So this past weekend I went to Jeju-do, an island south of Korea, where I spent the Korean holiday, Chusok, with my host family and my host mom's inlaws. It's quite lovely, though I really didn't have any time for sight seeing, since we were only there from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning. Below are a couple of pics of the shoreline. In the top picture, the well-like shapes protruding from the water actually have fresh water flowing out of them. Tasting fresh water coming out of the ground so close to the ocean was a bit of a surprise!
The day of Chusok (Sat) for me went as follows. We got up and cousins came over. The men of the family performed a certain ancestor ritual in the home, offering food and drink to the ghosts or spirits of their dead predecessors. We ate a big breakfast, after which I helped with doing all of the dishes. Then we went to the cousins' family's home and repeated (giant meal and all). After leaving the cousins' family's home, we went to the graveyard where all of my host mom's husband's family are (including her husband).
Graveyards in Korea are different from those in the US. Instead of the body being buried under the earth, they stay on top and are covered by dirt and eventually grass. They look like soft mounds of earth, and each have the presence of a person in a way. They have this very peaceful, if almost comical presence to them. And there were many of them in the graveyard, all belonging to their family. They bowed to the ancestors that still resided in their living memory. I only bowed to my host mom's late husband. After paying our respects, we proceeded to have a picnic amongst the dead. Though while all of this was going on, all we could hear was the crying sound of dogs coming from a nearby dog farm. So the whole experience was a little surreal, being in the presence of these bizarre tombs, listening to the sounds of soon-to-be-eaten dogs, and paying respects to people who up until a month ago I had no connection to. Surreal, but moving nonetheless.
Later in the evening one of the uncles took us around the seashore, so we could at least see some of the island while we were there. While on our travels we stopped at a small seaside restaurant and ate the freshest squid I've ever eaten in my life. So fresh in fact it was killed right in front of me! It was a little unnerving watching the tentacles still squirming about minutes before I was about to consume them raw, but I got over it pretty quickly when I discovered that it was delicious! And it was interesting, b/c as we ate the freshly julienned squid, the little spots of coloration were actually moving in sort of a blinking manner. All motor movement had stopped in the tentacles, but the little dots were all blinking like crazy. It was strange, but absolutely tasty.
So in the end, I won the approval of the grandparents b/c I did a lot of dishes (basically for all the meals that were eaten this weekend) and I ate everything that was put in front of me. I never realized that my love of food and lack of pickiness would help me win over the hearts of Koreans, or anyone for that matter.
So in the end, I won the approval of the grandparents b/c I did a lot of dishes (basically for all the meals that were eaten this weekend) and I ate everything that was put in front of me. I never realized that my love of food and lack of pickiness would help me win over the hearts of Koreans, or anyone for that matter.
While growing up, Chusok was one of the three days of the year on which my family conducted this ritual, for my paternal grandfather. (The other two days were Lunar New Year and the day of my grandfather's death.) It was one of my parents' ways of remaining tied to tradition, a practice that kept alive their ties to the homeland, connections which were tenuous for a great deal of our first years here, owing to our status as the first of our family to leave Korea. Of course, as a little kid, I didn't understand this 3-times-a-year practice in the way I do now. What I remember is the feeling that it was a pain in the ass to get up so damn early (before dawn), and all the food my mother had stayed up all night to make (and how unfair it seemed that she had to do all that cooking and wasn't even permitted to take part in the ceremony). The ritual itself seemed strange. There was pouring of the rice wine, which I got to do second, after my father, because I'm the oldest son. And that bowing at the end of each round of obeisance, three times fully crouched on the floor, closed each time by a half-bow towards the head of the table, marked by a bowl of rice and a spoon placed in it. The chopsticks were inserted into one of the banchan dishes, indicating the dish that my grandfather's spirit was supposed to alight on during that cycle of bowing. Once the ceremony ended, all of us retreated to another part of the house for several minutes. Then we all returned to the site of the ritual, to help my mother clear off the ritual table, and then we all ate an early morning meal consisting of her best dishes. We kept up this practice till I reached college age; then we stopped. We haven't performed a chae-sa since.
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