A Humble Beginning

Recently, we had to write an essay in my Russian class about our family history, and I found out a lot of things about where I come from. I thought it might be interesting for others as well, so I’d like to share it here. 

My whole family – my parents, my older brother and sister, and I – were all born in Uzbekistan, a country south of Russia, bordered by Kazakhstan and three other “stan” countries. I knew that my dad’s parents had come to Uzbekistan from Korea, but I didn’t know the circumstances.

To understand, a little bit of history is required here:

In the mid to late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the Russian government really wanted the far east of Russia to be populated, so they offered land to Koreans. Because of this, a lot of Koreans immigrated and settled there. But when Stalin came to power in the 1920s, he mistrusted and disliked Koreans and found them to be guilty. It’s unclear as to what Koreans were actually guilty of, but under his command, they were to be deported from Russia to either Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, and forbidden to return (the ban was lifted in 1956).

Source

So in 1937, government officials came to the town my grandparents (on my father’s side) were living at the time. They told all of the residents that they must come with them and to leave all of their things; that they weren’t needed. Completely unaware of what was about to happen, everyone boarded the carriages and left everything behind. My dad told me that his parents thought they’d be back shortly, but they stayed on that carriage for months, travelling the great distance from the far east to Uzbekistan, where they were dropped off and left on their own, without any guidance or instruction.

That is how my dad’s family came to live in Uzbekistan. Fast forward 23 years and Vyacheslav Nigay is born. He grows up in a family of six children, has a happy childhood filled with exciting stories of fist fights, and then grows up to earn three master’s degrees from three different countries. With his education, he becomes vice president of the Uzbekistan International Airport, where he later meets a woman by the name of Nodira. And you guessed  it, that’s my mom.

They had three kids – Evgenia, Arkadiy, and Natalia (me!) – and everything was good, until it wasn’t. A few years after I was born, at the very end of the  20^th century, the people of Uzbekistan began to reject all non-ethnic Uzbeks. Because my family is technically Korean, that meant us. Employers would not hire anyone who wasn’t completely Uzbek, and my dad, who held a very high ranking position in Uzbekistan, knew that it was time to move.

We moved to Russia, but in Russia, we were always treated as outsiders. So when we won the Green Card lottery, we came to America. According to my dad, all of us hid behind him when we stepped off the plane at JFK. It was a hard adjustment, especially for my parents who had to go to night school for a long time to learn English, but they say it was worth it. Because now they get to see their kids be happy and have a chance to be the people they want to be, with no one telling them that they can’t succeed.  

My dad sacrificed his career, the one he worked for for almost two decades and my parents left everything they knew behind to come to a land halfway across the world with only $100 in their pockets. And here we are now. Happy, healthy, and grateful for everything we have. Sometimes I get caught up in trivial problems and I think that my life is so hard, but now I carry my family’s journey with me. So if I don’t want to do something for myself, I do it for them. 

Families that wear denim together, stay together.