The Kim family album

Everyone in the lower Chu knows the name of Igor Min. He was a teacher, born in 1899, and in 1937 he was thirty-eight. He had one idea: if you take the people who know rice and put them at a river, there will be rice. In the Far East our people grew rice for generations. The Chu valley is not the Primorye, but the water was there, the soil was heavy, and he had a ruler.

My grandfather Ivan worked under him. Not with a spade, he was not strong, but with a ruler and a notebook. I have his notebook; the pages have rows of numbers, how much water each field needed, in Russian and in Korean letters. My grandfather wrote the numbers in Russian and the remarks in Korean, I think because the numbers were for the boss and the remarks were for himself. One remark I can read, because it repeats: "Wait."

In the spring of 1938 they planted the first field. It was less than a hectare. Nothing came up the first year in the third part of it, and Igor Min walked the bank for a week and said nothing. Then he told them to cut a second channel. The second year the field was green. By 1944 the kolkhoz had sixty hectares and the Iradi neighbours came to look, and some asked to learn.

Mr Min died in 1964, when I was fifteen. All the kolkhoz came to the funeral, and the Iradi villagers came too and brought bread. It was a very big bread. I had never seen so much bread in one place.