Hyon-Joo’s Everyday Life

One of the good things about living outside Korea is that I'm rarely called 'ajumma'. I guess I've just admitted that I don't want to be called ajumma. However, believe it or not, I don't have strong resistance against being ajumma - because I am, but I'd be still surprised a little bit if someone bluntly calls me ajumma in a market or café. I'm not quite ready for that yet only because I haven't experienced it a lot. Am I making it too big a deal to be called ajumma? Maybe. Am I subconsciously fearful ...

- Mom with an ox in 1960. Why am I always reminded of big plaintive eyes whenever I hear of hwangso(ox)? Well, it's because oxen do have big round eyes. Then, why sadness? It's hard to clearly point out the reasons. There is something sad about the way they "open and close" their eyes. To me, it's different from blinking. It looks like they close the world, pause there for a tiny bit of a second, and then open their eyes to the world again. Somehow that looks doleful to me. Maybe it's also because of the way they moo or "cry" - ...

- Moon Geun Young in traditional Korean Costume, handbok It was freezing cold in Korea on the last lunar new year day - Jan.26, 2009 - not only because the temperature was way below the freezing point, going around -5C to -10C ( 23F to 14F), but because the world has become more harsh to those who already don't have much. On their biggest holiday, Koreans were shivering, thinking of those who got displaced or had to give up their means of living due to the government re-development plans, and got killed while searching for fair treatment. But there were a couple ...

My family's seollal* events have been gradually scaled down since my mom started to go to church twenty years ago. Her church argues that religious service to the deceased -a big part of seollal - is superstitious and my relatives didn't appreciate it much. My mom decided to follow her church rules and eventually our seollal has become more of family-gathering, not a huge holiday gathering with relatives. We still keep the good elements of the tradition that is irrelevant to any religious beliefs and doesn't have patriarchal poison of the holiday. We have tteokguk, play ...