Voices in the Field 183shoulders and felt warm and safe, and how, sometimes, her father would
carry her while she wrapped herself around him inside his jacket to avoid
the windy chill of Vladivostok in the fall and winter. This was the voice of
the happiest and most innocent time in her life, from age three to seven.
Immediately after her father’s arrest (during 1937–1938), she described a
bewildering period when her mother was extremely ill and Elizaveta was
left to take care of both her mother and her younger brother. Her face and
body language changed again, to that of a frightened eight- year- old child
who was suddenly forced to become an adult: “Life was so hard, I didn’t
know what to do. But life got better once ‘aunty’ (tyosha) came after about a
year. She knew what to do and how to take care of my younger brother.”
Then, in the next anecdote of the same interview, Elizaveta described
her younger brother’s attempt during the early 1960s to find out what had
happened to their father and possibly find where he was buried. This voice
was clearly that of a hardened adult who had become cynical towards the
state. She stated: “The authorities said that he had a sharp pain in the abdo-
men and died from this [during his incarceration]. Of course, we don’t believe
that he died this way. We don’t know how he died and where they buried
him. Whether they buried him or shot him and where they threw the body,
we don’t know.”^15
Li’s interview exemplifies the richness and the complexity of conduct-
ing oral history. At best, the interviewer feels as if he were a diver plunging
into the depths of the subject’s psyche. The subject narrates a history inter-
twined with thousands of roots and connections to places, events, and
people long gone and forgotten by others; this memory (and its voice) gives
interpretations, meanings, contradictions, and counternarratives, all in the
pres ent. It is a view of history so unique that it will never be replicated or
recounted in the same form!
THE ONE (STORY ) T H AT GOT AWAY
I would like to end this chapter with a poignant anecdote about men con-
demned to serve in a Stalinist gulag who did not forget their own humanity
and, figuratively speaking, threw a drowning man a life preserver. As stated
earlier, conducting oral history and fieldwork is an inexact science that can
vary depending on the individual’s rapport with the subject and yet can still
be carried out successfully despite the variance. Some stories were just never
meant to be recorded, and they live on in print and in memory. In Septem-
ber 2009, I went with a couple of Soviet Koreans to Kolkhoz Uzbekistan,
about 30 kilo meters from Tashkent. Kolkhoz Uzbekistan had been one of
the largest majority Korean collective farms until 1991. There I met Nikolai