Pol Cho

Sunday morning my host mother woke me up and said that we were going to meet my host father, who hadn't returned home the night before. We drove to the nearby town of Calsan while my host brother and sister slept in the back seat of the car. We arrived at a small, hole-in-the-wall restaurant and gradually the whole Kim clan began to pour in with my host father and I was introduced to the extended family of close relations to him. We ate while my host grandmother and great-grandmother poked and laughed at me, complemented my handling of chopsticks, and asked various questions about what foods I do and don't eat and why. After the meal I was taken to my host great-grandmothers house and asked if I wanted to cut the grass. A week or two before Chuseok -- the Korean thanksgiving -- Koreans cut the grass on their family tombs so that they can have access to the tombs during the Chuseok celebration (that's held on Tuesday September 25 this year), when they will bring food offerings and perform worship rites to thank the spirits of the ancestors for a good harvest. My host-father's family is very large and few people have moved very far outside of the area and so when we got to the tomb plot there were about 30 men, all members of the extended family, who had gathered to help cut the grass on just that plot. The family has 5 or 6 plots total, so I can't even begin to imagine how many family members worked on the plots that day in total. It was a surreal few hours of me raking up huge mounds of grass on the side of a mountain while 30 men of took rakes and weed wackers to the overgrown grass on these enormous tomb plots, pausing every now and then to take gulps of soju. Afterwards old men squatted around and insisted that I drink with them, so I'd let them fill up my paper cup, take a sip and wait until they weren't looking to dump the rest in the grass so that I wasn't plastered at 10 o'clock on a Sunday morning. My host father later took me to the oldest family tomb, a plot that dates back 400 years. A few years ago I got really into the genealogy of my family and tried tracing our history back, but got as far as the 1850s. Its bizarre entering into a culture where family history can be traced and remembered hundreds of years back with little research or effort.