Language Opens People’s Hearts
Hwang Polina on education, perseverance, and building a life as Koryo-Saram in Uzbekistan
Hwang Polina was born in Samarkand in 1952. Her parents had arrived there through forced migration, and Uzbekistan became the place where Polina herself was born, raised, educated, and eventually built her life.
Education was never treated casually in her family. Polina remembers being raised with a simple expectation: study hard and be number one. That expectation became even more significant after her father died when she was ten years old. He left behind six children— four daughters and two sons— and Polina’s mother suddenly had to raise them alone. The family struggled financially, and for three years, Polina and several of her siblings lived and studied in a state-run orphanage because their mother could not care for all six children by herself. When it closed, they returned home.
Still, one expectation remained: Everyone would study.
Polina remembers university becoming almost a rule within the family. Her mother was determined that no one would be able to look at her children and say that, because they had grown up without a father, they had not been properly educated. That determination would shape much of Polina’s life.
“We Had One Goal”
Polina left Samarkand for Tashkent hoping to attend university. When she could not enter immediately, she enrolled in an agricultural college instead. Once again, she finished at the top of her class.
That achievement opened another door: top students could continue their studies in Moscow. Polina went and was admitted to university there. It seemed that the goal she and her family had worked toward for years was finally within reach.
Then she came home. Her younger sibling also dreamed of attending university in Tashkent. Polina began to feel that pursuing her own education in Moscow was selfish when she was already old enough to work. So she gave up the opportunity, returned home, and worked so that her sibling could study instead.
Her own dream of a university degree did not disappear.
Polina studied while working at night, still determined to finish first. Years later, after marriage and after having a son and daughter, she returned to that unfinished goal.
At 33 years old, she finally graduated. And she did not simply graduate. Out of approximately 600 students, Polina remembers being the only one to graduate at the top.
“I’m not bragging. I just had a goal to study hard and prove myself.”
For Polina, academic achievement was personal, but it was also connected to something larger. She describes growing up with the belief that Koryo-Saram had to work and study exceptionally hard to build secure lives in the place where their families had settled.
The Women Who Raised Her
There was another side to Polina’s childhood.
She grew up as one of four daughters in a family that desperately wanted sons. Polina remembers her parents and grandmother waiting for a boy, and she remembers the pain this created for the girls in the family. Her grandmother once suggested that one of the daughters be given away simply because she was a girl. Polina believes the words left a lasting wound, particularly for her younger sister.
“Girls weren’t celebrated the same way.”
Yet it was ultimately Polina’s mother who held the family together after her father’s death. She raised six children under difficult circumstances and made education one of the organizing principles of their lives.
That tension is important to Polina’s story: she remembers growing up in a family where sons were deeply desired, while simultaneously being shaped by a mother whose determination kept six children moving toward an education.
Hwang Mangum and a Second Chance at Education
Another person became central to Polina’s education: Hwang Mangum.
Polina describes Hwang Mangum as almost a father figure. She credits Mangum with helping make it possible for her to eventually complete her university education and remembers proudly bringing her diploma to show her after graduating first in her class.
That relationship later extended into Polina’s professional life.
After studying agriculture, Polina worked as an agronomist in Samarkand. After marrying, she moved to the village where Hwang Mangum worked. Polina recalls joining a laboratory established there to develop biological methods of controlling agricultural pests without relying on chemical pesticides. She traveled to other countries to learn more about the work and later took on additional responsibilities involving economics, planning, and greenhouse agriculture.
She worked there from 1976 until 1994. And eventually, almost accidentally, she became connected to the museum where I interviewed her. When someone was needed to explain the museum to a visiting Uzbek official, Polina was asked to help. She had something particularly useful: she could communicate in Uzbek, Russian, and Korean. What began as a request to help eventually turned into years of volunteering there.
“Language Opens People’s Hearts”
Polina did not grow up speaking all three of those languages fluently. Russian was the language of her childhood education. Her grandmother spoke a Korean dialect, and Polina remembers her parents sometimes speaking Korean with one another while the children responded in Russian.
She learned Uzbek later, largely out of necessity. At university, Polina became the leader of a group in which, as she remembers it, roughly 90 percent of her classmates were Uzbek. Not understanding their language made communication difficult, so she began teaching herself. She remembers the process as extraordinarily hard.
Korean came later still. Around 1991, when visitors from South Korea began arriving, Polina confronted the fact that she identified as Korean but could not communicate with them in Korean. She remembers feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable. So she decided to learn. Within about six months, she says, she had studied enough Korean to begin working as an interpreter.
“Language moves people’s hearts. Language opens people’s hearts.”
For Polina, knowing Uzbek fundamentally shaped her experience as a Koryo-Saram woman. She told me that she did not personally feel that being Koryo-Saram or being a woman prevented her from finding work. Instead, she remembers being welcomed in different settings because she could speak to people in their own language.
“In My Heart, I Think of Myself as Koryo”
When I asked Polina whether she considered herself Koryo-Saram, Uzbek, or Korean, she did not hesitate about her internal identity.
“In my heart, I think of myself as Koryo.”
But the rest of her answer mattered just as much. She told me that living in Uzbekistan, she had rarely felt a sharp boundary between herself and the Uzbek people around her. In her telling, Uzbek neighbors had accepted Koryo-Saram warmly enough that the distinction between “you are Uzbek” and “I am Koryo-Saram” did not dominate everyday life. She described it instead as living “like one family.”
That sense of belonging appears again when Polina talks about food. Uzbek families eat and even sell kimchi. Koryo-Saram families, meanwhile, learned to prepare and eat foods such as plov, dumplings, and lagman. For Polina, those exchanges symbolize the relationship she has experienced between the communities.
“We don’t think, ‘This is yours, that’s ours.’ We live like one family.”
The Traditions That Made Them Koryo-Saram
Living “like one family” did not mean that Polina stopped thinking of herself as Koryo-Saram. Her family continued celebrating first birthdays, weddings, and 60th-birthday celebrations. They observed memorial traditions and visited graves. When I asked why those customs mattered, Polina connected them directly to identity.
“That’s how we show our Koryo identity—through culture.”
And when I later asked which traditions she hoped younger generations would continue, she returned to the same celebrations: milestone birthdays, weddings, and other family traditions. She did not know what would happen to them in the future, but she hoped they would continue.
A Different Generation, With Different Dreams
Polina is particularly interesting for this project because she was born in 1952. When she talks about younger Koryo-Saram women, she is not describing an abstract historical change. She is comparing their lives with a world she remembers herself.
“Younger women have different dreams now.”
Her generation, she said, was taught primarily to work hard. They were also expected to marry within the Koryo-Saram community. Younger people, in her view, no longer approach marriage or the future in quite the same way.
But Polina resisted making too simple a comparison. The eras themselves are different, she told me. Young people have access to different technologies, opportunities, and possibilities, and therefore imagine different futures.
What she hopes remains is the determination to learn. That idea stretches across virtually every generation in Polina’s story. Her mother insisted that six children pursue education after their father’s death. Polina worked at night while studying and eventually completed the university degree she had once sacrificed. Her son later earned a doctorate in South Korea. And she remembers adults in her Koryo-Saram community working to create opportunities for younger students to study abroad.
The countries changed. The languages changed. The possibilities changed. The expectation to keep learning did not.
A Life Built in Uzbekistan
Polina has traveled to South Korea many times. She has family in Russia. At one point, her family even prepared to move to Crimea, where her mother and siblings were living. But her children did not want to leave Uzbekistan, and the family stayed. Polina never left.
She was born in Uzbekistan to parents whose arrival there had not been voluntary. She grew up speaking Russian, learned Uzbek as a young adult, and later learned Korean. She identifies in her heart as Koryo-Saram, while describing Uzbekistan as the country where she has never felt like a foreigner.
Those identities do not appear contradictory when Polina tells her story. Perhaps that is why the lesson she draws from language feels so fitting. Learning Uzbek did not make her less Koryo-Saram. Learning Korean did not make Uzbekistan less her home. Each language gave her another way to enter a community, another way to communicate, and another way to make herself understood.
“Language moves people’s hearts. Language opens people’s hearts.”
For Polina, it seems to have opened much of her life.
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