Mar 152011
Excerpt from an interview conducted by Bruce Grant — probably in Russian — with a Nivkh/Gilyak woman in the North Sakhalin village of Okha, 1990 (In the Soviet house of culture: a century of perestroikas — lingeringly evocative title if there ever was one):
My father was born in 1892. He used to talk about all the Japanese that used to be on Sakhalin and the Amur. The Japanese used to hire the Nivkhi as workers. There were Chinese too; one of our relatives was married to a Chinese man. She eventually left for China and stayed there. They used to send us letters, but we didn’t hear from them after the war [World War II]. As for my grandfather, he was Ainu, he was a very famous hunter. He used to tell us about how they kept horses, and used the horses to go across to Manchuria. Straight from Sakhalin–on boats across the strait and then with the horses into Manchuria. Most of the time they traded furs for Chinese silks and brocades. My father spoke a little Evenk, and a little Chinese. He spoke Japanese best of all, quite well.
Works Cited:
Grant, B. (1995). In the Soviet house of culture: a century of perestroikas (p. 59). Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.