By Brian Shin Photos courtesy of Hunter College
At 14, Evgeniya (pronounced yev-GAY-neeya) Kim had already captured her age group’s national title, played with the Uzbek national tennis team and traveled all over Asia and Europe for international tournaments.
The talented teenager, who first picked up a racket at 7 years old, was accustomed to winning big. She would go months without dropping a single set and was known for her devastating serve and relentless crash-the-net mentality.
But while she was hitting the prime of her developmental tennis years, Evgeniya says being an ethnic minority meant relentless discrimination. Her grandparents had been part of the 1937 forced migration of 200,000 Koreans from the western Soviet Union, as ordered by Josef Stalin who believed the ethnic group might serve as spies for the Japanese. Most of the transplants settled in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where it was not uncommon to be harassed.
“They’d call me names and make racial remarks, and if I ever talked back, they’d throw stones at me or spit on me,” Evgeniya says, recalling her dreaded daily walk to a segregated school for Koreans in Uzbekistan. “In the winter, I’d have to dodge snowballs, ones with rocks slipped inside them.”
Her father, Viktor, eager to give his wife and three daughters a better life, hired an American immigration lawyer to help move the family to the United States.
Five days before Christmas in 2002, the Kim family arrived at JFK airport in New York City. Viktor was shocked when authorities forced his family into a windowless cell after handcuffing him and his wife, Galina, in front of their three daughters. He learned that he was carrying fraudulent immigration papers courtesy of a scam artist. Liana Schuster had posed as an attorney and successfully swindled the family’s life savings of $10,000. (Shuster, having defrauded multiple people, later pleaded guilty to forgery and fraud.)
“It was completely shocking,” recalls Evgeniya, who speaks with a slight Russian accent. “For my dad, it was a lifelong dream to come to the States. He worked so hard back in Uzbekistan, and finally we had this opportunity to come. My dad is always in control of situations, but that was the first time I saw my dad lost and confused. He brought his children with him to a different country, and here he is being handcuffed.”
The Kims’ request for political asylum was denied, and they were transported to a federal immigration shelter in Leesport, Pa. Refusing to give up, Viktor hired an attorney who successfully pushed for a judge to hear the case. After seven months behind bars and under the close watch of armed guards, asylum was granted and the Kims were freed.
Adjusting to American life required a lot from Evgeniya in particular.
“I really had to grow up a lot,” she says. “As the eldest child and the only one who could speak English, I had to deal with a lot of stuff: immigration papers, looking for an apartment, looking for a job, paying bills, basically taking care of everything.”
When Evgeniya, known as “Eve” to her friends, began attending Benjamin Cardozo High School in New York in 2004, it had been more than 18 months since she last touched a tennis racket. It didn’t take long for her to get her court legs back. She dominated opponents and went undefeated during all three years at Cardozo. After graduating in the top 2 percent of her high school class, she spurned high-profile tennis programs and opted to stay close to home. She is now enrolled in Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, a Division III school.
Coming off her second consecutive undefeated season, the 19-year-old sophomore has enjoyed the honor of MVP two years in a row.
“I don’t take too much pride in being MVP, but it’s nice,” she says. “Our team getting to nationals last year was a bigger achievement. It was the first time that a CUNY got into nationals for tennis, and we did it again this year too.”
Balancing academics and sports is an easy balance, especially because Evgeniya doesn’t forget where she came from.
“People play tennis in the United States for recreation. People play tennis [in Uzbekistan] because it’s something that can get them a better life. The condition of living in Uzbekistan is so bad they think the only way they can make it is to become a tennis star.”
But Evgeniya doesn’t have her eye on Wimbledon. Instead, her family’s immigration story has inspired her career aspirations. “I want to make sure no one has to go through what we did,” she says.
Which is why she’s chosen to major in political science and dreams of working for the United Nations.
“I wanted to do something with law, I wanted to help people,” she says. “[But] I realized so many times you want to do something, you want to prove something, but you can’t because it’s not written in law books. So I told myself instead of trying to fix the outcomes of certain laws, why not fix the cause, eliminate the cause itself? I thought OK, instead of being an immigration lawyer, maybe I can go a little further.”
Those around her believe in her abilities. Melissa Trapani, 19, was one of the first American friends Evgeniya made and has seen how the Korean Russian has always managed to persevere.
“She’s optimistic, energetic, intelligent, hard-working and an amazing friend,” she says. “She always has this way of turning a bad situation good. I’m just amazed by her. There was never any doubt in my mind that she would be able to rise to the top.”
With her father now working for an auto parts business and her mother recently having opened a Russian deli, Evgeniya says her family has adjusted to American life, renewed their Christian faith and grown closer at the same time. She’ll never forget their initial traumatic experience in the States, but she says now she can look at it with perspective.
“It helped me to understand my parents more, seeing what adults actually have to deal with,” she says. “It pushed me to achieve so much more. Having gone through trouble in the past and persevering, I don’t fear anything in the future.”
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