Intervention 41zemskoe, Blagoveshchensk, and a few others.^40 The oral interviews con-
firmed this as well. Koreans of middle- class urban backgrounds sent their
children to the best gymnasiums. They hired the best tutors for them. In
general, Korean sons were pushed harder and given more attention and
praise than daughters.^41 Pak Chin Sun, who spoke at the Comintern’s Second
Congress, studied at one of the most prestigious RFE gymnasiums in
Vladimiro- Aleksandrovsk. His parents also paid for tutors to teach him
Korean lit e r a ture and the Chinese/Korean writing system.^42 Korean children
growing up in Vladivostok learned Rus sian even before they started school,
because urban Koreans spoke both languages or spoke in a mixed Korean-
Russian patois. Children would play kurka and lapta in the streets or open
fields (both are variations of a game similar to baseball). They learned to
play volleyball and football at school.^43 Vladimir Tsoi was born in Vladivo-
stok in 1925. His family left Korea shortly after the March 1 (1919) protests,
in which his father had participated. He recalled attending Rus sian school
in Vladivostok, stating, “Half of my classmates were Koreans. There were
some Chinese and Rus sians, but no indigenous.”^44 Most urban Russified
Koreans dressed primarily in Rus sian clothes. As Chan Nim Kim indicated:
“Where would we have gotten Korean clothes from? I didn’t see any Korean
clothes.”^45 When Putnam Weale was in Vladivostok, he noticed Korean
newspaper vendors (boys) selling their papers on the street and screaming
out the daily headlines (in Rus sian). However, korenizatsiia would bring
back the po liti cal “exotica” of Koreans and other nationalities wearing
traditional dress during the vari ous nationalities and all- union national con-
gresses.^46 Koreans in Sinhanchon were general carpenters, joiners, tailors,
doctors of traditional medicine, small business owners such as greengrocers
and those selling general goods, servants (boiki), navvies and dockworkers on
Vladivostok’s wharf, and general laborers. There were also opium and gam-
bling dens in the Koreatown.^47 Although opium and gambling dens signified
seediness and generated opprobrium, these dens were very much a part of the
working- class environment of Chinese and Korean laborers in the nineteenth
to early twentieth centuries.^48 The following is a description of an opium den
in Vladivostok’s Chinatown circa 1913. This passage is cited because this de-
scription more or less held true to the end of the 1930s (the Chinese deporta-
tion).^49 Before 1913, Sinhanchon (the Korean district) was composed of two
streets in the Chinatown area. They are described as follows:
Walking around these streets and ducking into courtyards and shops,
bath houses and even into attics and cellars under the guidance of the city
sanitation commissioner, Mr. Porvatov, I was surprised by the scene which
opened before me. The dirt, the horrible stench and the overcrowding