The process of moving or travelling for the holidays, is already an established facet in the culture and modern history in Korea. Just as Thanksgiving time is famous for people traveling to go see their families, Chuseok (Korea’s thanksgiving) is famous for this phenomenon. People travel from all over the country to be with their families and it is a national holiday. For this cultural artifact post, I chose to post a screenshot of a text message conversation I had with my parents. I was coming back home for Thanksgiving break, and they had not seen me all semester until then, so they were very anxious to see me. They were also really worried because the bus I was on kept running into traffic.
The first text in the conversation is my mom responding “okay~” to something I had said earlier. The next text was me saying “I should have about two hours left” to my parents to let them know when the bus was going to get to my destination. The next text was my mom sending the letters o and k in korean (literally meaning ok). This is a common abbreviation and slang used in texting in Korean. I then said “looking at google maps, I have about an hour and a half left” to my parents to let them know my estimated arrival time. I then said complained to my parents saying “I think there is actually a surprising amount of traffic” because I had not expected to be so late. My mom then responded saying “even at this time?” because I had left fairly late and had expected to avoid the traffic. She then sent a sad face emoji. The letters ㅠㅠ are often used as sad face emojis in Korea because they look like someone crying. My mom “alright…” after her sad face emoji because she was sad about the traffic and how late I was going to get home. About an hour and a half later, I texted them saying “hi~ I’m arriving in about 47 minutes” with the 하이 in the beginning of the text literally being the phonetic spelling of how hi is pronounced in Korea (ha ee). I then complained saying “the bus is arriving almost an hour late..” with three more of the sad emoticons that my mom had used earlier because I was upset that the bus had been delayed and that there had been so much traffic on my way there. My mom then said “dad will leave the house to match your schedule” meaning he would time when he left the house to pick me up to my schedule. This was a fairly standard conversation that seems very commonplace that I would have with my parents around this time. Since my family and I have been living in the United States, we do not celebrate the Korean Thanksgiving of Chuseok as much as our other relatives do in Korea. Instead, we celebrate with the American Thanksgiving and so the normal feelings about traveling for Chuseok were put for the American Thanksgiving. It is interesting to consider how living in a different country can make a holiday like Chuseok, which is so central for most Koreans, so easily replaceable.
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