By Kim Jong-chan
Deputy Managing Editor
I have been watching a KBS drama series portraying King Gwanggaeto the Great which started last month and airs Saturdays and Sundays. Gwanggaeto was the 19th monarch of Korea’s ancient kingdom of Goguryeo.
Gwanggaeto literally means broad expander of territory. During his reign from 391 to 412, Gorugyeo controlled territory between the Han River and the Amur River between Russia and China; Manchuria; and parts of the Russian maritime province and Inner Mongolia. Manchuria, now northeastern China, was part of Goguryeo.
Accordingly, many people of Korean descent have lived in Manchuria, including in Jilin, Liaoning and Heilongjiang provinces, just north of North Korea.
On the other hand, many Koreans were forcibly taken to Manchuria in the early 1940s during Japan’s colonial rule of Korea (1910-1945). Among them were Lee Cheol-gu, who was five years old at that time, and his family.
Two years after their unwilling migration, Korea was liberated from Japan. But his family could not return to their hometown, Busan in the southeastern part of the country, as they had no money, Lee said in a recent interview with the Yonhap news agency in Seoul. His father worked as a tenant farmer. Harsh conditions facing the newcomers made their lives difficult. They had few choices but to live in Yensou, Heilongjiang, as members of “joseon-jok,” the name for ethnic Korean Chinese -- one of 55 ethnic groups in China.
Lee, now 73, still remembers the day when he realized his long-cherished dream of regaining Korean nationality. The glorious date was June 27, 2005 when Lee no longer needed to evade police crackdowns on illegal migrants. Lee had been living in fear of the crackdowns since, if caught, he would be deported from the country where he could make his Korean dream come true.
Lee returned to his hometown in October 1991 for the first time since his family left for Manchuria, after reuniting with his elder sister with the help of a local radio station. She had been left behind in Busan. However, the authorities rejected applications he filed to regain his Korean nationality, branding him an illegal migrant.
In 1995, he moved to Seoul. It was hard for him to do a 3D (dirty, difficult and dangerous) job as he had taught at a primary school while in Yensou. He joined a campaign calling for a revision of the laws to pave the way for ethnic Koreans in China to regain Korean nationality. The revision finally was passed at the National Assembly in 2004.
Decades ago, Lee’s family neither wanted to go to Manchuria nor wished to become Chinese citizens. This is the very reason why they should not lost their Korean nationality in the first place.
Elderly Korean-Chinese are said to feel more homesick for their ancestral hometowns than their children. If you ask senior Korean-Chinese which team do you cheer for when Korean footballers play against Chinese counterparts, the answer is predictable. The seniors, even though they are Chinese nationals, are expected to say they support Korean footballers.
But when I actually asked the same question to a Korean-Chinese worker Woo Hye-jeong in her late teens from Jilin, she replied without hesitation that she preferred China to Korea. She was my interpreter while I worked as director of a Korean-invested company in Qingdao, east China’s Shandong Province, about 10 years ago.
Korean-Chinese say they are unhappy with what they call discrimination in jobs and various hardships once they get here. They complain that when they go to construction sites for jobs, interviewers first ask them if they are Chinese (who can speak Korean) or Korean? They think that Koreans do not treat them as fellow countrymen.
Why are they ill-treated? This may be, in part, because people here have a sense of superiority as their living standards are better.
Now, more than 1 percent of people living in the country are joseon-jok. This means that 25 percent of the 2 million ethnic Koreans in China have moved to Korea.
If someone asks me are they, joseon-jok, Chinese or Korean, I will answer that they are Koreans because they speak the same language, share same culture and always make kimchi.