Tonight at dinner, I told my parents that I want to celebrate 추석 (Chuseok) from now on. Chuseok, Korean Thanksgiving, is celebrated on the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar. This year it lands on 10/30. It’s a time when families get together and eat traditional Korean foods and pay respect & give offering to their ancestors. I learned about Chuseok several years ago through my journey of learning and connecting more to my Korean culture and identity.

My parents moved to the states in 1982 and has adopted mostly American holidays since. The only Korean tradition we practiced growing up was on Korean New Years. My cousins and I would gather, bow to our elders, recite “새해 복 많이 받으세요”, and receive money. We stopped doing that about 10 years ago. My family has never been big on holidays and I was never particularly connected to any of them. My parents always work on holidays so family time has always been limited. As I’ve gotten older and learned the racist and capitalist history behind most American holidays, I have chosen to be more conscious of the value I place on them.

Chuseok is the first holiday that I feel really drawn to. They say that families are making the “pilgrimage” back to their hometowns to pay respect to their ancestors. This typically includes setting up an ancestral memorial with traditional Korean foods such as rice cakes and jeon, fruit, and makgeolli (Korean rice wine). Over the last 4 years, I have learned so much about the history of Korea and heard stories from my grandfather about his life and upbringing. My grandfather has lived an incredibly extraordinary, but painful and traumatic life. He is a North Korean refugee, lived in poverty, fought in the Vietnam War, and lived through the IMF crisis. I am so grateful to still have him in my life today and have realized that I owe a great deal of respect to my ancestors that are no longer with me today. It is such a great honor to celebrate the ancestors who have laid the foundation for which I exist today.

This is why I choose to celebrate 추석 (Chuseok) from this point forward.