Pan generational: International House's Chusok celebration brought together Korean-Americans and students from all over the world.

Seoul Food

Korea’s harvest feast is all about the ancestors.

by Mara Zepeda

Despite being pronounced dead a few years back, multiculturalism is alive and well. And nowhere is it more evident than at the University City-based International House—a nonprofit that’s home to nearly 400 students from more than 65 countries. It’s a mini United Nations where students peacefully cohabitate and eagerly volunteer for all manner of native holiday celebrations, featuring everything from Venezuelan folk music to surveys of Japan’s golden era of rock ’n’ roll.

Such was the case on Sept. 28 when a handful of students met at Han Wool Korean Restaurant in University City to prepare food for Chusok, the autumn festival sometimes lazily called Korean Thanksgiving by parochial Americans.

Koreans travel by air, bus and boat to celebrate this three-day harvest holiday with family, and their exodus causes long travel delays. But unlike Thanksgiving-bound Americans—where our migration is largely motivated by a potent combination of familial guilt and a lust for tryptophan—Koreans travel to honor and remember their ancestors through food, tradition, meaningful ceremony, prayer and graveside visits.

A flock of students from Brazil, Turkey, Japan, Indonesia, Korea and China gathered in the restaurant lobby preparing fried mung bean flour and vegetable pancakes called buchimgae (commonly and erroneously referred to as “Korean pizza”). Two older Korean women led the cooks in making hundreds of cakes. Colorful heaps of songpyun—bite-sized chewy half-moon rice cakes stuffed with sweetened sesame seeds, chestnut paste or beans—were piled high on a platter. (The songpyun had been steamed between pine needles to prevent them from sticking to each other.)

T.J. Lee, owner of Han Wool, volunteered to prepare the food for the night’s celebration. Central to it was a shrine laden with food symbolically memorializing Lee’s ancestors. His daughter Tina, the restaurant’s manager, gave me a tour of the overwhelming assortment of foodstuffs assembled in five rows: chestnuts, kimchi, fried fish, tofu, beef, the alcoholic drink soju, broth, dried fish (with head pointed toward the east, the direction symbolizing eternal life according to Confucianism), apples, pears, rice cakes, songpyun and chaltok (glutinous rice cake).

Dung Phan from Saigon and Ari Yasunaga from Tokyo, who coordinated this year’s festival, ferried the dishes over to International House. The day’s cooking culminated in a celebration featuring a prayer ceremony in honor of the dead, Korean pop (sung a capella), traditional drumming and the long-awaited feast. “We didn’t really know anything about it when we decided to organize the event,” said Phan. And there’s an awful lot to take in.

Part of a Chusok education is learning about the myraid traditional rituals, many of which would greatly enhance America’s soulless tradition of gluttony and televised football. May I suggest kanggangsuwollae (a dance circle of singing women), tug-of-war, wish-making on the full harvest moon, nolttwigi (see-saw jumping) and ssiereum (wrestling). And then there’s my personal favorite, kobuk-nori, in which two men roam the neighborhood singing and dancing for food and drink while dressed like tortoises. Who wouldn’t want to get behind a holiday like that?