On Wednesday of this week, Koreans celebrated their own version of Thanksgiving. Called Chuseok, it is the most important holiday of the year and combines a harvest festival with the vestiges of ancestor worship. There is also a great deal of booze involved.
While Chuseok proper was on the 22nd, it’s a three-day break from work. And in my wife’s family, the visit to the tomb comes the day before Chuseok. So, on Tuesday, Ian and I joined two of KJ’s cousins, their wives and children, and my father-in-law on a visit to the tombs of his mother and father. Other families do this on the morning of Chuseok itself.
A view of some of the tombs (burial mounds, really) at the graveyard where my father-in-law's parents are buried. You can also see some folks paying their respects.
While very few South Koreans actually still worship their ancestors, they continue to pay their respects to their parents and grandparents by trimming the grass and plants around their tombs and making offerings of food and makgeolli (a milky-white Korean rice wine). Then, everyone gets down on the ground and bows before the tombs. After this, it’s time to drink the makgeolli and eat the food. Kind of an interesting concept for a picnic really.
Ian passing the time while we wait for one of KJ's cousins to arrive with his family. The pink Paul Frank outfit with blue trim is a gift from my wife's younger sister, who insists the outfit is unisex. I'm not entirely convinced, but what can you do?
KJ didn’t come with us to the tombs because there was cooking to do. And this being South Korea, cooking is women’s work, so she stayed behind to help her mother out. After we returned, the wives of the cousins pitched in as well to help get everything ready for the big day. We men did absolutely nothing to help. I might point out here that South Korea is a land of cutting-edge electronics and Fifties-era social mores.
On the morning of Chuseok, we all got up very early and waited for my father-in-law’s elder brother to arrive from Busan. He’s a retired priest – actually a monsignor, which is even better, just below a bishop. In fact, he trained almost all of the priests currently active in the Busan area, I’m told.
Well, if you’re Catholic, it’s pretty darned handy to have a priest in the family because you can have Mass without leaving the house. And that’s what we did. It’s part of the Lee family’s way of celebrating Chuseok – Mass first, bowing to photos of the patriarch’s parents and then eating breakfast. However, I should confess, that I missed the bulk of the Mass and all the bowing, because Ian just couldn’t stay still that long. Since I didn’t understand a word of what was being said anyway, it fell to me to take him outside and walk around in the rain.
Now, there are some important differences between Korean Thanksgiving and North American Thanksgiving. One is that there isn’t just one big meal in the Korean version. There are three – breakfast, lunch and dinner – and they’re all the same. Each meal featured a bowl of rice; bulgogi (a marinated beef dish); Korean-style tempura; marinated squid; a variety of kimchis (fermented vegetable dishes); some other dishes I’ve forgotten about; and makgeolli. Yup, rice wine at about 7:30 in the morning. Lots of it, too.
Lunch was the same, except it featured soju instead of makgeolli. Soju is basically the national drink of Korea. It’s a distilled beverage typically between 24 to 27 per cent alcohol, clear, slightly sweet and cheap as borscht. A 300 mL bottle costs about 60 cents in the supermarket. Not the greatest alcoholic beverage in the world, to be honest, but after about three shots you don’t even notice it tastes a bit like mouthwash.
Dinner was also the same, except that the cast had changed. The cousins and their children had gone off now to visit the families of the wives and they were replaced by my father-in-law’s sister, her husband, their two sons, and KJ’s two sisters, their husbands and their kids. The booze changed, too. This time, it was Scotch. And lots of it.
The menfolk sitting around enjoying Scotch while the womenfolk put the finishing touches on dinner and bring the food to the table.
Once dinner was finished, it was time for the main event, which was the priest uncle giving KJ a stern lecture in front of everybody about how terrible it is that we’re traveling all over the place with a baby in tow when we should be buying a house or some such and being respectable people, instead of, in his words, being “worse than gypsies.” After he was done, my mother-in-law took a pretty good run at KJ, too. I’d been instructed by KJ in advance (we knew this was coming) not to say anything at all, so I went out for smoke breaks anytime the urge to spout off approached irresistible levels.
And here is where Thanksgiving Korean style revealed itself to be essentially the same as Thanksgiving in Canada or the United States: It’s a time for family to travel sometimes great distances to get together for a big meal and to remember just how much they really piss one another off.
Good times.
Jeff Melland
Gnomeless 