Pen/Insular_Notes

Saw a great film yesterday on the Koreans of Kazakhstan: Koryo Saram - The Unreliable People. I highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in diasporas (Korea or otherwise) and questions of culture, identity and nationality. Very thought-provoking and moving stuff. The film is still in postproduction but to find out about screenings and DVD availability you can sign up for the mailing list at the website.

One unlikely fact I found out at the screening and post-film Q&A with the director David Chung was the existence of Korean-speaking Kurds in Kazakhstan. It seems that quite a few young Kurds worked on Korean-run collective farms in the 1950s and so picked up the language of their co-workers - an ‘archaic’ dialect of Korean that is called Koryo mar. Kazakhstan is one of the more ethnically diverse countries in the world (partly thanks to comrade Stalin) with some 100 recognised ethnic groups including Russians, Ukrainians, Koreans, Germans, Kurds, Uighurs, Greeks and of course Kazakhs.

See also the quite comprehensive Wikipedia page on the Koryo Saram, which solved for me the mystery of why the surname of one of the people appearing in the film was pronounced ‘Kan’. This surname does exist in Korea, but it is extremely rare with a population of only a few thousand. It turns out however, that the Russianised versions of the much more common surnames Kang (姜) and Han (韓) are pronounced as Kan and Khan respectively. And finally, in one of those handy coincidences, Hankyoreh has a story this week on Sakhalin Koreans visiting Ansan.