for a better life, the family then moved to Uzbekistan, where Tegay was raised with little influence from his ethnic Korean roots. In 1997, he moved to Ukraine to make some money picking melons and watermelons during the hot Kherson summer. The harvest was rich enough to convince him to stay for good.

Reaping crops on the Ukrainian fields, he thought little of his family background until one trip to the United States in 1991, when he met with Korean diaspora.

“I never felt more embarrassed,” he said about his first meeting with his ethnic compatriots. “They all spoke Korean among themselves, went to church and kept traditions alive. I felt like the odd one out [not even knowing the language].”

He came back from the U.S. with a bag full of Korean textbooks and, in two years, he learned to speak the language. In 1997, he made his first trip up north, to the land of his ancestors.

The Korean-Americans also motivated him to bring together Soviet Koreans living in Ukraine. As a community leader, he helped many of them receive Ukrainian citizenship through a legalization program set up by the Korean government after Ukraine’s former president, Viktor Yushchenko, met with his Korean counterpart, Roh Moo-Hyun, in 2007.

Among Koreans who took advantage of this program was Lev Khvan, 54, and his wife, Klavdia Lyan, 51, who also came to work on Ukrainian fields from Uzbekistan in 2002, but couldn’t receive legal status until 2009.

“For seven years, we had to leave Ukraine once a year, register with the authorities every three months and buy work permits,” said Khvan, who rents a land plot where his family grows vegetables and melons. To sow the next season’s crop, he has to mortgage his one-room shabby house. His three children, like most youth in their village Kolonchak, left for Odesa, Kherson and Mykolaiv to look for work.

Although in urgent need of bank loans and government agricultural subsidies, the Khvan family still said their life in Ukraine is better than in Uzbekistan. “We have almost nothing here, but at least there is fertile soil and so there is hope,” Khvan said.

Their community leader, Tegay said he is on a mission to improve life for his people. In charge of six greenhouses set up by the South Korean government in 2010, he teaches fellow Koreans innovations in agriculture.

There they grow popular in Ukraine white cabbage for sale reserving their own patches for napa kind they need for kimchi.

South Korea factsheet:

Political system: Democracy with president elected for a single five-year term by direct popular vote.

Territory: 100,032 square kilometers, more than six times smaller than Ukraine.

Population: 48.6 million.

Religion: Buddhism, Protestantism and Catholicism.

Major industrial products: Semiconductors, automobiles, ships, consumer electronics, mobile telecommunication equipment, steel and chemicals.

Bilateral trade with Ukraine:
$1.5 billion in 2010

Imports to Ukraine: Electronic products, cars

Exports from Ukraine to South Korea: Steel, wheat, chemicals, fertilizers

(Sources:
www.korea.net,
South Korean embassy in Ukraine)

Kyiv Post staff writer Katya Grushenko can be reached at [email protected]