Chuseok

This weekend marks the Chuseok holiday when Koreans travel to their hometowns to gather with their extended families and perform ancestral memorial rituals called chesa. Businesses, stores, and restaurants effectively shut down during this 3-day period, and hordes of families make the trek out of Seoul armed with Chuseok gift sets to different parts of the country. Needless to say, traffic on the roads is miserable. Television and radio stations feature hourly traffic updates, reporting on the average driving time from Seoul to Busan (8-10 hours), and other parts of the country. Fortunately for me, I just needed to get to Incheon, which is now easily accessible via a Rapid Train from Yongsan Station (app. 45 minutes). 

Early on Saturday morning, I went with my relatives to the mountain gravesite where both sets of my grandparents are buried. I've now had the opportunity to observe chesa performed by relatives on both sides of the family. I've always found it fascinating to witness this highly stylized and gendered ritual; the sons and grandsons serve offerings of specially prepared food and wine to the ancestral spirits and complete a series of prostrations in front of the burial mound and tombstone. But what's more interesting to me is how the traditional Confucian-based chesa has been altered to accommodate new ritual practices, from allowing the female descendants to participate in the offering and bowing sequence on one side of the family, to creating a more streamlined rite that incorporates Catholic prayers and songs (that sound uncannily like Korean Buddhist chant to me) on the other. In any case, it's all rather easy for me to observe, pay my respects to my grandparents, and partake in the feast afterwards. Since I have more of a visitor status, I've never actually been responsible for preparing any of the food for chesa.  That formidable task, I'm afraid, still lies squarely in the women's domain...and I'm sure that all of my aunts are breathing a collective sigh of relief now that Chuseok is finally over.