A S Korean City Imports Koreans from Central Asia

choi

My Aug 1, 2024 posting titled "Old News About Local Governments in Japan as Matchmakers" at the last paragraph of the Note talked about total fertility Rate (TFR, which talked about S Korea's 0.72. The following NUT report is free.


Victoria Kim, To Save Shrinking City, Mayor Entices Koreans in Central Asia. New York Times, Aug 8, 2024, at page A4.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/ ... eon-population.html

Note:
(a) Jecheon  堤川市
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jecheon
(b)
(i)
(A) Koryo Saram  高麗사람
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koryo-saram
(Korean: 고려사람; table on the right margin for distribution)
(B) Korean-English dictionary:
* 사람 (n; romanization: saram)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/사람
   ^ Koreans do use hanja 人 but generally write it in hangul 인 (whose romanization is "in"). See 인
   https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/인
(ii) Compare Goryeo  高麗
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goryeo
(918–1392; Korean: 고려; MR [McCune–Reischauer romanization]: Koryŏ)
(c) My question was why the same hangul 고려 gets different English spellings: Koryo and Goryeo.
(i) After extensive research, I got the answer. The en.wikipedia.org has a page "Names of Korea" which explains why Korea now and Goryeo before (as a kingdom). This page does not explain why Koryo or Goryeo.
(ii) It comes down to two major romanizations of Hangul. See romanization of Korean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Korean
(section 1 Major systems: McCune–Reischauer ("MR"; 1939) + Revised Romanization ("RR," by S Korea's "Ministry of Culture (MC) 2000")
(iii) So, 고려 is Koryo in MR and Goryeo in RR.
(iv) Revised Romanization of Korean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Romanization_of_Korean
(section 2 Transcription: Vowels ㅕ (yeo), ㅗ (o) + Consonants ㄱ (initial g, final k; mceaning if the consonant appears at the beginning of the word, it is pronounced g), ㄹ (r) )
(d) "When Olga Poley, a Koryo Saram from Almaty, was looking for an apartment in Jecheon for her family last year, some landlords were hesitant because of the language barrier, she said."
(i) English dictionary:
* Almaty
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Almaty
(pronunciation)
(ii) Almaty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaty
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JECHEON, South Korea -- The nearby mines shut down one by one. The cement business, once the city’s pride, waned. More than a dozen schools closed, as did one of the two movie theaters. The second would eventually follow.

By the time Kim Chang-gyu returned to Jecheon, South Korea, after four decades away to become the mayor, his hometown felt resigned to its decline. The town’s center was dotted with vacant storefronts, and local businessmen fretted about how tough it was to find workers.

Like many other small South Korean cities, Jecheon, cradled at the foot of two mountain ranges, is being eroded by rapid aging and rock-bottom birthrates. Other shrinking cities have tried offering money to entice newlyweds or free housing to parents of school-age children.

Mr. Kim, a retired diplomat, looked farther afield: Central Asia and the estimated half a million people of Korean descent who have been living there for nearly a century. If he could persuade enough of them to move to Jecheon — population 130,000 and shrinking — he thought they might lay the groundwork for its future.

Their forebears left the Korean Peninsula more than 100 years ago for the eastern edge of Siberia. In 1937, the Soviet Union, led by Joseph Stalin, rounded them up and deported them to what are now Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Mr. Kim hoped that even if the language and historical connections had faded, the former Soviet Koreans would be more readily accepted than other migrant workers in a country that feels strongly about blood ties, he said.

“They are a quality labor force, a quality human resource,” he said. “They are our family.”

The families the mayor’s aspirations are riding on began moving into a former college dormitory last year. There, the city’s newest transplants can be found chatting away in Russian over a lunch of Korean knife-cut noodles and kimchi. One mother, eight months pregnant, mentioned a hankering for horse meat, a Central Asian staple.

The building that was emptied of college students has come alive with dozens of families of Koryo Saram, as the people of Korean descent from former Soviet republics are known. Strollers and car seats are stashed by the doorways; a young girl rides a pink scooter down the hall.

Mr. Kim first met them as a young diplomat in Kazakhstan in 1993, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Since becoming mayor in 2022, he has traveled to Central Asia to recruit people to move to Jecheon, filming social media videos in Russian.

About 130 people have moved to Jecheon under the initiative, mostly families who had already been living elsewhere in South Korea, and more than 150 others have registered to do so, according to the city.

Soviet Koreans have been coming to South Korea over the past decade, mostly to work in factories or do other jobs the locals no longer want but that can provide much higher incomes than in Central Asia.

Despite having the world’s lowest fertility rate several years in a row, traditionally homogenous South Korea has only reluctantly accepted limited numbers of migrant workers to do some of the most dangerous and difficult work. The Koryo Saram are somewhere between foreigners and compatriots.

Many of the Soviet Koreans say they haven’t felt welcomed by locals as one of their own.

“The actual thing is, ‘We need manual labor, and having somebody look like us is much nicer,’” said Albina Yun, an academic who has researched the experience of the Koryo Saram working in South Korea. “So it’s, ‘Welcome, but this is your job.’”

“I don’t think we will ever belong there,” said Ms. Yun, a Soviet Korean who has worked in South Korean factories.

The Jecheon initiative offers help finding jobs and housing, support for child care and education, and pathways to permanent residency. The city is providing free housing and meals in the dorms for up to four months. Each family has a room with two sets of bunk beds and four desks.

The mayor wants about 1,000 people to settle in Jecheon over three years, which is budgeted to cost the city the equivalent of $1.4 million annually.

In March, Ruslan Li moved with his wife and two young sons into Room 207 of the dorm from Karaganda, Kazakhstan, 2,800 miles away.

Growing up, Mr. Li said, he rarely thought about Korea. He knew one phrase in Korean, the only expression his father remembered from his grandmother: Wash your feet.

Mr. Li recently started minimum-wage work at a factory producing silicon powder for batteries. He said he is grateful to the mayor for the opportunity to improve his young family’s financial future. His children, ages 2 and 4, are subsisting on oatmeal because they are not used to Korean food, but seem well adjusted at day care, he said.

He and his wife, who is ethnically Kazakh, worry that the boys will lose their connection to Kazakh culture, tenuously tethered by WhatsApp calls with grandparents in Karaganda. He hasn’t thought beyond the two years they are required to live in Jecheon in exchange for the program’s benefits.

“There are all these programs to help you adapt, but I think it will continue to feel like a foreign place,” he said.

On Sundays, some new transplants take four-hour classes on Korean language and culture that will benefit their residency applications.

“We have them go through re-education,” the mayor said, before correcting himself. “Adjustment education.”

The Koryo Saram spent decades trying to assimilate to Russian language and society, said German Kim, a scholar at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University and an expert on the history of Soviet Koreans. In moving to South Korea, they must do that once more.

“For all these people, Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan is home,” said Professor Kim, who met with the mayor when he was in Kazakhstan, to promote Jecheon.

Kim Tai-won, a retired city worker who has lived in Jecheon all of his 64 years, said that Jecheon is in need of an infusion of people whether they have ethnic ties or not. His local middle school, which taught 600 children when he attended, dwindled to as few as two in recent years. It narrowly averted closure only when he and other alumni raised money for cash stipends for students, and a screen golf facility and pool table.

The new residents have begun to make their mark. Andzhella Tyan, 54, from Uzbekistan, last year opened an Uzbek restaurant in a vacant storefront near the center of town named after her mother, Maria.

The display fridge holds a half dozen brands of vodka alongside soju. She also offers kuksi, a noodle dish passed down among the Koryo Saram that has evolved distinctly from its Korean equivalent, guksu.

Ms. Tyan had been living in Jecheon for eight years and working at an auto factory but got help from the new city program to start her business. After about four years of living there, she said, it started feeling more like home than Central Asia.

“When I go back home, I feel like a guest,” she said.

When Olga Poley, a Koryo Saram from Almaty, was looking for an apartment in Jecheon for her family last year, some landlords were hesitant because of the language barrier, she said.

She and her husband found a ground floor apartment next to a park teeming with flowers and a sweeping view at sunset. They decorated a room in pink for their daughters — shy Evangelina, 7, and lively Sofiya, 4. Their teachers are kind and attentive, and they are quickly picking up Korean, Ms. Poley said.

With the stability newly afforded by her husband’s factory job, she began thinking of the son she’d always wanted.

In early July, she gave birth to a girl, Elizaveta — a native of Jecheon.