Asian Borderlands. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press [distributor], 2018. 240 pp. (Maps, illustrations.) US$115.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-8964-998-0.
The governments of twentieth-century Russia displaced borders and peoples. Park promises “to shed light on the contemporary presence of Koreans in the Russian Far East (RFE) against the background of their three consecutive displacements from the Korean Peninsula, the RFE, and Central Asia” (18). The displaced were: first, refugees from Korea; second, those deported to Central Asia; and third, those who returned after residence restrictions ended in 1956. Park writes: “[T]his book adopts a situational and relational approach to their scattered communities, focusing on how they maintain their way of life through kinship-centred sociality” (24). “My aim in this book is to shed light from an anthropological perspective on how the lives of Russian Koreans are intertwined with other local residents in this borderland of Northeast Asia” (40).
Data are the result of fieldwork conducted from 2002 to 2004, visits in 2010 and 2013, and archival research at the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography of the Peoples of the Far East. The fieldwork sites were Ussuriisk’s Chinese market and Korean House, both places where Koreans work and socialize, and a village located midway between Vladivostok and Khabarovsk.
Chapter 1 examines Korean immigration prior to the initial deportation. Early settlers were economic exiles followed by political exiles after Japan colonized Korea. They did well under early communism since most fit into the poorest category of agricultural workers. Yet they were more successful agriculturalists than their Russian counterparts. Deportation precluded their being counted as a nationality, reinforcing their separate identity.
Chapter 2 analyzes the repatriations to show “that the migration of Koreans from Central Asia to the RFE cannot be understood as a unitary phenomenon, but rather as something that involves many different factors” (82). In fact, few Koreans chose to return. Those who did gave up professional jobs to work on farms in the hopes of bettering their children’s lives. Others returned after the Soviet breakup, which became difficult after a 2002 law requiring virtually unattainable paperwork. Thus, Koreans faced a two-layered exclusion: “systematic exclusion” by the citizenship law and a “denial of sociability by local Russians” (111) who resented their presence. Park concludes: “This chapter has shown how kinship connections played a key role in the migration of Koreans from Central Asia to the RFE, but it has also illustrated the importance of friendship and its absence. This has allowed us to move beyond the traditional, rigid categorization of migration (e.g., political vs. economic vs. voluntary) and unitary notions of ethnicity” (113).
Chapter 3 discusses the Koreans’ transition from collective-farm rice cultivation to contracted vegetable cultivation. In the 1960s, the consolidation of successful and unsuccessful collective farms on larger state-owned farms disadvantaged Koreans, who generally ran successful farms. The larger units stuck them with the debts of the unsuccessful, who also took over their administrative positions. As a result, the Koreans turned to migratory vegetable cultivation (the gobonjil system).
In chapter 4, Park writes: “I want to address the issue of ‘subsistence’ or ‘independence’ of the Korean household as a moral construction, rather than as an economic reality” (140). “My attempt in this chapter is to de-naturalize DMS [the domestic mode of production] by means of [an] ethnographic description of [the] labour process which was entangled with [the] social relationship within and beyond the household” (141). She focuses on “the morality embedded in the greenhouse” both in its “disposability” and as a “projection of a male-gendered person,” (141–142) who built it. The house and the greenhouse constituted two households since Russian-hired labourers ate separately. The chapter also details the lifecycle ceremonies of a first birthday, wedding, sixtieth birthday, and funeral.
Chapter 5 discusses Korean House and the politics of its changing leadership. This chapter also highlights a popular carrot salad. The epilogue turns to the subject of salmon—Putin brought his own rather than eating the local catch. Park concludes: “In this book, I have shown that Koreans in the RFE are not merely objects of political and social change, but that they deflect the changes that lie outside of their control and absorb them into their subjective world” (207). “[T]his book has tried to show how Russian Koreans, who originated from a neighbouring Asian country, transformed themselves first into ‘Soviet people’ and later into russkoiazychannyi narod (‘Russian-speaking people’) following the collapse of the Soviet Union” (210).
If my chapter summaries seem dislocated, it is because much of the information in the book is displaced. Generalizations, explanations, and topics follow a stream of consciousness. There is no clear thesis or argument. Periodically Park writes: “This book” or “This chapter is about…” rather than consolidating the analytical discussion at the beginning of chapters to make clear their purpose. She often writes “as I mentioned before”—an indicator of flawed organization. The definition of the term, gobonjil (migratory cultivation), appears six pages after its intensive usage, leaving the reader adrift in the meantime.
I have quoted extensively to give a flavour of the book. The vocabulary is unnecessarily complicated with the use of “autochthonous” instead of “indigenous,” “interlocutor” instead of “interviews,” “antinomy” instead of “paradox,” and “quotidian” instead of “everyday.” Likewise, there are many unnecessary Russian words with clear English substitutes, for instance, national character for natsional’nyi kharakter. Explanatory footnotes contain details that should either be cut as trivia or integrated into the text as part of the discussion. Long chapter introductions detail the topics to be discussed. This should be consolidated into one paragraph followed by several analytical paragraphs laying out the actual argument. I still do not understand the relevance of the leadership changes at Korean House let alone the carrot salad. If they are relevant, Park needs to add topic sentences to make clear their connection to her argument.
Sarah C.M. Paine
US Naval War College, Newport, USA