My nationality is Uzbek, but I always root for Korea
Updated: Sep 18
The story of Kim Natalya and Koryo-Saram identity across generations
Natalya grew up surrounded by Koreans, but not in Korea.
She was born in a Koryo-Saram village in Tashkent Province, Uzbekistan. She remembers approximately 96 percent of the village being Koryo-Saram. Her school had around 1,500 students, and in a classroom of roughly 35, only two or three were Uzbek.
Yet the language they spoke at school was not Korean or Uzbek. It was Russian. During the Soviet era, Natalya explained, Russian connected people across all fifteen Soviet republics. Students who excelled academically could continue their education throughout the Soviet Union, and in her community, education was taken seriously. Most young people, she remembers, continued to a university or vocational school.
Her childhood existed at the intersection of several identities that are often treated as separate: Korean ancestry, an Uzbek homeland, and a Soviet education. For Natalya, they were simply parts of the same life.
The Life She Wanted
Natalya wanted to design clothes. Instead, she became a nurse. Her mother left when Natalya was only about a month and a half old, and she was raised largely by her grandparents, aunt, and uncle. Both of her parents eventually remarried. As a child, she did not even realize that the woman she knew as her mother was not her biological mother until other children at school told her.
Those family circumstances also shaped the choices available to her after high school. There was not enough money for her to pursue the education she wanted. Her maternal grandmother suggested nursing school instead. Natalya did not want to become a nurse, but she needed a profession that could provide an income.
So she went. She became skilled at giving injections and hoped to move into an operating room, but the work was demanding and the pay was low. Living independently in Tashkent was expensive. Natalya remembers earning around $10 at the hospital when a friend told her she could make roughly that amount working for a single day in a restaurant. She left the hospital.
It was only the beginning of a working life that would repeatedly change direction. Natalya worked in restaurants, at an education center, at an optician’s shop where she learned to make glasses, and at a traditional Korean medicine hospital alongside KOICA doctors. She also spent more than two years living and studying in South Korea. And it was around that period of her life that she began learning a language that was simultaneously foreign and familiar.
Learning Korean
Natalya did not grow up speaking the Korean spoken in South Korea today. She first became interested in learning it while working part-time. She noticed someone doing homework in a script she did not recognize. She asked if it was Chinese.
“No,” the woman told her. “It’s Korean.” The woman offered to teach her.
Natalya remembers learning to read and write Hangul within about a week. Grammar was another story. During our interview, she laughed while remembering how confusing Korean verb conjugations seemed to her— why 먹다 changed to 먹었다, for example, and why the rules never seemed as intuitive as learning the alphabet had been.
Then she went to Korea.
Suddenly, she had to learn grammar, speaking, and listening at the same time. For roughly six months, she remembers barely speaking at all. She would listen, nod, misunderstand, and rely on other students from the former Soviet Union for help.
But Korean was not entirely absent from Natalya’s childhood. There was another Korean language waiting in her memories.
The Language of Her Grandmother
Natalya grew up hearing her grandmother speak Koryo-mar, the language historically spoken by many Koryo-Saram. Her grandmother spoke very little Russian. She had attended a Korean-language school through middle school. Her grandfather, by contrast, had received only about two years of elementary education.
Before 1937, Natalya said, her grandparents had lived near Vladivostok. That year, the Soviet government deported Koreans from the Russian Far East to Central Asia. Her grandparents’ lives continued in Uzbekistan. The history of migration was audible in the language Natalya remembers her grandmother speaking.
Some of the words she recalls as Koryo-mar were derived from Russian words, transformed through pronunciation and everyday use. During our conversation, Natalya began listing examples from memory: words for buckets, jackets, matches.
Language had traveled with her family. It had changed along the way.
Her grandmother’s generation could receive an education in Korean. Natalya’s generation was educated primarily in Russian. Natalya later learned contemporary Korean as an adult. Today, she says, younger people in Uzbekistan increasingly need Uzbek as well. There is no single language that contains the entirety of her family’s history.
“I Can’t Say I’m Uzbek”
When I asked Natalya whether she considered herself Koryo-Saram or Uzbek, her answer came quickly.
“I acknowledge that I’m Koryo-Saram, but I can’t say I’m Uzbek. My nationality is Uzbek, but when there’s a soccer game, I root for Korea. No matter where Korea plays, I’m always on their side.”
Her relationship with Korea is more than an imagined connection to an ancestral homeland. Natalya lived there for more than two years.
She remembers that experience warmly. Most of the people around her were kind, she told me, and her time there left her with a positive impression of the country. Even now, meeting someone from Korea produces a feeling that she struggled for a moment to name during our conversation.
Excitement. Familiarity. Pride.
Yet Natalya did not simply tell me, “I am Korean.” She told me she is Koryo-Saram.
That distinction matters.
Her life has been rooted in Uzbekistan. Her childhood was shaped by the Soviet Union. Russian was the language of her education. Her grandmother spoke Koryo-mar. She learned contemporary Korean as an adult and spent part of her life in South Korea.
Her identity does not fit neatly within the borders of any one country.
What Changes Between Generations
Natalya sees those identities continuing to change. She describes herself and people of her generation as relatively conservative compared with younger members of her family. Younger Koryo-Saram, she observes, have grown up alongside Uzbek and Russian friends and have adopted different attitudes toward clothing, relationships with elders, and social expectations.
She notices similar changes in attitudes toward education and work. Natalya remembers growing up in a community where education carried enormous importance and where Soviet schools emphasized obligations to neighbors and people who needed help. She believes younger generations approach some of these questions differently. She does not necessarily see those differences as something that can—or should—be stopped.
“There’s nothing we can do,” she said while describing some of the cultural differences she notices among younger relatives. They have grown up in a different world. But some things, she hopes, will remain.
“Because We Are Koryo-Saram”
Natalya told me about an eight-year-old boy in her family. The adults around him are teaching him the rituals that previous generations taught them: how to celebrate a child’s first birthday, how to mark a sixtieth birthday, how to perform memorial rituals after someone dies. One of the relatives who had carried this knowledge died during the COVID-19 pandemic. But what he taught his son did not disappear with him.
Now, Natalya explained, that son takes his own child to visit their ancestors’ graves. He teaches him how to pour the ceremonial liquor and explains what each action means.
Natalya describes how her family teaches younger generations traditions surrounding first birthdays, milestone birthdays, memorial rites, and visiting ancestors’ graves.
The transmission is also happening beyond individual families. Natalya described Koryo-Saram cultural organizations where younger people gather for holidays such as Chuseok and Dano and learn traditional games and customs. But the culture they inherit is not identical to the culture their grandparents practiced.
Contemporary South Korean culture has entered the community as well. Traditions have mixed and changed. Even among Koryo-Saram communities, Natalya explained, practices surrounding something as fundamental as a funeral can vary from one village to another. Perhaps preservation, then, does not mean keeping a culture unchanged.
Natalya’s grandmother spoke a Korean language different from the one Natalya would later learn in South Korea. Natalya grew up in a Koryo-Saram village while receiving a Soviet education in Russian. Younger generations are growing up in an independent Uzbekistan while encountering both inherited Koryo-Saram traditions and contemporary South Korean culture.
Each generation receives something different. Each changes it. And then, sometimes, someone takes an eight-year-old boy to the graves of his ancestors and teaches him what to do. Because, Natalya explained, they are Koryo-Saram. And these are the traditions they want the next generation to remember.
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