Three years ago, I wrote an essay for a class called “Culture and Society”, in which I described the last time I visited Korea. At the time, the trip was significant for a number of reasons: for one, I had known that my grandparents’ health was declining, and my uncle had passed away a year prior, so it was an opportunity for me to be with my parents as they were entering the third act of their lives; and another, I was approaching my thesis project for my M.Arch program and was interested in investigating my sense of attachment to Korea (read: home, identity) as its theme.

And through the journey that is a thesis project in Architecture, I discovered that a sense of belonging is a set of emotional being/relationship within space(s) defined by one’s subjecthood and its orientation towards a spatiosocial feature(s). More on that another time.

Anyways, three years later – almost to the day – I returned to Korea. I am here now, on a cold Wednesday, the 25th of January, 2023, in Yeongcheon City, North Gyeongsang Province. I felt compelled to write to process the experience of meeting my extended family for the first time in almost 9 years, and of the observations I made being back here in relation to the essay I had previous written of my trip three years ago (which can be found at the end of this post). I want to separate that experience into discussions of personal history, family and kinship, and maybe of identity, in 3 separate chapters.

In the intervening three years, my grandmother had passed away. My father arranged for a traditional funeral service a day following her death, and a cremation the day after. The first day I came back home, my father drove us to our ancestral burial site where her ashes eventually lay. We drove through indeterminate highways, with bare trees like raised hairs on a nude, supine body that were the rolling mountains on either side of us for endless stretches. Then, off an unfamiliar exit we turned into a road that brought a familiar site of a suspended highway under which were abandoned elementary schools, small patches of cabbage farms, old bus stations, weathered farming equipment, stalled tractors, and corrugated sheet metal roofing. We arrive in the late morning.

Like a hot scale off an anvil when the hammer strikes the ore, vivid flashes of having-been-there returns and overlays itself in the present. Three years ago, I traveled the same way to the same place and I have noticed the following differences since: schools are still abandoned, but more worn than before; cabbages are rotting on the soil because the farmers have either died or cannot afford help; buses have stopped running through these roads; and there is a fresh mound and tombstone in the burial site.

Three years ago, I had pondered the future of the site when my parents’ generation passes and it is left to us to take care of it. My parents’ relation to those who are buried here are mixed, and mine is tenuous or entirely mythic; with each passing year, and each passing relative, the site would grow but so would my distance, both physical and emotional. I had not reached a satisfactory answer to the ponderance then, and this time I looked to ask for my dad’s opinion after we gave my late grandmother’s spirit her offerings.

He said, “it’ll probably get swallowed back up by the forest.”

He said that about a hundred years ago, this place didn’t exist. About a thousand years ago, our family didn’t have a last name. Turns out, nobody did until the royal family conferred it to clans whose deeds were worthy of written history, however insignificant they may be in the big scheme of things. Turns out, clan identity was largely used as a distinguishing marker for marriage compatibility in a society where a lot of people share the same last name.

About 80 years ago, my grandfather settled where he lives today. 73 years ago, he was caught up in a war that split the country into two; half a century ago, my father first visited the site. Back then, there were only four tombstones. Today, there sits twelve.

My grandfather’s grandfather moved from Anseong, the Juk-san Ahn clan’s home, to Yeongcheon in order to be closer to Daegu so that his sons and grandsons could go to school. He is the first one to be buried here. I am later told that this place wasn’t even the first place where he was buried. We simply transplanted his remains here from a hill just one ridge over. Nor was either of the plots our land – we are on someone else’s property, without explicit permission.

My grandmother lies buried on a mound, alone for now. The tombstone marks her name and my grandfather’s, who is still alive – the name is already milled out of the stone but covered in black tape. He has made it his wish to be buried here in the foreseeable perpetuity. His cousins, though, have ordered their bodies to be buried elsewhere. As a result, to my father, this place will be a place of ritual solely for the connection between him and his family.

Likewise, Yeongcheon exists solely as a place to connect to my parents.

And in a broader, less personal sense, Korea exists as a place to connect to something like a history.

A space is something real that exists a priori. A place is a space we know by instruction, memory, history, action – its definition evolves. Perhaps the family burial site will be reclaimed by the earth. Yeongcheon may also be meet its fate as its ageing population dies and its young leave. Korea, as an entity I sometimes call home, may be usurped by whichever country I make a stronger, more present connection. Maybe the sooner we accept and allow those changes as its definition, and not be too caught up in having clear definitions in the first place about things that relate to time, the sooner we can allow ourselves to grow naturally in an ever (subjectively) evolving world.

You can find the aforementioned essay here: