ASTANA, Kazakhstan — Elena Ko has little difficulty answering a question that history made complicated for her family.
"I'm Korean, but I think like Kazakh," she said through an interpreter.
Ko, 55, is a third-generation Koryo-saram, a descendant of ethnic Koreans who settled across the former Soviet Union. She keeps Korean traditions, stays close to Kazakhstan's Korean community and travels to Seoul roughly once a year.
But when she talks about home, there is little ambiguity.
Kazakhstan is where she was born and went to school, where she built a business and raised a family.
"I'm very proud that I was born in Kazakhstan," she said.
Her ancestors had no such choice.
In 1937, they were among the ethnic Koreans uprooted from the Soviet Far East under Stalin and loaded onto trains bound thousands of kilometers west. The story handed down in Ko's family is one of a punishing journey, hunger and arrival on an unfamiliar steppe with almost nothing waiting for them.
Yet when Ko tells the story, the cruelty of how her family arrived is followed almost immediately by another memory.
Kazakh residents took in women and children. They shared food with the newcomers even though local communities were themselves struggling with shortages.
"We live today because our ancestors survived with the kindness of Kazakh people," Ko said. "We will never forget this."
Nearly nine decades later, a country her ancestors were forced to enter is the country their granddaughter chooses to call home.
And Ko's daughters are crossing borders again.
Her eldest is pursuing a doctorate in the United States. Another is studying in Hong Kong.
The difference between those journeys and the one that began the family's life in Central Asia could hardly be greater.
Ko's ancestors crossed borders because the Soviet state ordered them to. Their descendants cross them for education, work and opportunity — and can decide whether to come back.
Across three generations, forced displacement became survival, survival became settlement, and settlement eventually produced something the first arrivals could not have assumed: belonging.
The trajectory complicates a familiar image of diaspora as a people forever suspended between a homeland they lost and the country where history deposited them.
Kazakhstan's Koryo-saram did not simply preserve an unchanged Korean identity while awaiting reconnection with Korea. They learned other languages, adapted their food, married into new surroundings and lived through the collapse of one country and the birth of another.
For generations born in Central Asia, ancestral homeland and home no longer necessarily mean the same place.
A journey with no choice
The Soviet government ordered Koreans removed from the Far East in August 1937, officially citing fears of Japanese espionage.
By Oct. 25, Soviet records showed that 171,781 ethnic Koreans from 36,442 households had been transported aboard 124 trains. Of them, 95,256 were designated for Soviet Kazakhstan and 76,525 for Uzbekistan.
Later records put the number actually settled in Kazakhstan at 95,427.
The deportation established Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as the two main centers of the Koryo-saram population in Central Asia.
For Ko, the history is carried less in those numbers than in a phrase repeated through the family.
"They came to the open steppe, to nowhere," she said.
Two truths sit beside each other in her telling.
The Soviet state determined where her ancestors would live. The people they found there helped them stay alive.
The first was an act of coercion. The second became part of the family's understanding of Kazakhstan.
Later generations did the rest.
They built lives in the place where the trains had stopped.
By Ko's generation, Kazakhstan was no longer simply where the family had been sent.
It was home.
Surviving by changing
If displacement scattered the first generation, adaptation defined those that followed.
Kazakhstan's 2021 census counted 118,450 ethnic Koreans, up 18 percent from 100,385 in 2009. They made up about 0.6 percent of the country's population.
The numbers resist a simple story of a community fading away.
But they also show just how much the community has changed.
Some 102,804 ethnic Koreans lived in urban areas in 2021 — nearly 87 percent of the total. A population once closely associated with agricultural settlements and Soviet collective farms is now overwhelmingly urban.
Language tells another part of the story.
Of the 118,450 ethnic Koreans in the census, 49,222, or 41.6 percent, identified the language of their own ethnicity as their native language. The remaining 69,228 named the language of another ethnicity.
The figure does not mean only 41.6 percent can speak Korean. The census asked about native-language identification, not proficiency.
But the result captures a widening distance between ethnicity and language.
Multilingualism has become ordinary.
Among 111,549 Korean respondents included in another census table, 44,315 reported using two languages and 28,311 reported three.
More than two-thirds used at least two.
Ko needs no census table to recognize the transformation.
"A Korean in Kazakhstan is really different from a Korean in Korea," she said.
She does not say it with regret.
Her family observes Korean traditions alongside Kazakhstan's national holidays. Korean associations organize festivals and cultural programs and maintain ties with South Korea.
"We can always take care of our culture, of our traditions," Ko said.
Even the food carries a record of adaptation.
The first arrivals could not find many of the ingredients they had used in the Soviet Far East, Ko said. They cooked instead with what Kazakhstan offered.
"They didn't have Korean food groceries to make their traditional food," she said. "They had to use the food that was already in Kazakhstan."
Today, Korean groceries are easy enough to find.
The dishes, however, had already changed.
Koryo-saram culture survived not by being sealed off from its surroundings, but by absorbing them.
It survived by changing.
Korean roots, Kazakhstani belonging
Ko's ease with her two identities reflects one strand of a broader generational shift. Research also warns against treating any single Koryo-saram experience as universal.
A 2024 study by Korea University sociologist Yoon In-jin analyzed a 2022 survey of 2,679 adult overseas Koreans in 10 countries, including 186 respondents in Kazakhstan and 234 in Uzbekistan.
Social integration differed significantly by country and generation.
First-generation Koreans in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan showed moderate integration into social institutions but greater difficulty with psychological integration. Later generations in Kazakhstan were well integrated across the dimensions examined.
Ko's life looks familiar within that pattern.
She does not describe herself as a Korean living temporarily in somebody else's country.
She talks about the state that educated her, the society in which she established a business and the place where her children grew up.
"I'm happy to be part of Kazakhstan," she said.
Other research suggests the confidence with which Ko reconciles those identities is not shared equally across the community.
A study published in Nationalities Papers in 2026 surveyed 4,000 people across Kazakhstan, including 160 ethnic Koreans, and conducted 250 semi-structured interviews.
Among Korean respondents, 53 percent identified more often with a civic than an ethnic identity. Just 29 percent said they often felt a strong sense of ethnic belonging, the lowest share among the groups surveyed.
Yet 80 percent said they were proud to be citizens of Kazakhstan.
The researchers found that ethnic minorities broadly viewed Kazakhstan's nation-building positively, while ethnic and civic identities remained uneven and the effort to forge a single Kazakhstani nation remained incomplete.
Ko does not resolve those contradictions for an entire community.
Her story is revealing precisely because it does not need to.
It shows how Korean ancestry and Kazakhstani belonging can occupy the same life without one cancelling the other.
"We feel like one nation," Ko said of Kazakhstan's ethnic communities.
For her, integration has not meant choosing between the two parts of herself.
One deportation, different homes
Kazakhstan is only one branch of a history that split at the railway tracks.
The 1937 deportation sent the overwhelming majority of displaced Koreans to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The two communities began with essentially the same trauma.
Both then spent more than five decades inside the Soviet Union before Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan became independent states in 1991.
After that, descendants of the same deported population found themselves citizens of different countries, living under different political institutions, language environments and ideas of national belonging.
Yoon's research found that integration differed not only by generation but also by host country.
That distinction moves the Koryo-saram story beyond a narrower question often asked of diasporas: How much Korean culture survived?
A different question may be more revealing.
What happened after they survived?
One displaced population became part of several societies. Its descendants inherited a common history without necessarily inheriting the same language, nationality or understanding of home.
For Ko, the Kazakhstan part of that question no longer feels complicated.
She does not speak about the country as a temporary substitute for Korea.
It is where her life happened.
Toward Korea, but not necessarily home
History has added one more turn.
Some descendants of the people sent west in 1937 are now moving east, toward South Korea.
South Korean Justice Ministry data show that Kazakhstan nationals classified as foreign-national overseas Koreans increased from 13,993 in 2021 to 21,790 in 2025.
Among Uzbekistan nationals in the same category, the number rose from 32,216 to 41,144.
The figures do not represent all Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan nationals living in South Korea. They refer specifically to foreign nationals whom South Korean authorities classify as overseas Koreans.
Still, the direction of travel carries an unmistakable historical echo.
In 1937, Koreans were sent away from the Soviet Far East with no say in the matter.
Today, some of their descendants travel toward South Korea because they choose to — for jobs, study or opportunity.
But going to Korea is not necessarily going home.
For later-generation Koryo-saram, South Korea can be an ancestral homeland, a cultural reference point and a place to work or study without becoming the place to which they feel they ultimately belong.
Ko herself visits Seoul about once a year.
Then she returns to Kazakhstan.
Her daughters may build lives even farther away. Their grandmother's generation was told where it could not remain. Their mother's generation grew up in the place where the trains had left the family. The daughters now have a privilege their ancestors were denied: they can decide for themselves where to go.
Ko already knows what she calls the place she comes back to.
"I'm Korean, but I think like Kazakh."
For a family whose modern history began with being told where it had to live, there is something quietly consequential in being able to say where home is by choice.
AJP Takeaways
• Kazakhstan's Koryo-saram community traces its roots to Stalin's 1937 forced deportation of nearly 172,000 ethnic Koreans from the Soviet Far East, including more than 95,000 who were ultimately settled in Kazakhstan.
• Nearly nine decades later, Korean ancestry and Kazakhstani belonging increasingly coexist, with Kazakhstan's 2021 census counting 118,450 ethnic Koreans and showing a highly urbanized, multilingual community.
• Research suggests later-generation Koryo-saram in Kazakhstan are deeply integrated into the country, while identity remains varied and does not necessarily depend on retaining Korean as a native language.
• Growing numbers of ethnic Koreans from Kazakhstan are now moving to South Korea voluntarily for work and study, reversing the direction of the original forced migration without necessarily redefining Korea as home.
Copyright ⓒ Aju Press All rights reserved.