Two contrasting images have come constantly to my mind while conducting my fieldwork and writing this book about the history and contemporary lives of Koreans in the Russian Far East. One is the image of a huge rock embedded in the landscape, and the other is of reeds swaying in the wind. I have often wondered about the significance of these mental images, as they are not merely a product of my imagination but have been inspired by the people and the landscape I have encountered over the course of my work. In this Preface, I would like to elaborate on these images, as they indicate the direction taken by my research in this book.

There is a saying among Koreans in the former Soviet Union that they would survive even if a rock were to fall upon them. Here, the rock can be interpreted as a symbol of state violence and oppression, and more specifically, the forcible deportation of all Koreans from the Russian Far East to Central Asia in 1937, during Stalin's Great Terror. The saying itself bears witness to the remarkable resilience of Koreans in the face of such hardship.

The photograph on the cover of this book shows the reeds that can be seen everywhere in the marshlands and alongside rivers and ditches in the Russian Far East and also in the vast steppes of Central Asia. I took this particular photograph in 2010 during my fieldwork in a village where many Koreans were involved in agricultural work. It shows a bed of reeds beside a canal, which was probably constructed to enable rice cultivation by the Korean farmers who had migrated to the Russian Far East from the Korean Peninsula (though this would require historical investigation). Such reeds were often mentioned by Koreans as they told me their life stories, particularly in relation to the development of virgin land. Elderly Russian Koreans would describe how they had to clear large areas of reeds with their bare hands following their deportation to Central Asia; this was something I had not expected to hear when asking about their experience of Stalinist totalitarianism.

In contrast with a rock, which is heavy and immovable, reeds are constantly in motion as they sway in the wind.