Chuseok (pronounced Choo-sawk) is the Korean harvest holiday like Thanksgiving in Miguk (USA). Everyone goes back to their hometown to their parents' house. In our case, that means six siblings and their spouses coming to the little house in the little town of Buseok. Chuseok also is a somewhat religious holiday for Koreans of the Confucian variety because it's the most important day to honor your ancestors.
Now Chuseok is a multi-day affair. The first thing you have to do is return to your home town. This is the "grand migration" that Koreans refer to when they complain of the horrible traffic leaving Seoul. The horror stories go something like, "if you leave at the wrong time, you'll be stuck in traffic for 6 hours." We heeded, and left at 5 in the morning. The trip was a breeze in the little sporty Kia. I have to admit despite my skepticism that it handles pretty well. The narrow mountain roads are a good test of the car and my driving skills at 120 km/hr.
The day we Arrived we waited for the younger bros to show up too. It wouldn't have been a full enough house without them.
Speaking of full houses, these two bros got excited about playing poker with us. They don't usually play, so I thought it would be too easy, but of course they both were getting massive hands. That's poker. I think the bros must have seen the Western poker hands before, because they seemed to know what was up. Koreans play a card game called "go stop" (that's really what they say) with their version of poker cards called hwa tu (I guess they're from the Japs). These cards are really confusing to a stupid American like me, so it's a good thing we avoided the Chuseok tradition of playing this game. I'm sure I would have lost a bunch of Don (money), because your loss is practically limitless depending on the winner's ass kicking. Last time, older bro won like $150 off me from one game.
The preparation for Chuseok is divided by gender. The men go out to tend the graves of ancestors that fall under their purview - mostly parents and grandparents, but some are adopted out of sympathy by the family if they have no sons to take care of their grave site. This process is called beolcho, literally shaving the grass.
If you want your family to have any good fortune you have to do 2 things:
- put your dead ancestors in a spot that has good feng shui
- take care of your ancestors' graves
by mowing the grass at least once a year
I realized that this beolcho business is meant to keep the family's history alive. If the kids didn't have to go out every year and sweat to mow the grass at these sites, they might just forget where their ancestors are buried, and where they came from altogether. In the old days (like less than 50 years ago) they used to have to travel up to two days on foot to get to these sites. Then they'd have to cut the grass by hand with a blade. I bet that really used to make you think about your history.
These guys all live in the city, but somehow they can remember exactly where to find these little plots. They're all deep in the mountains; I couldn't even find my way back up to the road one time. They remember because of their connection to these ancestral lands that my in-laws roamed as kids. That, and they had to do this every year since then. We joked that the tradition may soon die with the younger generation, since it's so difficult to pull these kids off the grid for a day hacking away in the mountain jungles. I thought it was a blast, but then again, I didn't really have to do any work. Nor do I bear the responsibility of doing this every year.
We left early in the morning to do this. Since I'm a man, I got to tag along. My brothers-in-law made me stay out of the way the whole time because they were afraid that I'd get some weeds lodged in my eye. The two that did all the weed whacking didn't care to wear protective glasses though. Funny guys.
The bros had a good time razzing me about all the stuff that country boys know and city boys don't. Like they told me that I should be scared because there are tigers in the mountains. I was skeptical of that, and thought they meant mountain lions.
I was surprised later when we drove up to a monument that actually showed these tigers. According to the local legend, the king was in town one day, and this tiger came down from the mountain and put his paw on his shoulder. So they say.
They told me that there are dangerous bees and snakes in the mountains too. Sadly, we didn't see any snakes, and the bees we saw were not the deadly ones. We did get to see a spiny worm that supposedly will make your hand really hurt.
The razzing continued with my driving. They made me do all the driving around the mountains, which is really easy, but they made some noise every time I went around a corner too fast or was driving too slow. You don't like it? You can drive.
I got to hear some stories along the way too. The first site we visited was that of an adopted father of my father-in-law. He died before his wife, and his wife had to drag him up the hill to this grave site. As soon as she did, there was a flood and she was stranded there for quite a while. She waited for others to come help her bury her husband, but ultimately, she had to do it herself.
Another story: this site below is a great spot according to feng shui. It also happens to be on my father's-in-law land. One year, my bros came out to do the beolcho and found this site, all ostentatious and manicured. Turns out the neighbors thought it might be good fortune to bury their patriarch in this spot, despite the fact that it's not their property. My father-in-law could report it to the police, and they would be forced to move the grave. There was a big to-do about it, but ultimately it was best to simply leave the grave alone. This is the stuff that family curses are made of.
I got to hear the story again that I'd heard about my in-laws family grave site. This story goes that their ancestors did a similar thing three generations ago. They had found a good feng shui spot, but it was already taken by another grave. The grave was old, so they thought it might be ok to just take it over. Big mistake: they got a three generation curse. The soothsayer who fortold the curse said that it would come in the form of physical deformation, mutes, and hardship. After the three generations had passed, the family would rise to the class of statesmen. So far, the mutes and the deformation have come true. The Korean War took care of the hardship part. These days, the in-laws are doing pretty well for their curse. Maybe their kids are gonna make it to public office.
We finished our beolcho with some awesome grilled pork at a shikdang (restaurant). Unfortunately, we were 30 minutes away from homebase, and no one remembered their wallet. I thought this was a good put on for a while, but then I realized that they were serious. Luckily, Koreans can somehow put money on their phones, which is "just like cash". This whole process took a lot of arguing with the waitresses and talking on the phone with spouses to put the money in the bank account connected to the phone. They joked about leaving me there while they got it straightened out. Har har guys.
After the meal, we went to go fishing. This was supremely amusing for my in laws - they got to watch me lurch around in the river with my new hiking shoes (after telling me I overpaid for them). The "fishing" process is actually kind of hard because you have to run against the current while avoiding slippery rocks. I almost took a spill in the water a few times.
Of course I sucked at it at first. They just handed me a net attached to two bamboo poles and told me "go". I slowly learned that you have to stick your poles in the water while the others with you splash around to scare the fish into your net, which you promptly have to yank up out of the water (against the current) lest the fish escape. It also was slow going because I had to empty the sand out of my socks every 15 minutes or so. Wait up guys, my feet hurt again.
I got the hang of fishing by brute force and we quit when we caught about 4 pounds of these little guys. The next part was pretty intense - gutting them. I'm not squeamish about that stuff usually, but I've never really gutted fish, so it was kinda nasty. You have to squeeze them just below the gills until their guts pop out. All part of the food chain. I hate to say that the stew that was later made from our catch didn't really do it for me. Oh well, everyone else enjoyed it.
Exhausted, we returned back to homebase. Just after I started to relax, youngest bro says, "let's go". I say "where?", he doesn't say. I was naive enough to believe that we were going somewhere fun or at least something that would give him a laugh. We got in the car, and he punched in some directions. He wanted me to drive, which was fine because it gave me something to do. I had no idea where we were going. About an hour into the ride, I started to wonder if we were going to some remote strip club, and was trying to imagine little bro putting me in some kind of awkward situation to have a laugh with the other bros. We finally arrived in Yecheon, and we drove around trying to find some dude's place. He found it and went inside for about 40 minutes. I got to sit in the car, feeling like a kid waiting for my dad. Then I got to drive back, which nearly put me to sleep. So it turned out to be a 3.5 hour errand. Little bro said it could be my gift to him instead of the aviator Ray-Bans he was asking for. Nice one, guy.
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