#I originally wrote this for the Talk Talk Korea K-Culture contest but they decided to pick all drawing/painting submissions so...

[halfseoulco]

Everything is Our: An essay on Korean Culture

Published Friday, October 13th, 2023 — In Charlotte Cho’s The Little Book of Jeong, she shares an anecdote I’ve thought about often since I first read it: “A few months earlier, during the 2010 Winter Olympics, Kim Yuna, known as ‘the nation’s daughter’, had executed a triple lutz-triple toe loop combination, a triple, and a double axel for the short program, which not only won her the gold medal, it broke records. […] At that time, my jeong for Korea was still growing, but theirs was overflowing. Tears streamed down their faces, and they held their breaths in anticipation and awe, as every movement was executed to perfection.”

I don’t know how to explain to non-Korean people the connection that we as Koreans feel to our culture. To me, that short passage from Cho’s second publication strikes me in the same place that I imagine it would strike in other Koreans—a place where community, pride, and love intersect tightly, so tightly that the slightest tremble would cause the entire thing to tip over and pour out. From the soft underbellies of our souls to the sturdy ribcages of our psyches, I think that all Koreans carry within them something that only Koreans truly understand. The foundation of Korean culture is a war-riddled history as a tiny country surrounded by enemies, but it is also layers of jeong—strong, intimate relationships—and a stone well brimming with han—a complex cocktail of deeply rooted emotions such as grief and resentment.

But above all, the strongest pillar of Korean culture is the unabashedly overflowing love that Koreans have for Korea and other Koreans.

As Korea has grown into a thriving tourist destination and a point of interest around the globe, it’s easy to pick out what other people think is Korean culture. Of course, the cornerstones of any culture are often the things we can most easily identify: the food, the historic buildings, the art, the lifestyle. But I think the most defining element of Korean culture is the unyielding defense of our—our country, our people—not my but our—and the shared responsibility to uphold this defense connects one Korean to another like a silken golden thread that only we can see. And because everything is our, that means everything is shared: joy, anger, sorrow, pride. Everything that can be shared is shared in the clink of two glasses after long hours at the office, in the heat of the overhead lights of Seoul Olympic Stadium, and in the salted air of the sea between Incheon and Jeju where the MV Sewol sank in 2014.

Korean culture is being able to trace your roots backwards through generations and finding everyone’s places in time via designated syllables in given names—always being aware of who came before you, who will come after you, and who is walking the same path with you now but also being aware of your own significance as told through the name your parents picked for you. It’s a language that knows no gender but instead knows your elders from your peers and more than one way to say thank you and sorry. It’s a society where everyone gives what they can without expecting anything in return, where people fight to be the one who pays the check at the end of the night, and where birthdays are opportunities for giving gifts as much as they are for receiving them.

But Korean culture is also the way I always leave the ends of the soondae for my mother because that’s the part she likes the most, the norigae hanging in my room to bring me good fortune, my order of rice cake soup every new year from the nearby Korean restaurant if the holiday falls on a weekday and I can’t go home to my parents. It's the way I cry when I see KPOP artists perform versions of their songs with traditional Korean instruments while wearing hanboks in front of significant historic landmarks like Gyeongbok or Kyunghee Palace; or when I watched ATEEZ perform “Wonderland” in Sungnyemun for Korea’s 77th Liberation Day on stage last year. It’s the way I only watch the World Cup when Korea plays while wearing my red tiger T-shirt from Korelimited, the water I pour into my parents’ drinking glasses before my own, the pendant with my Korean name around my neck, and the ink on my skin. It’s all of our dogs having Korean names as well as English names, and my mother writing all of them down in a notebook like it’s our very own jokbo for our pets—a genealogy book recorded through the generations—and it’s all of our dogs understanding Korean as well as English. It’s speaking to another Korean person in Korean and them wanting to help me immediately and the oftentimes long conversation that follows. It’s always choosing Pepero over Pocky—always—and it’s knowing that Korean food is and always will be the best-tasting food, the food I always want to eat because it tastes like home. It’s learning the fan dance and the mask dance and playing traditional Korean buk drums in elementary school, it’s the jar of yuzu tea in my fridge, it’s taking the black-and-white photo of my halmeoni that sat on the mantel above the fireplace in my childhood home—my halmeoni who survived a Japan-occupied Korea and then raised four children by herself post-liberation—and connecting it with my memory of her on her deathbed when I went to Korea in 1998. It’s proudly giving a presentation in my college Korean class about my most famous ancestor, Empress Min Myeongseong, and being upset that I never got to see the musical about her called The Last Empress.

It’s a profound longing for Korea after having not gone back for twenty-five years.

Moving from place to place, the comforting hand of our culture remains on my shoulder. It waves at me with sincerity and warmth wherever I put down roots, winks at me from the flag painted in red, blue, white, and black in its place by my bedroom door. It makes me pause whenever I pass the white silken scroll with my Korean name in hanja, adorned with ink paintings of a palace, a rabbit, and a crane that my parents had done for me in Korea when we last visited. I taste it in the meat my parents marinate for me before packing it up and sending it home with me. I see it in the shot-on-film photograph of my first birthday, my parents holding me between them, me dressed in a fuchsia and green hanbok, having just picked the money during my dol ceremony. I hear it when my parents sing “our Youkyung” when they sing “happy birthday” to me in Korean; or when we sing “our appa” or “our eomma” when it’s my stepfather’s birthday or my mother’s birthday. Not my but our.

My joy is our joy, my grief is our grief, my triumph is our triumph. Everything is our and hibiscus petals line the way to our home from wherever we are in the world.