Korean Thanksgiving: Harvest of Surprises

Korean Thanksgiving (Chuseok) came early this year: it floats around the harvest moon's schedule, much like Easter bobs about in spring. Chuseok combines harvest festivities with ancestor reverence, and I had done my research on what to expect.  As a social psychologist (ok, Licensed People Watcher), I looked forward to witnessing some burial mound bowing, traditional dress, and food offerings.



I had monitored local burial mounds for many days, noticing that they were getting cleaned up as part of the annual ritual.  Happily, the mound below our kitchen window was also cleaned up (hmmm...having an unnamed dead person buried outside my kitchen seems normal now).  We'd been seeing a lot of weed-whackers in action, though they often lack the plastic housing/guard.  In the grocery store, we even saw one with a frightening saw-blade at the bottom - later google research revealed that it's a "paddy cutter," apparently used for harvesting rice. Ok, but still: who thought of inventing (let along USING) a power saw to swing around one's feet while slipping through the muck?  I think the local surgeon's guild is getting kickbacks on this piece of machinery.

Anyway.  Back to Chuseok. During Elisabeth's violin lesson last week, Nick and I went to the Lotte Department Store - the priciest place in town for fashionable clothing and an elite selection of groceries. I wanted to see the traditional Chuseok foods and giftsets, which one is supposed to give to family, friends, and business associates.

Mushrooms: $250.

Cantaloupe, complete with plastic wrap, paper
"underwear" and a bow for about $11.  Each.

A scary American woman imagining
a bite of this giant apple (about $5 each),
which is also over-packaged.

Whole walnuts, tucked into their own
little slots.

On Chuseok morning, Nick and I hiked a path we'd not traveled before so I could find some Traditional Ancestral Rites.We ended up going through a horse corral (oops - you never know where these paths will lead) then under the highway to a tiny village.







As we walked up the gravel hill among rice paddies, a few really nice cars went past us, driven by men wearing business suits. Strange. Then a be-suited Korean man on a motorbike passed us, presumably to visit his family on this festive occasion. I used Nick as camera bait, but got caught by the man, who was not fooled by my tactics.

We continued into the village, where I admired a recently-planted garden of something radishy-looking. The red pepper season is over now: the peppers were picked and laid out to dry, then the plants yanked and the ground tilled and re-planted with this same radishy-looking plant in most gardens. My camera suddenly stopped working as I tried to get a picture of the neat rows along the tiny traditional house with four shiny cars in front, and as I tinkered with it, squatting awkwardly, an elderly ajeema came barreling out of the house toward us.

Now, Sam has proposed a new Guinness World Record category: number of ajeemas smiling at the same time (Sam believes the current record is ONE.)  To our surprise, this lady was beaming.  Dressed nicely (though not in traditional clothing) and with tiny gold hoop earrings, she spoke to us rapidly in Korean.  The only word I understood was Handong, so she correctly connected us to the university.  ("But how did she know?" I stupidly wondered later to Nick. "Um," he responded, as nicely as possible, "we're clearly not from around here." Oh. Yes. I forget myself sometimes).  Wanting to engage her somehow, I pointed to her garden, asking "bro-co -lee?" (the only non-squash veggie vocab word I know); she shook her head then spieled away about the plants and gardens and who knows what else. After we continued walking, we saw a young man in another garden, and he did not look happy.  Bored, sullen, teenager; probably stuck at his grandma's house out in the sticks with family all day, no wi-fi, and it's only 8am.  Poor kid.

Once we got back to campus I kept checking the mound outside for some action. Nothing. By 11am, I decided to go Looking for Culture and went hiking with Sam and Elisabeth.  An extended Korean family went into the woods ahead of us and we saw them less than an hour later, returning with empty cartons from Baskin-Robbins.  Hmm.  Others drove by us in shiny sedans (paths are often used by cars to access fields, burial mounds, and I don't know what else), some dressed up in suits but more commonly in "business casual"; one group of men (young cousins?) wore tank tops and shorts.

Well.  Chuseok was not what I expected.  Perhaps it's like foreigners in the US for our Thanksgiving: they might expect over-dressed Puritans to invite scantily-clad Native Americans for a turkey hunt, amusing stories of the Mayflower, and corn-planting lessons from Squanto.  I'm not sure.  Perhaps living in a rural area (anything not in Seoul is considered rural, I think) makes for more private rituals.  I don't know.

That evening we went to the beach and saw an elderly ajeema with a tiny dog.  Nick asked "Picture?" and she nodded, posing her little dog, apparently assuming I wanted a picture of that instead of her.  I'm considering doing a series of pictures of elderly ajeemas, because I'm increasingly fascinated by their lives as etched into their faces and hands.  And maybe, as I learn the language and can interact better, my expectations will better match reality.