A wedding and a funeral

As I mentioned in a previous post, Mr. O, a third-year teacher at my high school who had a good friendship with the previous ETA and has been making a lot of efforts to befriend me as well, took me along to a Korean wedding last weekend. I was struck by the experience and wanted to write about it, and since this week I also experienced a Korean memorial service for the first time, it seemed appropriate to write about both.

I hadn't been told what to expect of the wedding. All I knew was that the groom was the son of a former vice-principal of my high school (the father) and the owner of the major bookstore in Suncheon (the mother). I was a little worried about how I would be received, a complete stranger. I met Mr. O and Mr. Ma (also a teacher at Maesan) at the school, and Mr. O drove us to the hotel where the wedding was taking place. The streets were unusually crowded, and parking seemed to be in short supply. At the first lot we tried a young boy was standing in the middle of the lane screaming at cars that started driving in that the lot was full. On the outside of the hotel was a gigantic portrait of a bride and groom, and I wondered briefly if that was the happy couple, though that seemed unlikely (in retrospect it was probably some kind of generic advertisement). The inside of the hotel was extremely crowded, and I then wondered if it was possible that all these people were guests of this wedding. The atmosphere was festive and some hotel staff were giving loaves of cake to guests in exchange for small blue tickets. We hurried to and fro a little--first Mr. O thought we should have lunch first, and then changed his mind. When Mr. O poked his head into a small, empty wedding chapel and then walked off in a different direction, I realized that this was a wedding hall--that a number of weddings seemed to be happening in the same afternoon. As I found later from reading the small, blue ticket I eventually received, that the place was the Royal Tourist Hotel Wedding Hall.

We found the right wedding hall eventually, and walked past flower arrangements as tall as a person and affixed with banners. The hall was standing room only and we got there just as the ceremony was ending. Mr. Ma exchanged some envelopes of money for a number of blue tickets, we showed the usher the tickets and were allowed to stand at the back of the room and watch the end of the ceremony. All I really caught was some praying and waving spotlights. It seemed a little strange to be paying for entrance to a wedding, but I figured that the money probably functioned as a wedding gift or more likely went towards paying for the rental of the hall. From that perspective it made a lot of sense to invite everyone you knew, even if they wouldn't nearly all fit. Our tickets also gained us entrance into one of the various lunch buffets, where we sat at a table with a couple who I imagine was there for someone elses' wedding--though the parents of the groom did stop by to give their regards to us. The buffet was pretty decent, with an array of Korean foods including raw fish.

Directly after the wedding Mr. O and Mr. Ma took me to Nagan Folk Village to see a food festival, and I also ended up watching a cockfight. It was a little disturbing, but not as disturbing as I would have expected. For one, unlike in Nicaragua, these roosters did not have razors attached to their feet and the fight was, ostensibly, not to the death. However, the roosters were pretty enthusiastic--one even appeared to have sustained a bleeding eye injury in the course of the fight. Occasionally the manager of the fight would walk up and separate the two for a moment, and when he picked one rooster up and backed off, the second rooster always ran after him. I'd never realized before watching this that roosters--being one of those male animals that have the instinct to kill or drive off another male whenever they encounter it--could be this persistent. It makes cockfighting seem less brutal than say, dog fighting, where animals that could be naturally social are trained to try to kill each other. I ended up leaving before the fight ended, though, and went home with my two loaves of complimentary pound cake.

At school on Tuesday, when my desk-neighbor Ms. Hwang was giving me the daily announcements in translation, she said, "Do you know Mr. Lee? The third grade teacher? Small man?" She gave a little chuckle and I said yes. I'd actually noticed his absence, since he was one of the teachers that came down from the upper floors and sat on a couch near my desk for the morning meeting, and he always greeted me with a pleased and slight incongrous "Hi Tamara" every morning. Still smiling and without skipping a beat, Ms. Hwang said, "His mother died last night, so we will go to the hospital to pay our respects."

When I came back from the Gyeongju conference a few weeks ago, I found that my host father's sister had died of a long term illness that morning, and I was sort of at a loss for how to respond and further befuddled by how casual everyone seemed about it. This time I sort of knew what to expect. But I was still a little surprised when we went to the hospital, and Mrs. Kim, the chemistry teacher, started giggling at Mr. Lee, the bereaved who was wearing some sort of traditional Korean funeral dress, and said he looked like a bridgegroom.

Korean funerals are generally held at the hospital where the person died, and my school is actually located just a few blocks from the hospital we visited. There was a separate building in back expressedly for wakes. I went with a group of female teachers and tried to follow their lead. In the building, (which seemed, like the wedding hall, to have a few different venues), there was a small room with an altar and a picture of the deceased, and across from it there was a dining area with low tables. I saw the vice-principal there among other people, sitting with a number of students from the high school. First we slipped off our shoes and stepped into the altar area. Mr. Lee and some other men, who I guessed to be his brothers and possibly his father, came from the dining room where they had been socializing and into the altar room when we entered. They were wearing yellow clothes and long yellow hats of a sort of coarse material. They stood to the left of the altar and we faced it. All the teachers bowed their heads for a few moments--maybe offering a silent Christian prayer to balance the apparent Buddhism of the ceremony. The altar was decorated with fruits and incense. Then we all kneeled (I was slightly delayed, since I was playing it by ear) and bowed diagonally towards the bereaved, who also kneeled and bowed towards us. Then we left the area and crossed into the dining room.

Even though we had all had lunch, we were served a few different foods by women who I assumed were the female relatives. They had their own white costumes on over their clothes. Mr. Lee sat down with us, smiling amiably, and it was during that time that Mrs. Kim began giggling. He left when another group arrived to pay their respects and he had to go back to the altar. Mr. O dropped by my desk later that day, and asked me what I had thought about the funeral. When I compared it a little with an American service, he said that the family does view the body of the deceased, but that other people who attend do not.

As we walked back up the hill to the school from the hospital, I inevitably began to think about death, and my own funeral, and whether it was more appropriate to be somber at a funeral, or to be casual and social. Despite the casual aspect, I know that Koreans grieve, of course--Mrs. Lee even descibed to me the intense grief of her husband's eldest brother at the sister's funeral. And I know Mr. Lee was probably grieving as well, even though he looked perfectly happy. However strange it seemed to me, the Korean funeral seems like a very practical institution--you contribute some money to the family and pay your respects, and for the living, life goes on.