I Only Do Things I Like
Kim Ekaterina on growing up quickly, finding Korean culture, and building a life on her own terms
For Kim Ekaterina, growing up happened quickly. She was about ten when her parents divorced and she moved with her mother and younger brother from Almalyk to Tashkent. Before the move, she remembered relatives nearby who could help with homework and make everyday life easier. Afterward, her mother had to support two children largely on her own, money was scarce, and Ekaterina began taking on responsibilities that would ordinarily have belonged to an adult.
By around the fourth grade, she was cooking, taking her younger brother to kindergarten, attending school herself, studying, picking him up afterward, bringing him home, and feeding him. The sudden change was overwhelming. When I remarked on how young she had been, Ekaterina remembered the experience without trying to make it sound easier than it was: “Every day, I’d lock myself in the bathroom and cry. Every day.” At the same time, looking back as an adult, she does not speak about her parents’ divorce with bitterness. She believes those years forced her to grow and made her stronger.
That pattern of being thrown into something she did not expect, struggling with it, and eventually finding a way to make it her own would repeat itself throughout her life.
An Education She Chose for Herself
University was not something Ekaterina pursued because her family told her she had to. Her mother had married young and had not completed university herself, and she did not impose a degree as an expectation on her daughter. Ekaterina was the one who kept saying that she wanted to go.
Wanting it, however, did not mean her family could easily afford it. Ekaterina needed additional preparation in history, Russian, and English for the entrance examination. Her mother was already under considerable financial pressure and suggested asking her father for help. Ekaterina called him, explained that she wanted to enter university and needed money for preparation, and learned that he could not help. She remembers crying afterward, although she also understood why her mother could not simply pay for everything herself: she had been working while raising two children.
Her mother eventually decided to use what money she had to give Ekaterina the chance to try.
“You want to go to college, right? I’ll help you as much as I can.”
Ekaterina studied privately for a year, took the entrance examination, and was admitted. She went on to graduate from Nizami Pedagogical University with a degree in Korean language and literature. During the interview, she added that her mother continues to help her even now.
Korean Was Not Her Family Language
It would be easy to look at Ekaterina’s adult life and assume that Korean had always been central to her upbringing. It had not. She grew up speaking Russian and learned Korean separately, as a foreign language. She estimates that she is around the fourth generation of her Koryo-Saram family in Uzbekistan; her grandmother was already born there. Her paternal grandmother had once known some Koryo-mar, while Ekaterina’s mother, who is also Koryo-Saram, did not speak it.
There was therefore no fluent family speaker from whom Ekaterina could simply pick up contemporary Korean. When she decided to learn it, she began with the alphabet. “I had to learn it completely from scratch, like a foreign language.”
That makes what came afterward particularly interesting. The language she initially approached as a foreign language became the language she studied at university, interpreted professionally, taught to students, and used to enter a much wider world of contemporary Korean culture. Eventually, it would even become connected to her business.
None of that was part of Ekaterina’s original career plan.
The Teacher Who Never Planned to Teach
After university, Ekaterina imagined herself as an interpreter rather than a teacher. She began taking part-time interpreting work and knew fairly clearly what she did not want: a conventional company job with fixed hours and a nine o’clock start. That kind of schedule, she told me, simply did not fit her personality.
Interpreting seemed much better suited to her, until COVID-19 disrupted that path. With Koreans no longer entering Uzbekistan as they had before, interpreting opportunities declined. A friend then heard that the Korean Education Center needed part-time lecturers and asked Ekaterina to go to an interview with her. Ekaterina did not see herself as a teacher and doubted she would be any good at it, but her friend kept insisting that they should at least try.
They interviewed together. Despite having no teaching experience, Ekaterina was hired. Her friend was not. She laughed while remembering it: “Sorry, friend. Sorry.”
Her first classes took place online during the pandemic. From behind a computer at home, she discovered that she enjoyed her students and liked teaching more than she had expected. The real challenge came when classes returned in person. Ekaterina had grown comfortable teaching online and felt shy standing in front of a classroom with every student looking at her. She considered it deeply uncomfortable, but rather than stop, she decided to give it a try. After that first in-person class, she found herself thinking, once again, that this might actually be something she liked. She still teaches Korean today.
Seoul Mun and a Life With More Than One Job
Ekaterina did not replace interpreting with teaching. Instead, she kept adding work she enjoyed. She continues to interpret, teaches Korean part-time, and also owns a business. When she mentioned that last part almost casually during the interview, I immediately asked what kind.
It was a Korean food restaurant in Seoul Mun, Tashkent.
The restaurant serves Korean dishes including gimbap, bibimbap, fried rice, and Korean-style chicken. Ekaterina’s business is also tied to her interest in K-pop: she described running a K-pop dance team and spoke excitedly about its performances. At the time of the interview, she said the team had recently appeared on KBS performing BIGBANG’s “Bang Bang Bang.”
Her mother is part of this story too. Years earlier, she had gathered the money she could so that Ekaterina could prepare for university. Now, Ekaterina said, her mother also helps her with the business.
Managing the restaurant while teaching and interpreting leaves Ekaterina with very little free time. When I asked how she managed all of it, she admitted that there really was not enough time. Yet she did not speak about any of those roles as something she wanted to abandon. Teaching had become almost like a hobby, she still enjoyed interpreting, and the business gave her another kind of independence.
“I like all the things I do— interpreting, part-time teaching, running my business. So I only do things I like.”
The line captures the kind of professional freedom Ekaterina had wanted from the beginning. She never found it by choosing a single ideal career. Instead, she created a working life out of several different things she wanted to keep doing.
A Life Increasingly Connected to Korea
The more Ekaterina talked about her adult life, the clearer a pattern became. The Korean language she had once learned from the alphabet now connected almost everything she did. She noticed it too. “If you look at everything I do, it’s all related to Korea.”
She teaches Korean and interprets it. Seoul Mun serves Korean food. Her business is connected to K-pop, and she has developed friendships with people from Korea. She even joked about other people noticing what they considered Korean habits in the way she eats, dresses, or styles herself.
Her sense of identity has changed alongside those experiences. When I asked whether she considered herself Koryo-Saram or Uzbek, she answered directly that she was Koryo-Saram. Yet she did not describe that identity as completely unchanged over the course of her life. As a child, she simply thought of herself as Koryo-Saram. As she grew older, she began thinking of herself as Uzbek. More recently, as her relationships with Korean people, language, food, and culture have deepened, she feels herself changing again.
Her connection to contemporary Korea, in other words, was not simply something preserved unchanged through her family. Ekaterina inherited a Koryo-Saram identity, but much of her relationship with South Korean language and culture was something she later sought out and built for herself.
Korea Can Be Important Without Becoming Home
None of this has led Ekaterina to conclude that she should move to Korea. Her father lives there, several close friends have moved there, and Ekaterina has traveled there herself. She understands why other Koryo-Saram choose to relocate, particularly when they believe Korea offers better-paying employment. For her, however, living in Uzbekistan remains comfortable, and she had no plans to leave when we spoke.
Her attachment to the country is explicit. “I really love Uzbekistan. Probably more than many Uzbeks.”
That answer sits beside everything else she told me: that she identifies as Koryo-Saram, teaches Korean, loves Korean culture, owns a Korean restaurant, and increasingly feels culturally connected to Korea. Ekaterina herself does not seem especially troubled by the apparent contradiction. When I tried to make sense of these different affiliations, she instead questioned the importance of categorizing people so strictly.
“Whether someone is of this or that ethnicity, where they come from— that’s not important to me. A person is a person. If they’re kind and have a good personality, that’s enough.”
Her own story works in much the same way. Becoming more connected to Korea does not require her to become less attached to Uzbekistan, just as identifying as Koryo-Saram does not require every part of her life to fit neatly into one cultural category.
What Changed From Her Mother’s Generation
Questions about younger and older Koryo-Saram women brought Ekaterina back to her own family. Her mother had married very young and moved from Kazakhstan to Tashkent for Ekaterina’s father. Looking at her own generation, Ekaterina sees education occupying a much larger place in many women’s plans, while marriage no longer necessarily feels like something that must happen early. She was careful to distinguish between not wanting marriage at all and simply rejecting the assumption that women should marry as soon as possible.
At the same time, she does not portray younger women as the harder-working generation. Her impression is almost the opposite. She remembers family stories of older women doing agricultural work under difficult conditions, and her own mother later worked while raising her children after divorce. In Ekaterina’s view, women of her generation often have more room to decide whether to stay home with children, work part-time, or pursue the work they prefer.
Ekaterina’s life reflects the difference she is describing. Her mother did not finish university, but she used what little money she had to help her daughter get there. Ekaterina grew up helping her mother care for the family, then pursued higher education, developed several careers, and became a business owner. Now her mother continues to support her, this time through Seoul Mun.
What Gets Lost and What Replaces It
When Ekaterina talked about the future of Koryo-Saram culture, she sounded less certain. Her grandmother’s and mother’s generations, she said, maintained customs surrounding weddings, first birthdays, and sixtieth birthdays carefully. Her own generation still knows how to prepare many of the foods they grew up eating, but she worries that younger children may not continue even those practices.
Food makes the change particularly visible to her. She remembers Koryo-Saram meals of rice, noodles, banchan, and kimchi, while she sees children increasingly preferring KFC, hamburgers, pizza, and pasta. Her concern is not simply that tastes change; it is that cooking knowledge and the foods associated with family life could disappear when fewer people want to eat them.
That concern creates an interesting tension with Seoul Mun. Ekaterina herself runs a restaurant serving contemporary South Korean food such as gimbap and bibimbap. The food of Seoul Moon and the Koryo-Saram dishes she remembers from childhood are related, but they are not interchangeable. Her business reflects her growing connection to contemporary South Korea at the same time that she watches some inherited Koryo-Saram practices become less prominent.
Language reveals the same shift. Ekaterina does not know Koryo-mar, so that is not something she can teach to her future children. What she does know, and what she can transmit, is contemporary Korean.
“I don’t know the Koryo language. I can’t teach it. But I can teach Korean.”
That distinction is one of the most revealing parts of her interview. In Ekaterina’s life, cultural transmission is not a process of perfectly reproducing what her grandmother knew. Koryo-mar may not survive through her, while contemporary Korean might. The foods associated with her childhood may become less common, while South Korean dishes become part of the business she builds. Her Koryo-Saram identity remains, but its relationship to Korea is being reshaped.
Keeping Seoul Mun Open
The independence Ekaterina found through entrepreneurship came with its own difficulties. Toward the end of the interview, she described a period when Seoul Mun came close to shutting down. The restaurant did not have enough money, and even basic obligations such as rent and employee salaries became difficult to cover.
Ekaterina did not romanticize entrepreneurship or portray every difficulty as someone else’s fault. She admitted that she had started the business without fully thinking through everything required to keep it running. Only afterward did she realize how carefully a person needed to prepare before opening a business.
Placed alongside the rest of her life, Seoul Mun becomes more than an interesting detail about her career. At ten, Ekaterina cooked because her family needed her to help care for her younger brother. Later, she pursued university despite the financial difficulty of preparing for admission. She entered a pedagogical university without intending to teach, accepted a teaching interview she did not think she was qualified for, and eventually discovered work she loved. Then she opened a restaurant without fully anticipating how difficult entrepreneurship would become and nearly saw it close.
Those experiences are not the same, and they do not need to be forced into a perfect lesson about resilience. What they do show is how much the role of choice has changed across Ekaterina’s life. The responsibilities that filled her childhood were often things she had little choice but to take on. The responsibilities that fill her adult life— interpreting, teaching, and running Seoul Moon— are demanding too, but now they are hers to choose.
When I asked how she managed to fit all of it into her life, Ekaterina admitted that time was always short. Yet she had reached a point where the things making her busy were also the things she wanted to be doing. That is why I think her own words make the strongest ending: “I only do things I like.”
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