Chaos reigns the day before the lunar new year. We are in Yongin, a satellite city of Seoul. We are on the 14th floor apartment of one of so many uninspired residential complexes, currently owned by my eldest uncle’s family. It is a four bedroom with a spacious living room that could accommodate the growing (and shrinking) extended family.

Korea is a patriarchal society, rooted in Confucian idealism of millennia ago that has tangled its roots around Daoist and Buddhist tenets and practices adhered to at the time. Hence, the cast of characters all orbit around my grandfather, the eldest male Ahn member in my direct lineage.

It is a culture that privileges the male members of the family. Matrilineality is essentially non-canon. Naturally, the men mill around – my grandfather is watching YouTube videos on a desktop in the spare room, while my dad and his eldest brother go to play golf. My cousins, my sister and I are removing tails from bean stalk. All the women who have been brought into the family (so to speak, in our current definition) are labor; they cut vegetables and meat and fry egg-basted dishes called jeon for the service the following day.

The chatter that fills the atmosphere is rough, mutable and often apocryphal. Narrative threads in conversations are not respected. It is a constant power play of drowning certain stories in favor of unrelated, often uninteresting stories. Sympathetic voices repeat things that were said. It’s hard to imagine anybody enjoys being here, yet somehow we persist in this behavior as though it were some fine print of life that determines the terms and conditions of how we ought to be.

But out of the conversations that took place, broad swatches of what I understood to be my family’s history slowly gain definition. More on that later.

The new year arrives, just like any other day before and henceforth. The living room is cleared, and five 1m x 1m tables are brought in. Three are aligned in a row, beyond which we place a folding screen filled with Chinese calligraphy that I am unable to read. That ability to read stopped at my parents’ generation. Two remaining tables are set to the adjacent wall to the left, with no screen behind it.

My uncle has written the same text as were written on all the tombstones in the burial site from a few days prior on separate pieces of paper, and tapes them to the screen. It is an incantation, or more accurately a marker, for the spirits of our ancestors to find. On the smaller set of tables on the other wall, there is a wooden stand on which two names are written. They call for my aunt and uncle who passed away a few years ago.

The table is set. Closest to the screen are 6 small cups, each filled with cheongju; on the next row are 6 bowls with tteok-guk; on the following are dried squid, sauteed leafy vegetables, tofu, the various jeon made the day prior, dried shark, and a whole fried chicken; finally, lining the far edge of the array of tables are dates, chestnuts, oranges, a single pear, strawberries, apples, and crisp rice confections. The arrangement for the other table is identical in item, but just fewer.

A padded straw mat is laid perpendicular to the center of the main table arrangement. In front lies a smaller table with a large tin bowl and a cup, next to which is a gourd of incense and a kettle filled with more cheongju. The ceremony begins and the incense is lit.

My uncle sits on his knees on the mat, flanked by his eldest son and my dad on either side. The rest of the attendants are neatly organized in a column file with sufficient space. We bow on our knees twice to welcome the spirits; we pour two glasses of rice wine from the kettle into the large tin bowl, and hang our heads to give the spirits time to enjoy the offerings; we bow twice more to acknowledge their presence and take of leave.

The mat is rotated to align with the smaller group of tables, and my cousin honors the spirits of his parents who passed. I take on the role of being on the side in my father’s stead. (Note: ancestral worship suggests one cannot lead the ceremony for one’s generation.)

The ceremony in question is called je-sa. It is a form of ancestral worship, where the main idea is that we honor those of previous generations for all we have today. It is the one thing that brought my extended family together for most of my childhood. Its meanings and nuances was lost on me then, and I had been severed from it when I learned of them. In my childhood, the lunar new year celebrations lasted three days, and I would play for endless hours with my cousins. Now, they depart as soon as the ceremony is complete. Now, I depart to another country for an indeterminate amount of time. Things have changed.

In a lot of ways, the recognition that tradition is changing is natural. I change as a person, with new ways of empathizing and analyzing the world around me, which in itself is constantly changing. Why I place such a heavy emphasis on family as a reference point may be because it is not such a constant in my life that can be holistically embodied as a process. There is always a temporal element that serves to point out the differences more than the similarities, because naturally I expect things to remain the same until further observation.

I notice changes in how I see myself in this familial group. I see we practice our being-together differently. Meanings are lost both ways in this intergenerational game of telephone. New modalities are placed in its stead.

In the previous post, I had said: “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).” In this post, I had mentioned that further conversations allowed me to better understand my family’s dynamic, in an intergenerational sense. It is not the specifics of the discussions that were important, but the fact that nebulous relationships do have understandable structures.

I promise that there is a full circle to the vignettes of the 3 chapters. For now, I wanted to end on an unsolicited definition of a word offered by my father. In Korean, nature (ja-yeon; 自然) is translated as self + being. The self that was, that is, and that will be. Maybe static permanence is unnatural to our ancestors’ eyes.