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Title: The Kareiski's Endless Wandering and the Korean Diaspora in the History of Northeast

Asia

Hello, everyone. It is a pleasure to be with you today.

My name is Moon Young-sook, and I am from South Korea.

First of all, it is an honor and a privilege to be able to join all of you at this important event to

talk about my book The Kareiski’s Endless Wandering.

This will also be an opportunity for us to think about the suffering of the children and young

people who were part of the Korean diaspora, which is a part of Northeast Asian history.

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The Kareiski's Endless Wandering (2012)

My book The Kareiski’s Endless Wandering, which was published in September 2012, is a

work of historical fiction for young adults.

“Kareiski” is a Russian word that refers to the Koreans who were scattered in various parts

of Russia across the Tumen River during the Japanese colonization of Korea.

Around the end of September 1937, the Kareiski were forced to relocate by the Soviet

government. They were loaded on a cattle train, which had neither chairs nor bathrooms,

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and sent on a forty-day, 6,000-kilometer journey to the wilderness of Central Asia.

Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, had decided to turn the Maritime Province, which

included the cities of Vladivostok and Ussuriysk, into a military district as part of the war

effort. For this end, he ordered that the 36,422 Kareiski households living there, which

numbered 171,781 people altogether, be loaded on the trans-Siberian train and relocated to

Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and other parts of Central Asia.

The Kareiski rode past 6,000 kilometers of snow-covered Siberian fields in a cattle train that

wasn’t even heated and were abandoned in a land they had never seen before.

It was not just the Kareiski in the Maritime Province who were relocated during this period.

The Soviet government also forced Greeks, Tartars, Germans, Jews, and Crimeans who

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were living on the western borders of the USSR to move to the wastes of Central Asia. The

Soviets believed that these peoples would be an obstacle in the war.

The Soviet administration gave the Kareiski at most five days, and sometimes no more than

three days, to get ready before they were relocated.

Leaving their houses, livestock, and fields behind and ignorant of what was happening, the

Kareiski had to board the trans-Siberian train. They didn’t know where they were going,

when they would be returning, or even why they had to leave.

While the Kareiski were traveling on the unheated trains, around 40,000 of the elderly and

infirm died from the bitter Siberian cold. The dead bodies were left on the fields beside the

train tracks.

.

Take a moment to look at this map with me.

Korea

Japan

Vladivostok

Khabarovsk

Irkutsk

Krasnoyarsk

Novosibirsk

Kazakhstan

Almaty

Uzbekistan

Kyrgyzstan Tashkent

Afghanistan

Mongol

Russia

Lake Baikal

The relocation route of the Kareiski living in the Maritime Province

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You will see at once just how far it is from Korea, through Vladivostok, to Almaty in

Kazakhstan and Tashkent in Uzbekistan.

For the 20 years that passed from their forced relocation to 1956, the Kareiski had no

identification papers. They had no freedom to move somewhere else, nor could they use

their own native language.

Since it was thought that they might become spies for the Japanese, they were treated like

an enemy people. They were watched carefully and mistreated like criminals.

Abandoned in the snowy fields, the Kareiski dug holes in the ground and made huts out of

reeds as they struggled to endure the deadly first winter.

During that winter, many more of the elderly and the young fell victim to local diseases or

starved to death.

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This picture shows where the Kareiski dug a hole in the ground and made a reed hut to

spend their first winter.

We are told that in Ushtobe, which is still a long way from Almaty in Kazakhstan, the Kareiski

dug holes and laid reeds down inside to spend the winter.

The children and the elderly lay down on the bottom, with the young people lying on top of

them. The next day, when they got up, they found that the people lying on top had frozen to

death during the night.

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These memorial stones mark the site of the first settlement of the Kareiski, located in

Ushtobe, Kazakhstan.

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In this picture, we can see graves of the Kareiski.

They say that at first, the earth was too hard to dig graves. Even when people died, they had

to wait until spring to dig graves for them.

When spring came, the first thing the Kareiski did was dig graves for the dead.

They did this even before they built houses, although they were still living in huts.

After that, as soon as the dirt thawed, they started cultivating the soil with their bare hands.

However, since the soil where the reeds grew was very salty, no crops would grow there.

Patiently and diligently, the Kareiski brought water from the Karatal River to remove the salt

from the soil. Finally, they managed to cultivate rice for the first time in Kazakhstan.

This photo shows a memorial stone that tells us that the Kareiski were the first to

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successfully cultivate rice in Kazakhstan.

The Soviet government forced the Kareiski to plant cotton in the rice paddies they had

prepared.

The reason, we are told, was that cotton was needed to make winter clothes for the soldiers

fighting in the war.

The Kareiski worked like dogs to raise cotton on collective farms.

In Korean, there is an expression that working on a cotton plantation will break your back.

This means that the work is so exhausting that even your bones get weak.

Such were the difficulties that the Kareiski had to face as they lived in a foreign land.

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Even worse, many families were separated from each other.

They were treated more like slaves than free people.

They could not use their mother tongue and were forced to speak only Russian.

The Soviet Union did not officially acknowledge that the forced relocation of the Kareiski had

been a poor policy until 1986, 49 years after it took place.

The Russian government announced this later, in 1993, after the former Soviet republics

became independent.

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It was in this document that Russia admitted that the policy of forced relocation was a poor

policy.

After this, the Kareiski were given the freedom to choose where to live, but by this time,

nearly all of the first generation of the relocated Kareiski had already died.

For those who remained alive, it was too late to return to their homeland. That would mean

giving up the land they had strived so hard to cultivate.

But the Kareiski had to face yet another trial after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

At this time, as the Soviet states became independent, they made policies that focused on

the ethnic majority. These policies favored the language of the majority and did not welcome

outsiders.

Since the Kareiski did not know the languages of the people living in the post-Soviet states,

they were pushed out of good jobs.

While Germany and Greece brought their people home and even gave them money to

resettle, Korea was different. The country was divided into North and South, and the two

states were not able to take in all of the Kareiski.

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When the Kareiski returned to the Maritime Province, leaving behind all of the land they had

spent their lives cultivating, the Russian government gave them old military barracks that

soldiers had stayed in during World War II.

In these worn-out military barracks, there were big problems with basic amenities such as

electricity and running water.

Another problem was that the Kareiski could not receive medical benefits, since they had no

nationality.

While the Kareiski finally received Russian citizenship, even today, their descendants are

working to establish themselves in a foreign land because of Stalin’s poor policy.

My young adult novel The Kareiski's Endless Wandering tells the story of a young girl named

An Dong-hwa who leaves Vladivostok in 1937 and of her life in Ushtobe, Kazakhstan

through 1956.

Dong-hwa boards the trans-Siberian train as part of the forced relocation. She joins her

mother, who is about to give birth, her older brother, and her grandfather.

Her father was taken away by Soviet officials a few months before the relocation, and the

family had not heard any news of him since then.

While Dong-hwa is on the train, she loses her mother.

As her mother is giving birth to the baby on the train, both she and the child die from cold

and hunger. As a result, young Dong-hwa suffers the pain of losing her mother, along with all

the other difficulties she is facing.

Dong-hwa’s older brother is also on the train, where he is treated like an animal. When he

tries to fight back against the cruel soldiers, one of his friends is killed, and he goes insane

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from the shock.

Dong-hwa, her grandfather, and her disturbed brother manage to reach the snow-covered

plains, but her misfortunes are not over.

Her brother is bitten by a wolf and dies of rabies, and her feeble grandfather does not make

it through the winter.

The only one of her family to survive the journey, Dong-hwa must fend for herself as she

keeps looking for her missing father.

However, it is not until 1956 that she learns the truth. She is sent notice that her father had

been executed without a trial one month before the relocation.

By this point, Dong-hwa is already the mother of three little ones. The story now tells of how

she overcomes all kinds of hardship for her children.

In September 2012, after the publication of The Kareiski's Endless Wandering, I boarded the

trans-Siberian train in Vladivostok and took a trip to Irkutsk.

During my time on the Trans-Siberian Railway, I spent some time thinking about the Kareiski

who were forced to move.

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This is a picture taken at Razdolnoe Station in Russia in September 2012.

During the forced relocation of the Kareiski, 171,781 people boarded trains at this station

under orders from Stalin.

The greed and selfishness of countries in the region forced numerous Kareiski to live and die

as exiles in a foreign land.

In addition, there are still many people living today who are scattered across the world

because of this unfortunate history.

As an author, I have written several books that deal with the Korean diaspora.

This is a subject that I really want young people to learn about as they are growing up.

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the other books I have written.

In 2009, I wrote a young adult novel titled The Children of Henequen.

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The Children of Henequen (2009)

This novel depicts the hard lives led by Koreans who were tricked into crossing the Pacific

Ocean into Mexico in 1904.

In that year, a Japanese man named Tashino Kanichiwa and an English ship owner named

Myers deceived people living in the Land of the Morning Calm, as Korea was known at the

time.

They lied to them, promising that they could get rich if they went to Mexico and spent four

years working on a farm. Mexico, they said, was a warm country where the living was easy.

Tashino and Myers even took out a newspaper ad to attract Koreans.

Many were fooled by the claims that they could make a lot of money by working for four

years in a warm, delightful country that was said to be heaven on earth.

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One thousand and thirty-three of these Koreans boarded a British ship called the Ilford and

crossed the Pacific Ocean.

The forty-day journey took them to Merida on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, where they

were sent to work on henequen farms.

A picture of the Ilford (from the Korean Museum of Immigration History)

The 1,033 Koreans immigrants who were victims of the fraud boarded the British vessel

Ilford and crossed the Pacific Ocean.

When they arrived at the henequen farm, they were still unaware that they had been

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betrayed.

Three of the immigrants had died during the voyage across the Pacific, and their bodies had

been simply thrown into the ocean.

The Koreans had immigrated thinking they would be doing rice farming. They were

astonished to learn that they instead had to work on a henequen farm in the desert under

the hot sun.

Even worse, they were forced to work like slaves, and were not even given proper wages.

In this picture you can see a henequen farm located on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

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It is said that there were many rattlesnakes and scorpions on the henequen farms.

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In this picture, you can see fibers made from the leaves of the henequen plant. (Source:

Korean Museum of Immigration History)

At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, the world

powers were busy expanding their colonies.

Many resources from the colonies were loaded on ships and brought back to the home

country.

In order to help move those goods, these countries needed a large amount of rope that

would not rot in seawater.

The source of that rope was the henequen plant.

The Koreans who worked on the henequen plantations under the blazing sun didn’t have

enough to eat. Some of them were bit by rattlesnakes, while others came down with

diseases of that region.

In 1909, the four years of the contract had expired, but the Koreans hadn’t been able to

make enough to pay for the passage back to Korea. In fact, their wages had been so low

that they were actually in debt.

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The leaves of the henequen are as long as an adult is tall, and there are poisonous spines at

the end. Because of this, the workers on the plantation often had wounds on their bodies.

This is a shack where Korean workers at the henequen plantation once lived. (Korean

Museum of Immigration History)

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If they wanted to return to their home country, the Koreans would have had to work for a

year to save up enough money to pay for passage on a ship crossing the Pacific Ocean.

However, in 1910, Korea was annexed by Japan. Now that Korea had become a colony of

Japan, the Koreans in Mexico could not return to their home country.

The Korean immigrants lived and died in a strange land, longing for their distant homes, and

their descendants were scattered throughout Latin America.

This is a picture taken in January 2013 at the Museum of Immigration History in South Korea.

My book tells the story of three boys. At the time, Korean society was divided into classes.

One of the boys is the son of an aristocrat, one is the son of a butcher, which was the lowest

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class, and one is the son of a vagabond. The book describes how the three boys endure the

hardships they face in a foreign land.

The three boys, who followed their parents to Mexico and had no say in the decision to

immigrate, experience equal shares of pain, resentment, suffering, and hope while on the

henequen plantation.

Eventually, the three boys establish a Korean school in Merida even as they long for Korea

and battle feelings of despair. Though they miss the home they can never return to, they still

try to find a new hope.

While writing this book, I thought about all of the foreigners who come to Korea today to

pursue the Korean dream. My book is an appeal for Koreans to remember how we suffered

and to treat that history as motivation to embrace, care for, and love the foreign laborers who

come to Korea with the dream of succeeding. It is also a reminder that all of us must work to

create a global village where everyone can be happy.

The story of Korean boys who were pressed into service as laborers

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The Dark Sea (2010)

At the end of World War II, young Koreans were pressed into service as soldiers and

laborers.

The Japanese sent some of these young people to undersea coal mines to dig for coal.

They were held against their will and could not leave when they wanted to.

Work at the Chosei Coal Mine was divided into two shifts, with each miner working for twelve

hours at a time.

On the morning of February 4th, 1943, the underwater Chosei Coal Mine collapsed.

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The 180 or so people who were digging for coal in the mine at the time drowned where they

were working.

One hundred and thirty-seven of them were Koreans.

Even today, their bodies remain underwater at the site of the Chosei Coal Mine, located

offshore of Ube in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan.

In 2006, I visited the site of the disaster to write this book.

Each year, the family members of the deceased go there to perform the jesa ritual for the

fathers, uncles, and brothers lying beneath the waves.

While there, the bereaved family members and I cried together.

The thing that motivated me to write this book was the newspaper article you see here.

In this picture, you can see traces of the Chosei Coal Mine in the waters off the coast of the

city of Ube.

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Two structures can be seen here.

One was a ventilation shaft that brought air into the underwater coal mine.

The other was an outlet for removing water that collected inside the mine.

Even today, these two pipes just off the coast of Ube are a witness to the horrible things that

happened here.

The Japanese government wanted to tear down these structures to conceal the past from

future generations.

However, there was a civic group in Japan that argued that the pipes must be preserved to

remind people who come that this sad history must not be repeated.

Thanks to petitions they collected, the government decided to preserve the pipes instead.

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The structures had been very close to becoming one more distorted part of Japanese history

Every year, this civic group raises money to pay for the travel costs of ten family members of

the deceased.

These family members travel from Busan in South Korea to Ube in Japan by way of

Shimonoseki to perform the jesa ritual for their ancestors.

The members of the civic group also prepare the food to be used in the ritual.

For these Japanese citizens, doing the right thing is more important than their government’s

political position.

The family members face the sea as they conduct the ritual using the ceremonial table that

the Ube residents have prepared.

When the jesa is over, they hold a single chrysanthemum and walk out to the sea, where

they mourn for their fathers, uncles, and brothers in loud voices.

Some sons bring a letter they have written and read it aloud as they look out at the sea, with

tears running down their cheeks.

Other sons cry out, “Father! Forgive your wretched son,” as they look out at the sea.

When I accompanied the family members, I also shed many tears.

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Look at this picture.

The young boy you see here was forced to work in the underwater coal mine by the

Japanese at the end of World War II.

That is where he died.

I was reading a newspaper article one day when I first learned the surprising story of the

underwater coal mines.

The article contained the shocking information that these young Koreans that had been

pressed into labor and had never come back home.

Their bodies were still lying under the sea.

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At once, I called the newspaper for more information.

Next, I went to meet one of the survivors of the Chosei Coal Mine accident in Yamaguchi

Prefecture in Japan.

After I listened to his testimony and visited the site to see it for myself, I wrote a historical

novel for children and young adults.

The descendants of the coal miners prepare the ceremonial table and hold the jesa ritual on

the seashore.

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On these wooden plates are written the names of the Koreans buried underwater.

Because of Japan’s colonial policy of forcing Koreans to adopt Japanese names, the

descendants of the victims cannot find the names of their relatives on these plates.

Most of the year, the name plates are stored in a box that is kept at Saikoji Temple.

They are brought out on February 3rd of each year, when the relatives of the deceased come

to hold the jesa ritual.

However, because all of the names are written in Japanese as a result of colonial policy, the

descendants are not able to tell which of the name plates belonged to their relatives.

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Despite this, the families line up the name plates neatly, bow before them, and pray for the

souls of the departed.

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Amazingly, these two people made it back from the coal mine and are still alive today.

The man on the left, the one who is not wearing a hat, is the man whom I based my novel on.

Can you see the big pipe in the distance behind them? That’s how far from the shore the

underwater coal mine was.

Standing in the place where they had toiled away the years of their youth, the two survivors

resisted feelings of resentment and recalled the events of the past.

Basing my tale on a true story, I wrote about a boy who is forced to work at the Chosei Coal

Mine while enduring various difficulties.

After the mine collapses, this seventeen-year-old boy works at a shipyard in Nagasaki until

the atomic bomb falls in 1945.

Following Japan’s defeat in the same year, the boy survives countless brushes with death

and finally manages to return to Korea.

The people who were conscripted by the Japanese and somehow managed to survive, like

the main character of my book, still deal with physical ailments caused by their experiences.

Even today, they have yet to be properly compensated for what they endured.

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This is a picture of me when I visited the site of the tragedy with the survivors and the

families of the deceased in 2006.

The Japanese colonization of Korea played a major role in the Korean diaspora, which I

have looked at through the novels that I have written through the present.

In the case of the Kareiski, many people crossed the Tumen and the Yalu Rivers into Russia

around that time because of Japanese colonization.

The Kareiski went to a place beyond the reach of Japanese oppression to work toward

Korean independence.

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Most of the Kareiski were independence fighters struggling to achieve the independence of

Korea.

However, because of Stalin’s policy of forced relocation, these people unfortunately became

part of the diaspora.

They were unable to return home even after Korea gained its independence from Japan.

Also, as we saw in my young adult novel The Children of Henequen, another part of this

diaspora is the Koreans who were tricked into going to Mexico.

They were scattered throughout Latin America, never to return home.

Finally, as I describe in my young adult novel The Dark Sea, numerous Koreans were

conscripted by the Japanese during the colonial period, forced to go to a foreign country and

die there.

One good example of this is the large number of people who were detained on the Soviet

island of Sakhalin.

They lived out their lives there in loneliness, longing for their home.

Their descendants are scattered far and wide even today, having forgotten how to write and

speak their native tongue.

For most of these people, their wounds have never been healed.

Their pain has been passed down from generation to generation.

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And then there are the countless families who were divided as a result of the Korean War.

Today, more and more North Korean defectors are crossing the border in search of freedom.

While some of these defectors do eventually reach South Korea, others are forming a new

diaspora that must wander in foreign lands.

This sad history must not be repeated.

Why have countless people lost their lives, and why have countless others suffered the pain

of leaving their homes and living as wanderers?

It is because of the colonial ambitions of neighboring countries.

The countries responsible for such suffering should offer a sincere apology to their victims.

These countries should take the lead in making sure that such tragedies are not repeated.

Even at this very moment, there are unlucky people around the world whose lives are ruined

by war and hunger.

Even now, people are separated from their families and forced to suffer in a foreign land,

longing to return home.

The reason I wrote these historical novels about the suffering of people in the diaspora was

to find some way to comfort, console, and encourage the people who are hurting today.

I believe that the best way to ensure that this kind of tragedy does not occur again is to

reflect on what we have done wrong, to love one another, and to understand each other. I

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am speaking of the spirit of friendship.

I believe that if we are to understand other cultures, we must bridge the psychological and

physical gap that separates us. I hope that the stories I have written will serve as a tool to

help the flower of multiculturalism bloom.

Thank you for listening to my presentation today.

Attendee: Moon, Young-Sook

Nationality: Republic of Korea (South Korea)

Email address: soltee1953@hanmail.net

Title: The Kareiski's Endless Wandering and the Korean Diaspora in Northeast Asian History

Subtitle: The Kareiski and Multiculturalism 75 Years Ago