Kimchi In Kazakhstan
Clare Jeong
©
Copyright 2025 by Clare Jeong
|
Large apartment block in Almaty. Photo courtesy of the author. |
Traveling
is as much a chance to learn about oneself as it is to learn about a
new place. I never thought I would be taught this lesson in as
foreign a country as Kazakhstan. Before my college roommate had been
placed by her post-graduation fellowship program to teach English in
Kazakhstan’s largest city of Almaty, I couldn’t have told
you the difference between Kazakhstan and any of the other Stans.
After
I promised to visit her, I checked out all three books in my library
on Kazakhstan, plus a Russian language book for good measure. I
learned about the remoteness of the country, how despite being the
largest landlocked country in the world, its population was similar
to Missouri’s. I learned that modern apples originated in
Kazakhstan - in fact, Almaty’s name roughly translates to
“Father of Apples”. I never could have pictured those
hours back in college of helping my roommate study Russian by
pointing out objects around our dorm room and asking “Kakoy?”
(what’s that?) would lead to these mountainous foothills she
now called home.
From
the moment I landed in Almaty, I was on high alert. Actually, even
before I landed. While I was waiting at the check-in line in Hong
Kong for the next leg of my journey to Almaty, a well-dressed man
behind me asked if I would check in his bag as I only had my
backpack. He looked like a model from a catalogue for men’s
watches – ambiguously exotic with tan skin and immaculately
shaped hair and bear. His accent hinted at a posh British boarding
school upbringing in possibly an Asian country. He was wearing a
starched white linen shirt and khaki pants, like he had just stepped
off his yacht onto a Mediterranean shore. He handed his leather
weekender bag towards me. Sensing my hesitation, he insisted, “It’s
just clothes.”
I
was terrified but also didn’t want to make a scene. A fear
entered my mind that if I were to report him, he might be able to
identify me and get revenge in some way later. I was about to land in
a country where I knew little but had heard snippets from my roommate
of corruption and resources acquired through opaque means. I was also
angry. As a young Korean woman, I often felt like a target for
strangers who profiled me as an easy target, be it for harassment or
petty theft. I shook my head quietly and tried to ignore his
protests, only to find when I stepped into the plane that I was
seated right in front of him. I spent the flight tucked deeply into
memorizing the sounds of the Cyrillic alphabet.
When
I arrived in Almaty, the cacophony of taxi drivers entered the
airport lobby every time the automatic doors opened. Men stormed the
exit, yelling prices in Russian, and I scanned their faces,
attempting to find a trustworthy one. Eventually I ended up walking
with someone, mostly because he had made eye contact with me.
He
was a burly man in his forties, and led me to his car where another
man, his friend, sat in the passenger seat. I laid my backpack onto
the back seat next to me, recited the name of my friend’s
address, and hoped that honest intentions and attempts at
communication would combine to lead me safely to her door.
We
had agreed on a price before I stepped in his car – a price
that my friend had told me should be in the range of costs –
but as I exited, he wrote a number that was quadruple what he had
quoted. I couldn’t understand why he was charging so much, as
traffic hadn’t been particularly bad and the journey had taken
as long as my friend had predicted, so I resolutely held out cash in
the amount that he had initially requested. Angrily, he shouted
something in Russian and drove off.
I
was stunned. He hadn’t taken my cash, and luckily I had kept my
bag on me when I stepped out of the car. I felt like I had offended
the first person I had encountered in the country. The guilt of being
a disrespectful tourist weighed heavily on that first day.
Over
the next few days, we explored the city. Almaty was unlike anywhere I
had visited before. I grew up outside Seattle and thought I was used
to living among a backdrop of mountains. But the looming Tien Shan
mountains were on a different scale, snow-capped and ever present in
the foreground. Their wildness contrasted with the austere, straight
lines of Almaty’s streets and the geometrically-contained
blocks of gray apartments that stood unchanged since the Cold War.
Square, concrete monoliths with weather-worn balconies stood shoulder
to shoulder like tired old soldiers—some scarred with peeling
paint, others proudly defying time with fresh coats of pastel.
Cyrillic letters still clung to their facades, half-lit neon signage
buzzing faintly beneath rusting hammers and stars.
The
streets felt empty for a large city. The lack of traffic brought
periods of quiet, interrupted occasionally by revving sports cars.
Gaudy red Lamborghinis and yellow Porsches raced through the roads.
Neon lights flickered in glassy storefronts – Gucci, Louis
Vuitton – gleaming above Soviet-era streetlamps.
Even
the parts of Almaty that should feel familiar were disconcertingly
like a facade of cities I had grown up in, but that didn’t
function in the same way. The shopping mall featured familiar brands
– Swarovski, Starbucks, ZARA – tied together by the same
shiny tiled floors and fluorescent recessed lights of the local
American mall that I had loitered in during my teenage years. It was
the middle of the day and all of the shops were open, yet there were
no customers. The mall held a dead emptiness such as I wouldn’t
experience again until a few years later, during the pandemic. These
huge spaces were built as if to accommodate much traffic, but where
were the people?
I
had traveled extensively across Africa and Europe before this trip,
and usually observed that if there were few tourists in a place with
many operators, the unlucky foreigner would be swamped with offers by
vendors. Not in Almaty. I tiptoed through the silent mall and popped
my head into shops, trying to avoid bringing too much attention to
myself, but the employees generally gave me a brief, disinterested
glance before returning to their conversations.
I
gingerly entered the bathroom of the mall, bracing myself for an
unmanned state, but it was pristine. The sinks glowed as if they were
brand new, and the toilets were uniform without a misaligned roll of
toilet paper or piece of trash in any stall.
I
headed first for the sink. No soap.
I
turned the tap. No water.
I
went to the next sink but encountered the same thing. After a few
tries, I glanced under the basins and noticed that the taps were
suspended into the air. None of these sinks were connected to pipes.
I inspected the toilet stalls closer and saw the same thing –
none were attached to plumbing. The immaculate props of sinks and
toilets in that film set of a bathroom had never been used.
The
museums and even restaurants felt similarly like they had been built
to anticipate large crowds that had yet to arrive. My friend took me
to her favourite restaurant, and it seemed almost comical when they
asked if we had a reservation, as there were only a few other
occupied tables to prove that the restaurant was actually operating.
It was a Georgian restaurant, and the dark wooden tables with their
heavy, cushioned chairs stood silently in irregular clusters. A dozen
or so waiters and waitresses, dressed in red like flight attendants,
milled around the empty restaurant. They were heavily engaged in
conversation, and after a few minutes of waiting at the table, I
waved to attempt to gain someone’s attention. Our waitress
reluctantly extracted herself to take our order.
The
menu was organized as expected – with starters, mains, sides,
desserts and drinks – and promised rich, heavy offerings of
skewered meats and bean stews. Except when I attempted to order one
of the stews to start, the waitress quickly answered, “We don’t
have that.”
I
pointed to kurt, a dried, fermented cheese ball. “We don’t
have that.”
It
seemed they only had one item from each of the sections. My friend
later explained that all the times she had been to the restaurant,
they had only ever had those few items. But she had allowed me to
order in hopes that there might be an additional item for a change.
I
asked my friend how these businesses could stay afloat without
seeming to need customers, and she assured me that the restaurants we
had visited were given to the wives of businessmen to give them
something to manage. Many of the employees were extended family
members, and the success of the business wasn’t necessarily a
source of income for the restaurant owners.
After
a few days of exploring the city with my friend, she needed to return
to teach. I was nervous about wandering the town on my own. Not many
shop or cafe workers spoke English, and my limited Russian could
barely get me a coffee. The only saving grace was that, despite being
in a country that felt so different from anywhere I had been before,
I didn’t look out of place. I have always lived in places where
I was a minority. But in Almaty I got to enjoy the feeling of
anonymity, of observing as a tourist without being observed.
I
slipped into a cafe to trial this superpower. I would order a coffee
and cake in Russian, and try to pass as a local. As I squinted at the
sign under the chocolate cake and silently tried to sound out the
Cyrillic letters, a voice came from the other side of the register.
“한국
사람이에요?”
(Are you Korean?) After days of striving to identify words from the
jumble of unfamiliar Russian words around me, my brain couldn’t
comprehend this turn of events.
“What?” I
reflexively responded in English.
The
speaker was the barista. She was a similar age to me, and had the
characteristic local look of a person of mixed Asian-European
descent. I wouldn’t have immediately jumped to the conclusion
that she was Korean, but her flawless sentence brought to my
attention details of her eyes and face that felt familiar after all.
In
the early 1900s, many Koreans fled Japanese colonization, expanding
to as remote places as the Russian Far East. In 1937, Stalin faced
rising tensions with Japan and accused Koreans of being potential
Japanese spies. He deported 200,000 ethnic Koreans from Russia,
stuffing them in cattle trains destined for the remote steppes of
Central Asia. The journey took weeks, and thousands died from hunger
and exposure. Those who survived became known as Koryo-saram –
the ethnic Koreans of Soviet Union countries.
As
they adapted to their new lives, the Koryo-saram found ways to hold
onto their heritage. They adapted seafood stews to make use of horse
meat and other mountainous beasts. They fermented hardy carrots to
make a variation of kimchi that would traditionally consist of salted
napa cabbage. They made makeshift greenhouses to protect staple foods
like spicy peppers from Kazakhstan's harsh winters, and used less
spice to appeal to an expanded range of palettes. Koryo-saram became
known for their agricultural expertise, bringing rice cultivation to
the steppes.
Almaty
was the economic capital of Soviet Kazakhstan, and over the decades
Koryo-saram moved there from the rural areas of their banishment,
seeking education and jobs. By the end of the Soviet period, Almaty
had become a major hub for the Koryo-saram community. They built
Korean language schools, opened grocery stores supplied by their
family farms, and cultivated lives that celebrated their Korean
heritage.
“Yes,
I’m Korean. Do you live here?” I responded in Korean. She
nodded and smiled.
What
I meant was, “How is it possible that another Korean person is
here? What turn of events led your family to live in this isolated
land of altitude sickness and long winters, where even the biting
timbre of the Russian language mimics the robustness of the few
fruits that grow in this harsh climate?”
The
polite indirectness that comes naturally when I speak the mother
tongue set in, and I rolled my intrusive and multi-generational
interrogation into a simple, “Where do you find kimchi here?”
After
meeting Ye-rin at the cafe, Almaty became a softer place for me. I
began looking out for faces that felt familiar to mine, and once I
started looking, I more often than not found my hesitant “저기요?”
(Excuse me?) could strike up conversations. Over the next few days, I
got around easier using Korean than Russian. It was as if I had
unlocked a secret language; a way of navigating this foreign land
that turns out had been available to me since birth. I started
noticing traces of home – churches with welcome signs written
in Korean, dive bars with posters on the window of Kpop idols,
grocery store staples of Kikkoman brand soy sauce. I let my guard
down, and the city opened itself up with the beauty of blended
Kazakh, Russian and Korean influences.
I work in HR and live in Dallas, Texas. This is
my first story competition.
(Unless
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type
the
author's name
in
the subject
line
of the message
we
won't know where to send it.)
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