The Ghosts of Autumn Evening
An Essay
Before my maternal grandfather passed away, an ancestral rite would be conducted at his home every Chuseok evening. During the rite, after burning incense and offering a drink to invite the ancestors, a spoon would be stuck into a bowl of rice, indicating everyone should leave. We waited outside where the night was descending while the deceased members of the family could dine in peace, no eyes of the living to watch them gulp down the offered food in a dozen minutes or so. Meanwhile, the living could look up at the full moon.
Today, the day I am writing this essay, September 17th, 2024, is Chuseok. Chuseok, a Korean harvest feast whose name is translated as “Autumn Evening”, falls on August 15th of the lunar calendar, when the eighth full moon of the year rises. My paternal grandfather also passed away a few years ago, which resulted in a scaled-down family gathering for the season. For some years, my father and I would visit the apartment where my paternal grandmother and her elder sister live for a few hours, and that has been about it for Chuseok.
My grandmother was born in 1933, and her sister in 1931. They are quite hale and hearty for their age, especially in that they can live by themselves in an apartment in Incheon, a port city that functions as the outer harbor of the South Korean capital, Seoul. My grandmother’s family has been living in Incheon as far as one can verify: it is a rare occurrence in the city where the majority of its population consists of emigrants from other regions. For instance, my paternal grandfather who hailed from Manchuria, had lived in Pyeongyang, Busan, and Seoul before he settled down in Incheon.
As far as I can remember, both before and after the death of my grandfather, I have never liked going to Incheon on Chuseok. It is not that I do not fancy visiting relatives in se. There is something so depressing about the port city in question that every step I take in it feels like being dragged underground. I could not articulate why for some time.
“There aren’t many books I want to read there,” my grandmother’s sister mutters. It is a day before Chuseok, and we are passing by Baedari Secondhand Bookstore Alley in Incheon. Only a handful of used bookstores remain unlike its name, but there used to be about forty used bookstores in a single alley during its heyday.
“Have you been here recently?” My father asks, only to find out that she is talking about her experiences from the fifties, despite her usage of the present tense.
We reach Hongyemun, a tunnel built by Japanese military engineers in 1908. My grandmother’s sister remarks on how the local calligraphers put up their work against the outer wall of the tunnel. The calligraphers she is referring to are possibly from any point in time from the forties to the sixties, and I cannot pin down when she saw them. Hongyemun’s outer wall is clean, but I notice the gazes of my grandmother and her sister stretching out towards it. I, for a moment, think they are seeing someone.
Incheon as a city began to be developed in the late nineteenth century. After Korea opened to foreign trade, it was convenient for foreigners to live where both the harbor and the capital were close. By the 1890s, Japanese and Chinese settlements had been established in Incheon, and Americans, British, Germans, French, and Russians followed.
“That’s where the Russian Consulate used to be,” my father says, pointing at a residential building. Most Russians left Incheon after the Japanese annexation of Korea and the Russian Revolution, but the building itself remained until the seventies, used as a local head office of the South Korean Navy before its demolition. My father spent his teenage in Incheon. There is no way he could have seen the building functioning as the Russian Consulate. I wonder if people still referred to the building as the Russian Consulate even after the Russians had been long gone.
My grandmother, her sister, my father, and I are still strolling about the old downtown of Incheon, where the oldest Chinatown in Korea is located. There is a small Catholic church in the middle of it. A priest let my father live there for some time when the creditors of my grandfather were hounding him even at home. My father’s eyes are briefly fixed at its gate.
Everyone but me starts talking about people who are not there, as if recognizing and greeting them in the streets: a Japanese teacher from the colonial era who was nicknamed “Venom” and taught my grandmother and her sister; their classmates, whose names they can only remember in Japanese, the result of a Japanese policy which forced Koreans to use Japanese names; a classmate’s father who was studying in England and America and could come back home after the end of Pacific War, only to be conscripted by the North Korean Army as an English translator and then captured and shot by the South Korean Army for the collaboration with communists during the Korean War; a North Korean army officer who urged my grandmother’s sister to flee before the Battle of Incheon, a turning point in the war; North Korean soldiers who moaned all night and grew silent forever by daybreak after grumbling at my grandmother, who could not spread balm over their napalm-burned bodies without causing pain; a church choirmaster who could always tell who was singing the wrong note, sneered at my grandmother’s suggestion that they should sing Handel’s Hallelujah chorus for South Korean soldiers, and later defected to North Korea to become a big shot of Pyeongyang’s classical music scene; a relative who opened a shop on the street after the war; my father’s friends, who would head to the used bookstore alley together with him after school not for the books but for the sweet buns sold at a bakery there.
“More acquaintances of yours have passed away by now, right?” My father asks my grandmother and her sister.
“I can count the living ones, but not the dead ones. There are way too many of them,” answers my grandmother’s sister.
The conversation begins to address even the Chinese kulis who arrived at Incheon before the dawn of the twentieth century and the Europeans who frequented Jemulpo Club, a social club exclusively for foreigners that closed down in 1914. It becomes evident that the ghosts my father, my grandmother, and her sister are seeing not only comprise their personal acquaintances. The bygone residents of Incheon, before turning into ghosts themselves, told their successors the stories of the ghosts they had been seeing, letting them live on.
Unlike my maternal ancestors or Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Past, the ghosts of Incheon do not come to us; it is the living that visit them on the streets. If one wishes to see them no longer, he or she should not pay a visit where they haunt. I feel like getting the hell out of Incheon as soon as possible, as I have always felt regarding the dispiriting port city, before I am forced to notice any of them.
Then I notice two ghosts in front of Incheon Station, one of them my past self.
After my breakup, a widow made a comment about what I was going through. Her message read: “you are seeing ghosts.” I liked how precisely her words described my situation. The ghost of my ex-girlfriend would appear anywhere we had been together when I happened to pass by.
Just as my father was seeing the ghosts of his classmates from the seventies, I have learned that one does not have to die so as to manifest as a ghost to someone else. Once, my ex ran into me on a street after the breakup. It was thanks only to the dress she was wearing that I could recognize her. Had she not shouted out hi to grab my attention, I would have passed by without knowing it was her. Her facial features and voice felt so foreign, so alien to me, making me realize there would be no going back.
In contrast, her ghost, which would appear around the City Hall, Gwanghwamun, Euljiro, Myeongdong, Dongdaemun, Gangbyeon, and Jamsil, felt so familiar. Then, the same ghost, whom I had not witnessed for a while, once again manifested itself in front of Incheon Station, along with the ghost of myself from a few years ago. Back then, we had been getting ready to go back to Seoul after visiting the Chinatown.
It has been fifteen years since I moved to Seoul as a teenager. These days, I spend many hours a day walking alone in the streets of the metropolis before taking a subway train to get home. Many days of mine are spent in silence, without much verbal interaction with others. In the streets, I sometimes think about why Ezra Pound would have chosen the word “apparition” in his short poem In a Station of the Metro. He was referring to what he saw in the Paris Metro. Less often than Pound’s poem, I also think about Natsume Soseki’s essay Tower of London, where he wrote: “As twentieth-century London gradually receded from my consciousness, the contours of the Tower rose before me, like an apparition, filling my mind with thoughts of ages past.”
Though without a precise language for its articulation, it seems I thought avoiding Incheon would stop me from encountering ghosts of the past and let me not become one. However, I have recently begun to feel like a ghost in the streets of Seoul already. Maybe, the city itself is an apparition that gradually swallows all its residents, not letting them leave and forcing them to stay as ghosts of the past.
Incheon, Seoul, Paris, London—they will all put people under arrest in their purgatorial shadows, given that they stay in them long enough. “I escape/I escape Seoul like escaping hell”, wrote Kim Nam-ju in his poem The Moon of Seoul. I need to escape too.
Writing at a café in Myeongdong, seated next to a whole glass window, I look up at the evening sky through it. I see the full moon of Chuseok, hovering over this city.
If you enjoyed my work, you can buy me a cup of tea. I am not a coffee person, by the way.
So beautifully and evocatively written.
This is perhaps the biggest issue I have with visiting once familiar places, articulated so beautifully, too.