The harvest is in. This year it is a good one: 58 centners per hectare on the big farms, they say, one of the best since I retired. The combines worked until dark, and the drivers ate rice with kimchi from a pot on the bonnet.
At the market the price of rice is 9.5 som, up from last year, but the dollar on the street is 11, 12, nobody can say. My neighbour, a trader, says: "Viktor Pavlovich, we can eat rice, we cannot import anything." I said, "that is what the Koryo-saram have always done."
Today I opened the shoe box again. 212 photographs, now 147 named. I want to say thank you to those who wrote: the lady at the Kirov Street kiosk who knew my aunt, the cousin in Vladivostok whom I never met, Lena Pak who recognised my grandmother in a wedding group of 1954. My aunt's name was Zoya. I did not know it a year ago.
In two weeks it is November and we will make kimchi in the ceramic jar, with the round cabbage. Nelli will cut, I will carry. Vika will do it in Seoul, in a jar a Russian shop sold her. The recipe is the same. The cabbage is wrong, the way it was always wrong. That is the whole story of our family: the right dish, with the wrong cabbage, made with love, and a piece of warm bread when someone needs it.
Next year, God willing, the rice and the blog.
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Viktor Pavlovich, my grandmother Zhenya had a friend called Zoya Kim, from the Sixth Brigade! I will ask my mother tomorrow.
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