Spring Wedding Moon
Yesterday we took a trip to the past. To Seoah’s family home and the village of the Jang family for at least four generations. The neighbor women sat at a low table eating from dishes and dishes of food. They looked up curiously as we came in the small traditional house, then went back to their meal.
(Kate took all the rest of these photos.)
The house had little furniture, mostly low tables and one chair, a massaging recliner that Mary (my sister) says is common in Singaporean households. Often the only chair in the house.
We met many black-haired children who ran around, curious and a little uncertain, Seoah’s two sisters and her older brother. Seungpil, husband of her younger sister, has been our taxi driver in a sleek, well-maintained black Hyundai, a Grandeur.
Seoah’s mother had charge of a compliment of women in the kitchen which had food plates and bowls and pans on all of its surfaces. Her father, a trim man, 71 moved with the grace of a 30 year old. He farms a large number of plots, some vinyl greenhouses, a rice paddie and several fields. I asked to see it and we walked around it all.
He proudly pointed to a tractor and said, in clear English, “John Deere!” He had a combine, a grain drier and a second Massey-Ferguson, older. He grows vegetables, hay and some fruit. Like any good farmer in the spring, after we left his home for the Bamboo Museum, he headed back into the fields.
Seoah’s home village nestles among low mountains that look (and probably are) ancient. They’re very beautiful, often mist covered and extending in ranges for some ways. Sangkuk is well beyond the metro region of Gwangju, in the country. As nearly as I could tell, the area around Sangkuk is only agricultural, no folks living the country life and commuting into the city.
