Between Two Countries, I Can Be the Connection
Chong Tatyana on language, Koryo-Saram identity, and a life connecting Korea and Uzbekistan
Chong Tatyana was born in Russia and moved to Uzbekistan when she was five years old. She grew up in a village where almost everyone around her was Koryo-Saram. Her classmates were Koryo-Saram, her grandparents spoke a Korean dialect, and Korean foods, holidays, and family traditions were part of everyday life.
Russian, however, was the language of Tatyana’s education and the language her family used at home. At school, she also learned what she remembers calling Chosonmal at the time. Her grandparents still spoke it, while her parents could read and write it but were less comfortable speaking. Tatyana herself could read Korean but found conversation more difficult.
Growing up in such a heavily Koryo-Saram community meant that Tatyana did not spend much of her childhood questioning what she was. She remembers her village as “99 percent” Koryo-Saram. The food her family ate, the holidays they observed, and the people around her reinforced an identity she inherited from her parents and grandparents. She was Koryo-Saram.
It was only later, as the country around her changed and her own relationship with Korea deepened, that the answer became more complicated.
When the Country Changed
As a teenager, Tatyana imagined becoming an interpreter. She studied English and thought about pursuing higher education elsewhere in the Soviet Union, perhaps in Moscow or Saint Petersburg.
Then, while she was still in school, the Soviet Union collapsed.
The political transition forced Tatyana to reconsider a future she had imagined within a country that no longer existed in the same form. She decided to remain in Uzbekistan and pursue her education there.
Her path to university was not straightforward. At the time, she remembers students having only one opportunity each year to take the university entrance examination. Tatyana performed well in two subjects but fell short in a third and was not admitted. Rather than spend the following year doing nothing, she enrolled in a technical college and studied design, a field that had always interested her.
She did not give up on university. She tried again with English and was unsuccessful. In the meantime, another language was becoming increasingly important in her life. Tatyana began studying Korean more seriously at the Korean Education Center in Tashkent and eventually applied to a Korean Studies program. That attempt, too, was unsuccessful.
But the language she had been studying opened a different door. Instead of entering the Korean Studies program, Tatyana began working at the Korean Education Center itself, starting in its library.
“If I hadn’t known Korean, I wouldn’t have been able to enter the Education Center.”
A career she had not originally planned began to take shape.
Finding Another Way Forward
Tatyana had wanted to become an interpreter through English. Instead, Korean became the language that transformed her professional life.
After joining the Education Center, she continued studying Korean and completed teacher training. Over the years, she worked not only as a Korean-language teacher but also in interpretation, translation, administration, and other responsibilities. At the time of our interview, she was even considering adding another qualification in accounting.
Her career reflects a pattern that appears repeatedly in her story: when one path closed, she found another.
Failing the university entrance examination led her to design. An unsuccessful attempt to study Korean formally eventually led her to the Education Center. The Korean she had first encountered as a heritage language at school became a language through which she built a career.
At the same time, the languages around Tatyana continued to change. Russian remained central to her life, but after Uzbekistan became independent, Uzbek assumed a growing role in education and public life. Tatyana can communicate conversationally in Uzbek, but formal written Uzbek remains more difficult for her. As more of her professional work with Uzbek institutions has shifted into the national language, she has continued studying it.
For Tatyana, Russian, Korean, and Uzbek have each come to represent different parts of the same life: the language she grew up speaking, the heritage language that became a career, and the language of the country she calls home.
“Who Am I?”
When I asked Tatyana whether she considered herself Koryo-Saram, Uzbek, Korean, or Russian, she laughed at the difficulty of the question. It was, she said, both “very important” and “difficult.” As a child, there had been little ambiguity. She grew up surrounded by Koryo-Saram families. Her family ate rice, kimchi, and other Korean foods, made soy sauce and doenjang, and continued observing holidays and customs passed down through generations. She had always thought of herself as Koryo-Saram.
Working at the Korean Education Center complicated that understanding in a different way. Through her work, Tatyana learned more about South Korea and began interacting more deeply with Korean language and culture. She increasingly came to understand Koryo-Saram and South Koreans as members of a broader hanminjok— one Korean people separated by where they lived.
Her ideas about what preserving that identity required have changed, too. Years ago, Tatyana said, she would have insisted that her child marry another Koryo-Saram or Korean. Today, she sees it differently. Whoever her child chooses, she told me, what matters most is that they are happy.
But there is something she still hopes will remain. She wants her child, and eventually her child’s children, to understand where they came from.
Her answer reveals an understanding of identity that has itself evolved. Preserving Koryo-Saram identity no longer requires, for Tatyana, drawing the same boundaries around whom her child can love. What matters more is whether the next generation knows the family and culture from which it came.
A Little Korea in Uzbekistan
Much of Tatyana’s adult life has been spent at the Korean Education Center in Tashkent. She describes it as an unusual space— almost another country within the country around it. When she taught students there, she sometimes told them “When you enter the Education Center, this is a small Republic of Korea in Uzbekistan.” The land was Uzbek, she explained, but inside students could speak Korean, learn Korean culture, and experience an environment connected to Korea.
Tatyana found herself standing in the middle. Uzbek students could relate to her because she had grown up in Uzbekistan. She understood the society and its educational system and could communicate in ways familiar to them. At the same time, her knowledge of Korean language and culture allowed her to introduce another country to them. Eventually, she came to see that position not as an uncertainty about where she belonged, but as something useful.
“I can play a role connecting the two countries.”
For someone who had spent much of her life navigating Korean, Russian, and Uzbek languages and identities, being “in between” had become less a problem to resolve than a position from which she could work.
The Education She Couldn’t Have
Education carries a more personal meaning for Tatyana because her own path was shaped by circumstances beyond academic ability.
Around the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the money her family had spent years saving lost its value. Tatyana remembers her parents having accumulated enough to imagine paying for their children’s university education and other major expenses. Suddenly, those savings were effectively gone.
Her family was willing to borrow money to help her continue studying. Tatyana resisted. Tuition was only part of the cost; studying elsewhere would also require money to live. Instead, she chose the technical college and a path that felt financially possible. Years later, at the Korean Education Center, Tatyana found herself helping other young people pursue precisely the opportunities she had once wanted.
She helped send students abroad. And every time, she remembered feeling a little envious. “Whenever I sent them, inside I would cry. I was so jealous.”
She watched students leave for good universities and thought about how badly she had once wanted to do the same. But by then, the decision was no longer hers alone. She had parents, a family, and a life in Uzbekistan.
Eventually, the dream took another form. Her own child went to Korea to study.
“My child going to study in Korea is actually my dream coming true.”
There is something particularly fitting about that outcome. The institution Tatyana entered after her own educational plans changed eventually allowed her to help other students pursue theirs. And the opportunity she once wanted for herself became one she encouraged her child to pursue.
Learning Culture by Living It
When I asked Tatyana what parts of Koryo-Saram culture she hoped younger generations would preserve, her answer became one of the longest of our conversation.
For Tatyana, whether traditions survive depends partly on where and among whom a person grows up.
She had been surrounded by Koryo-Saram families as a child. Traditions were not things she needed to seek out later. She saw them practiced by parents, grandparents, relatives, and neighbors. People who grew up elsewhere, she observed, might know far less simply because they had fewer opportunities to encounter those practices.
The traditions themselves had also changed.
Tatyana described Koryo-Saram weddings that combine practices she associates with Korean, Russian, and Uzbek culture. Families continue practices surrounding funerals and bujo, or monetary contributions given at important family events. Doljanchi remains particularly significant: she told me that Koryo-Saram families still celebrate a child’s first birthday and practice doljabi. Rather than seeing this mixture as evidence that Koryo-Saram culture had disappeared, Tatyana described a culture that had continued by changing.
One family in her village offered an especially memorable example. Tatyana told me about a family with the surname Lee whose history in the village stretched across several generations. Men in the family repeatedly married Russian women. Over time, their descendants became increasingly mixed, and Tatyana described younger members as appearing almost entirely European. Yet the family continued carrying the surname Lee. More importantly to Tatyana, they continued participating in the traditions of the community around them. One Russian woman who married into the family learned to make soy sauce and doenjang and even learned the local Koryo-Saram dialect. Later generations continued celebrating doljanchi, dressing children in hanbok, and observing milestone birthdays according to traditions practiced in the village.
For Tatyana, the family’s story illustrated something that ancestry alone could not explain. Culture endured because people were surrounded by it, learned it, and chose to continue practicing it. She tried to do the same with her own child.
“They Have to Learn”
When Tatyana visited ancestral graves, she began taking her child with her from a young age. Her husband initially questioned it. Why bring such a young child? Tatyana’s answer was simple: They have to learn.
At first, the rituals made little sense to a child. Why prepare a table of food? Why bow when the grandparents and ancestors they were honoring were no longer physically there? Tatyana explained. Then they went again. And again.
Eventually, something changed. Her child no longer needed to be brought along without understanding why. Instead, the child began asking: “Aren’t we going to the graves?”
It is perhaps the clearest expression of how Tatyana understands cultural preservation.
Identity cannot simply be announced to the next generation. It has to be shown.
Between Two Countries
Tatyana has considered leaving Uzbekistan. Korea was the most obvious possibility: she had family there, spoke the language, and had spent much of her career connecting people with the country. But leaving the place where she had built her life would mean beginning again. Uzbekistan had become home.
At the same time, Korea had become much more than an ancestral homeland she knew through family stories. Through language and work, it became part of her everyday life.
The tension between those two connections is why Tatyana found my question about identity so difficult.
Was she Korean? Koryo-Saram? Uzbek? Her life resists a single answer.
She was born in Russia, raised in Uzbekistan, and grew up speaking Russian in a Koryo-Saram village. She learned Chosŏnmal as a child and contemporary Korean more seriously as an adult. She built a career teaching and interpreting Korean while continuing to learn Uzbek. She raised her child with Koryo-Saram traditions and then watched that child leave to study in Korea.
Tatyana’s life has unfolded across the boundaries between those places, languages, and identities. But she has also found a purpose within those boundaries. At the Korean Education Center, she described herself as someone capable of understanding both sides: someone who knows Korean language and systems but also knows Uzbekistan because she has lived there nearly her entire life.
Someone who can connect the two.
And perhaps that is a more fitting way to understand Tatyana’s story than asking her to choose between them.
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