Sino-NK

The Road Home. | Image: State Academic Korean Theatre of Kazakhstan.

My first trip to the Korean theatre in Almaty in June 2025 was seeing the premiere of a play, The Road Home (Дорога Домой); it quickly became a favourite cultural experience in the city. The Road Home is still running at the the State Academic Korean Theatre of Kazakhstan, based on another play, Memory by Korean-Russian (Koryo-Saram) playwrights Lavrenti Son and Li Stanislava that was first performed in Koryo-Mar (a Koryo-saram dialect) at the Korean Theatre in 1997. Both plays focus on the Stalinist mass deportations of Koreans from the Far East to Kazakhstan in 1937 which created a marked population of Koreans in the country. Today there are still roughly 100,000 Koreans living in Kazakhstan, the reason for the existence of the Korean theatre itself.

Directed by Korean Kang Tae-Sik, The Road Home aims to deepen the ties between Kazakh and Korean culture while memorialising a tragic chapter of their joint history. The Koreans’ traumatic deportation is performed on stage, as is their arrival in a Kazakh aul (village). The deported Koreans begin to live alongside Kazakhs and assimilate to their lives and culture while also preserving their own. For some this comes more easily than others, as the play reflects a huge generational intersection, demonstrating a comprehensive set of experiences of Koreans settling in Kazakhstan.

The most striking part of the play was the way in which the Koreans were not at all at odds with their Kazakh surroundings. The stage design was distinctly Kazakh, with a background video of a yurt and herd of sheep, and yurts on stage in which the characters lived. The young female Koreans, in costumes that resemble hanbok, dressed in muted colours that match those of the Kazakhs, fit in with each other visually. One key moment that emphasised this peaceful co-existence despite cultural differences was when the Kazakh settlement’s leader Ogenbai and a Korean woman, or ajuma, were speaking to each other without any understanding of each other’s language. On overhearing the conversation, one of the younger Koreans asked the ajuma how they were conversing, to which she replied they had the shared language of humanity.

Not everyone speaks this language though, as the two Soviet soldiers in the play remained harshly separate from the rest of the characters. The car horn signalling their arrival immediately cut through the peaceful aul setting, and their linguistic differences make them stand out as the only Russian speakers. Even just their disgust at the (unknown) contents of the Kazakh-style cooking pot places them apart from the unity enjoyed by the rest of the community. In this way, the alienation of the Korean people experienced as a result of the deportations is very much perpetrated by the Soviets, rather than the Kazakhs, who in contrast are a welcoming presence for the Koreans.

This does not mean that there is no intermixing of Russian with the other languages and cultures. For example, the young couple Kolya and Anya choose to speak to one another in Russian, and Kolya acts as the middle ground between the Russians and Koreans/Kazakhs, speaking to the soldiers in Russian on behalf of the aul and reading out a letter from the World War Two frontline to Ogenbai when the Kazakh’s son dies. This makes him a valuable connection between the Russians and the village, but does not necessarily connect him to a wider Soviet identity, as he wonders aloud to his father why his deportee status means he is not called up to the front. Therefore, he is still marked as an outsider to the rest of the population, despite his ability to act as an intermediary.

However, there is also a wrong way to go about this cross-communication, as demonstrated by one of the Korean girls who echoes the Russians’ dress style (in a green coat and skirt like that of the Soviet uniform), and shamelessly flirts with them despite their being married. However, she is a corrupt character who schemes and shows off, with very little sympathy from the aul. Aside from being corrupt in flirting with and seducing married men, she struggles to get other members of the village on side in her plots. Any deeper assimilation attempt with the Russians is thus unsuccessful and ultimately unacceptable, alienating her from the aul.

This idea of unity between the Kazakhs and Koreans of the aul is a key theme: they suffer three traumatic events in the course of the play that emphasise this idea. The first one is when the baby raised communally by the Koreans dies. The second is when Ogenbai’s son dies in the war. In both cases, the whole village mourns in a similar way, mostly through noisy wailing, as the loss of each person is a loss for the entire aul. This all culminates in the third loss, of Kolya at the front. He is both a Korean and victim of the Soviet war effort, and thus links to both of the previous traumas and also unites the village in grieving their communal loss as they again noisily bewail together.

More happily, the aul is also united when the Korean theatre comes to visit. This is a much more comprehensive unity ― even the Russian soldiers enjoy the show. The performance is specifically Korean, the performers dressed in Korean hanbok and performing a Korean dance, suggesting a unity in appreciating Korean culture even if it is not your own (extending to the non-Korean section of the actual audience, myself included). The audience becomes aware of being incorporated into the play, as we are watching a Korean theatre play within a Korean theatre play, and enjoys the spectacle as much as the cast on stage. The viewers in the village even sit on stage with their backs to us, as if they are sitting in the front row of the performance we are all enjoying together.

However, the play still remains focused on the specifically Korean nature of suffering on the Kazakh steppe. The performance ends with one of the actors stepping outside of the play, breaking the fourth wall and speaking in Russian (the lingua franca of the Almaty audience) in lamenting the losses of the Korean people as a result of their deportation to Kazakhstan. Not only did they lose their relatives, but “Koreans lost everything: their home, their motherland, their people” (Корейцы потеряла все: дома, родина, народа). Under the dark blue lighting, this was a powerful monologue that left much of the audience in tears, again making them a part of the narrative in a powerful and sensitive way, and also in a manner to which I felt, as a non-Korean, unable to relate.

All of this reflects the characterisation of the Kazakh steppe as generous and accepting, a key framing in Kazakh history about its more traumatic episodes during the Soviet period. This is evident in the treatment of other episodes of Soviet history, for example the image of a broken shanyrak (the top of a yurt, meant to symbolise home and unity) to represent the abuse of Kazakh land and peoples in building the gulag system. This theme is reproduced in The Road Home in a Korean context: the Kazakh steppe was imposed upon this newly arrived population by corrupt and tragic Soviet actions, but nonetheless the Kazakhs welcomed a multiethnic interaction of cultures and peoples.

Alice Ashcroft is a final-year undergraduate student of Russian Studies and History at the University of Edinburgh. Her main interests lie in multiethnic encounters and urban spatial culture in the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Asia.