Chuseok: Korean Thanksgiving?

Hi everyone! Thanks for stopping by...if it's your first time, the first blog is at the bottom and this is the latest one. I'm not as tech-savvy as some others, so I still haven't figured out how to do a few things yet, like get video up here and it's driving me crazy!!!!! Actually, it doesn't matter what order you read them in, it's just that the first blog has an introduction about me and why I'm doing this. If you have any suggestions, questions or comments on my blog/design/Korea/China/anything at all, comment below or contact me. (o_O)  

        In honor of Thanksgiving, I have uploaded this vlog written this blog about our cherished Turkey Day and the Korean equivalent, Chuseok, although to me it's not really an equivalent at all. Let me explain more now, as I'm not restricted by time and language. I'm guessing you know a little about Thanksgiving. In America, we hope to gather with all of our family members under one roof and eat a HUGE meal at the same time. Though my family is quite small, this is a huge task. I think gathering the family the biggest reason that people compare it to Chuseok. It usually takes five hours to get from Seoul to Busan...on Chuseok it takes 19. This is the truth coming from a friend who came to visit me during the vacation. So in Korea, you get two or three days off before the holiday to make sure you get there.

     I'm not married, but this is a tangent worth noting: in Korea, there is much tension and frustration about whose house to go to on Chuseok. It must always be the husband's family's, and within that, it must be at the oldest living male's home(or hometown, I never got clarification on that, but it would make sense that in most cases they would be the same place because most older people in Korea don't want to be bothered with moving around the way young people do, which is another blog entirely). I am a teacher, and most English teachers in Korea are women, so I know that this is true because Korean women don't openly complain about their family issues but this is one that is well-known by MANY wives...the husband and the husband's family come first. One of my coworkers was in tears to me between classes because her mother-in-law had given her husband and all of the other children in her family some free herbs from the acupuncturist, but not her because the daughter-in-law doesn't matter. It's almost like America's "evil stepmother" in Cinderella, but in Korea, the monster-in-law becomes the real thing.

     Speaking about it now, that did happen to me! (No, I didn't get married and I wasn't upset my not receiving some herbs---and no, they weren't the kind you can smoke!!!) Being away from home when you're sick makes being sick even more painful and seemingly endless..so I would complain to my (Korean) ex-boyfriend and tell him how in America, when people get sick, their loved ones make hem soup and bring it to their door (that rarely happened for me but I wanted to see if he'd do it) and so he did something better: he invited me to his mother's house for a home-cooked meal. This was just about the next best thing to my own mommy cooking me soup, so I said yes, and forgot about all of the connotations and problems that could come with meeting your partner's mother for the first time. I wasn't nervous on the bus, I was more happy about getting food cooked by someone's mommy especially for me. She knew I was coming and made "sam gye tang", a stew similar to chicken noodle soup that involves stuffing a little beheaded chicken with rice and ginseng and boiling the whole thing in bone broth and onions..really good for you, but a mission for me to eat a whole chicken!

     The dinner was fine. It was weird because she just sat there and watched at me eat. She stared and smiled occasionally, and then told me to eat more. This process repeated throughout the whole thing until I finished my bowl of rice. A meal is not complete in a Korean household until you have eaten all of your rice. She spoke NO English and her dialect was SO thick I could only get a few words out of each sentence (I said I speak in the dialect of Busan, but the older the people get, the thicker and more indistinguishable their accents become). When she was satisfied that I had eaten enough, my then-boyfriend translated questions and answers. It turned out she would serve her husband dinner after we left and she'd eat with him. Korean mothers (maybe ALL mothers) live to see their sons eat. It was strange for me to hear this, one because it reminded me of the mom in A Christmas Story in the nineteen FIFTIES, and, two because I'm an only female child and there was so much food around that no one had to worry about if I was eating or not.  So then we got to talking and as soon as I started to understand her thick dialect a bit more, it was time for us to leave. As she hugged me goodbye(a strange thing to do, usually youngsters bow and parents nod their head in a shooing motion), she said "You know, I never had a daughter and I always wanted one...maybe you can be like my daughter." Ha ha ha, we all laughed that awkward laugh when someone gives you a great compliment but you both don't believe it. I told a co-worker and she said "Oh, she said that? To YOU? Haha, that's what they all say....in the beginning."

You must take off your shoes in homes, restaurants, schools and even hotel rooms

     I almost did believe it though. I started to believe it when I was invited over more and more often for dinner and visits, and even to meet the other members of the family. Things were going well, despite the fact that I was this white chick from America and they were this small-town Korean family who believed that if you brought a girl home to mom, you were going to marry her (and I made it clear to all of them that I was not interested in marriage). To make this sweet(because it's already not short), I started to hate her as much as Ariel hates Ursula and Cinderella hates the evil stepmother...to the point that the last time I saw her I just wanted her out of my face. The woman did nothing to me. She was kind. I was upset at all of the things she "did" to my boyfriend and what a momma's boy she made him into. I hope he's not reading this! Almost all Korean males are "momma's boys" to American standards, because it is expected that the eldest son stay at home for the rest of his life and care for his parents, since they so "lovingly" cared for him. If he is to be married, the wife would move into the mother's house with them. However it in Korean minds, living with and taking care of your parents is an extremely adult and honorable thing to do. It is the "right" thing to do. There, it's been said many times that "You don't just marry a man, you marry his family", and it's so true. This doesn't happen so much anymore, but the attitudes are still there in terms of the wife and the wife's family not being as important as the husband's.

     Thanksgiving and Chuseok are different in the reasons that families gather for unbelievable amounts of food. Americans (today) gather and eat to "give thanks" -hence the title. The most revered pastime of Thanksgiving as a family (no, not football) is going around the table and saying what each person is thankful for. God, I hope families still do this, because every day I am more and more embarrassed about being a citizen of this great country. Please DON'T comment on my patriotism or lack of it, ESPECIALLY if you've never actually lived outside of the country for a considerable amount of time...there are many blogs and  books already on the subject; I will digress no further. 

Halmoni(an elderly woman) selling vegetables at a traditional Korean street market

     The purpose of gathering in Korean families on Chuseok is the ritual called "Je Sa". Many Koreans have converted to Christianity and refuse to perform this Buddhist ritual, but as mentioned before, if the eldest male or husband's family does Je Sa, so will you, regardless of your present religion. It's only one day a year so some Christian families will do Je Sa only to commemorate their families and ancestors but not go to temple or do Je Sa on other holidays or anniversaries. What is Je Sa? It's an offering to and worship of one's ancestors. In modern America we don't use the word "ancestors" a lot in daily conversation, but in Korea, pride of one's ancestors may be one of the biggest reasons the small country has survived the way it has. 

At a palace in Seoul

     Unfortunately, I have never witnessed Je Sa or Chuseok with a Korean family, because like a dumb American, I thought it was a private thing and didn't want to impose. Also, I didn't want to meet every single member of my boyfriend's family and have them all asking me thousands of questions and staring at me all day and staring at my boyfriend for bringing home a white girl...you know, awkward stuff. But I did do a smaller version of Je Sa at a weekend temple stay and have had numerous people tell me all about it. The women get up at dawn to start preparing the feast. No, I think they might even start the night before. The women's role is to be in the kitchen of course (another reason I didn't want to go, and didn't want to sit with all of the men while they were doing manly things, although I really did enjoy the time I spent with manly men in Korea because even though they are worse than football jocks at a game, it was a world I rarely entered into, even in America, so I may have had a good time making them feel awkward having the foreign girl around.) 

A Buddhist temple right near my apartment in Jinhae!

     So they make food and food and more food. Then when everyone is together and in one room, they light incense(??) and they put some food on a table for their ancestors to "eat". After they have chanted/prayed/sang/whatever is said at Je Sa, the eating begins. And I'm sure, the drinking. That is the pastime of every day that ends in Y in Korea, but then after everyone leaves, the family puts a bowl of food in the doorway with chopsticks sticking out of it, ready for the ancestors to eat. This is the reason why you should never stick your chopsticks directly into your rice during or after a meal, because it is only done for the dead and is seen as very rude. I bet some young kids might not even realize that. You can put your spoon in the bowl, but never the chopsticks. Lay them alongside the plate or in the plate if there's no more food, but never jutting out of the food.

     I lived in Jinhae for three years, and for three years I thoroughly enjoyed walking around the neighborhood the day after Chuseok because in the morning, there are bowls of uneaten food outside of many doorsteps. It's a really strange sight for an American like me, where you'd be worried about raccoons or rats or people trying to eat that food. Well, they have cats...they are like big rats, always sneaking around the garbage areas at night, hunting for leftovers from humans. 

     That's it for tonight, folks! Happy Turkey Day! Oh one more thing: they don't eat turkey in South Korea. Not on Thanksgiving, not any day. A lot of Korean kids think a Turkey is a big chicken and only know about it from movies and American holidays where their foreign teachers tell them about it. Oh and sorry the pics don't match the writing, I just know that everybody likes to look at pictures once in a while (and they are all MY pictures, not copied and pasted from other websites--most of them are Jinhae or Busan^^). 

Okay, that's it. <3

All middle school students must wear uniforms and give "victory" signs in all pictures

P.S. Each of these pictures has an incredible story behind it and I feel like I'm doing you and this blog an injustice by not telling you...like a caption is not enough. From now on maybe I'll post pictures and then write about them instead of picking a topic and adding pictures. 

Thanks for reading this one, have a great WONDERFUL day!

Saranghaeyo

(I love you)