Koreans from Central Asia

• Dmitriy Pak: a gentleman from Tashkent. This photo was taken in 1997 when we were on a sight-seeing boat on the Bosporus Strait in Turkey which separates Asia and Europe. Prof. Pak is, regarded as the best physicist in Tashkent, is spending two years in Korea (1999-2000).

• Victor Kim: I met Victor Kim when I was the Soviet Union in 1990, and he has been one of my closest friends since then. His grandparents came to Kazakhstan from the Vladivostok area in 1934. He is now one of the most active physicists in Russia and visited Korea several times. This photo was taken when I was attending the first International Sakharov Conference held in Moscow (1991). Victor Kim is in red shirt. We were at a Korean restaurant called "Ojak-kyo" near Moscow's Convention Center. Victor Kim works at the Nuclear Research Institute in St.Petersburg and visits the Fermilab (near Chicago) very often. He visited Korea several times.
  In Minsk (1994), we met again.

• Korean Gentleman from Tashkent, with a Russian wife. He seemed to know how to make money. He drives an Audi (German-made car). This photo was taken when I was visiting Minsk in 1994.

• Dancers from Kazakhstan. They are descendents of those Koreans who were forced to go there by Stalin in 1937. They were dancing in a Korean church near Baltimore in 1997. Here, they are performing a traditional Korean dance.

• Iraida: with Dr. Iraida Kim of Moscow State University. She is a research professor at MSU's Sternberg Astronomical Institute. She is very popular among Korean astronomers. We were waiting on the bank of the Moscow River for a cruise boat. It was a hot day. One hour before, we were on the MSU campus which is at the top of the cliff about 100 meters high. We walked down the cliff. Iraida was born in Kazakhstan.

• Koreans from Mongolia. I met these Koreans in while in Kazan (Russia 2000). They claimed that Korean residents are very rich in Mongolia, and many of them are thinking of immigrating to the United States. In this photo, the lady is standing behind in the traditional Korean style.

• Immigrant from Kazakhstan. I met this young lady at a night club called "Odessa" at Brighton Beach (New York 2002). She came from a Korean community in Almaty (Kazakhstan) recently, and she was so happy to meet a Korean man in the United States that her first reaction was to embrace him. She got her "green card" by lottery. How about money? She said Koreans in Kazakhstan are very rich.
  Here is another photo.

• Korean Family in Kharkov (Ukraine). The eldest person in this photo used to belong to Kim Il-Sung's inner circle, but he became Kim's bitter enemy. He fled to Kharkov while serving at the North Korean embassy in Moscow,

• Korean Students in St.Petersburg. I met this group Korean students born in Russia. Their grandparents came from Korea and settled down in Central Asia.

• Two Sisters from Saratov. I met these young Russian ladies of Korean origin while I was in Saint visiting Catharines Summer Palace near St. Petersburg (August 2003). I was indeed pleased to hear perfect English spoken by these sisters. It appears that their parents, who are conscious of the atrocity Joseph Stalin committed to their own parents or grandparents in 1936, are determined to send their daughters to the United States. After having this photo, they came to me with their own camera to have this photo in front of Alexander Pushkin's statue.

• Yebgeniy Yen is a Russian student of Korean origin, with the same background as that of Victor Kim. He was doing high-energy experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in U.S.A. As of August 2003, he was a graduate student in high-energy physics at the University of Wuppertal in Germany. He told me he likes this webpage very much. He therefore deserves to be on this page.