SUNDAY'S POST

For some reason blogger was not kind at all to me this weekend -- it refused to post Friday or Sunday's entries in a timely manner. So it looks a bit f-ed up here. Grr.

(However, since it's free, I can't really complain, can I? That would be a negative, Iceman.)

This weekend was really lovely. On Friday, at Maiko's suggestion, we and my dad went to a Korean folk village (see Friday entry for a rather uninspired description). On Saturday, the first day of the lunar new year, my dad and I went to a Buddhist temple that my grandfather used to attend, and paid our respects to the ancestors. Then we went to lunch at my uncle's house. And on Sunday, I went to church (!) and my grandmother's house.

By Confucian tradition, the new year is the time to remember your ancestors: parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents. In the Buddhist temple we went to, my dad gave the monk some cash (like an offering in church) and the monk chanted a mantra as first my dad and then I bowed in front of an altar (not quite, but I don't know how else to describe it) laden with fruit and other foods.

Confucian tradition even dictates what foods go where on the table: liquor at the end furthest from the honored one, then fish and meat, then sweet rice cakes, then fruit. (Or something like that.)

The temple ladies poured six cups of water (traditionally liquor), each one of which I moved in three clockwise circles above some burning incense sticks. Then I bowed six times, one for each dead person in dad's family. There's a traditional way to bow, also; you put one hand over the other, palms down, and keep them to your forehead, arms akimbo, as you kneel and touch your head to the ground.

This is the way my cousins and I should have bowed to my oldest uncle, where my dad and I went after the temple, but he just gave us the money. I felt, as did my cousins, that we were a bit too old to be receiving money, but he wouldn't hear of us returning it. I remember that as a kid, I'd get little red envelopes of cash from my grandmother and aunt on new year's day. Traditionally too, everyone dresses in the traditional Korean clothes that day, so on Sunday I saw a bunch of kids and adults wearing brightly colored dresses and pants walking around.

At my uncle's house. I was the second oldest cousin among the cousins gathered there (5), but compared to Yoon-gyung, who's about 7 months younger than me, I felt like a huge rube. She's married to a pastor and, as my younger cousin Jung-eun pointed out, looks like Miss Korea. Seriously. I looked through her wedding album, and she looks like she should be in a wedding magazine. She looks the same (albeit slightly less airbrushed) in person. Decked out in a nice dress for the new year, make-up perfectly applied and every hair in place, she also was very gracious toward me and helped her mother put out a delicious meal and definitely made me feel like an uncouth sloppy American.

It's usually very nice to be as uncaring about fashion and makeup as I am, but there are times when I wish I had the secret key to looking fantabulous.

In spite of my self-consciousness about being an unmade-up, miserably-complected, unhelpful, blowsy-haired rube, I had a nice time. My cousins are all really, really nice. My two younger cousins there are siblings -- Jung-ho (male, 25) and Jung-eun (female, 23) -- and are graduating from college this year. (Korean men graduate college later than Korean women because they usually do their two years of mandatory military service in the middle of college.) They're the kids of my dad's second oldest brother, who died about 20 years ago from cancer.

Yoon-gyung (Miss Korea) has an older brother who was stepping out just as we arrived. He seemed really good-natured too. It's kind of crazy how nice they all are. Somehow, they all seem like "good kids." No attitude, friendly for the most part (except when the friendly is mixed up with shy), respectful and at ease with their adult relatives -- it all seems too good to be true! My other cousins (sons of my aunt), are extremely good-natured and kind as well.

I dunno, it's very weird to me.

I wished that my brother had been there, actually. Partly because it would have been nice to have another American rube there, and partly because being around family members who all got along (not just superficially but underneath as well) stirred up feelings of the choked-up, something's-got-in-my-eye variety. I feel so lucky and moved to be experiencing this side of family life. I wish bigbro could experience it too.

Then again, I'm probably missing a million subtle indicators of underlying strife.

I hope not.