Burnt by the Sun. The Koreans of the Russian Far East - Jon K. Chang

126 Chapter 6

My mother was married at the age of nine. She was going to the well to

fetch some water. My father, who was eigh teen at the time, saw her and was

smitten. He followed her home, found out where she lived, and proposed

to her [her parents]. She began to live with him when she was thirteen. She

had her first child when she was thirteen.... She had a total of thirteen

children. She was busy all of her life and thus remained illiterate.

Sergei Kim, also of Politotdel, commenting on his parent’s marriage [his
mother was fourteen, his father twenty- five] stated: “You can’t judge them by
today’s standards. This was not so rare then [marriage involving a female at
the age of puberty]. That was a diff er ent time. People were wild then.”^52 The
two cases of early pubescent marriage of Korean daughters seems to have
been a part of rural popu lar culture and mores of isolated Korean villages
and farmers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Of the people interviewed for this study, few wanted to give interviews
that contained extremely embarrassing details. Soviet society of the Stalin-
ist era contained a strong sense of decorum. The sense of having the right or
the desire to tell it like it was for an event that occurred in 1937–1938 was
bolstered and strengthened by the samizdat (self- published, tell- it- all) jour-
nals of the late 1960s onward, the Memorial publications (and the like), and
Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) era. All of these cultural movements and
periods helped to solidify the voices and the resolve of the deportees to
speak and recount their lives on their terms, sometimes giving an opinion
and then retracting the previous statement to give a contrary interpretation
or meaning. This is one of the strengths of oral history and its complexity—
that is, the past and the pres ent (interpretation and meaning) together in
the pres ent, with multiple voices, identities, interpretations, and meanings
as well as contradictory statements.^53 Many deportees could not control the
consequences of the Terror; therefore the interviews gave some a chance to
contradict or improve upon the official or published sources.

RISING TENSIONS: ESPIONAGE AND THE GEOPOLITICS OF THE FAR EAST

The 1930s were soon to turn back some of the pro gress of korenizatsiia and
internationalism. On the other hand, these changes brought about a greater
amount of control over citizens (via passportization), anti- Soviet groups,
foreigners, class enemies, Soviet borders, taxation, and trade. These ad-
vances in state control and the increase in state mea sures of population con-
trol led to the establishment of nationality as the primary marker of identity
in the 1930s. First, by the mid-1930s, we shall see that the Soviet nationali-