We have entered “the center of spring” when days and nights are of identical length. In Korean, this is called "chunbun."

Already, you can spot yellow cornelian cherry blossoms and white plum blossoms peeking out from the trees in the neighborhood park. While a thick haze of pollution often veils Seoul’s skyscrapers, these cool spring days feel positively balmy after a frigid winter.

Among the net effects of living in Korea continuously as a foreigner is that you become aware for perhaps the first time in your life that people once measured the year by the moon, rather than the sun. The moon takes on a deeper significance — a sky mark and a time mark. With this lunar calendar, the old rituals centered around agricultural and culinary tasks begin to fall into place.

Growing up in New York, I never learned about the Lunar New Year, let alone farming, from my grandparents and parents. Instead, unbeknownst to me, we glued those Lunar New Year traditions into our observance of the Gregorian solar calendar. Every Jan. 1, we drove to my grandparents’ apartment in the Bronx. We never performed a single “jesa” ancestral rite because it hinted of a “heathen” past. But my sibling and I did dress up in hanbok, or traditional Korean clothing, and performed the “keunjeol,” a full-body bow, to my grandparents each year. They gave us pocket money and words of wisdom and then we’d quietly eat our “tteokguk," or rice cake soup, under a sweeping calligraphy painting by the dining table that intoned, “Fear God, Love Man.”

Regardless of the vast oceans between east and west, the television screen’s glow also transmitted a “lunar literacy.” As a child, I watched the Japanese anime “Sailor Moon” religiously after school. I only realize now how much the anime drew from folk beliefs. Sailor Moon’s nickname “Usagi” means “bunny,” after the creature that folk culture says lives on the moon. The sun, by contrast, houses the golden three-legged crow.

Everything about the agricultural calendar and, accordingly, the culinary calendar followed the moon. After the mid-autumn festival Chuseok, fresh soybeans were boiled, mashed and shaped into bricks of miraculous meju, the literal building block of Korean cuisine. Leftover rice straw was used for hanging meju bricks to dry evenly. That straw served as more than string. It supplied the proper bacteria Bacillus subtilis necessary for fermentation.

Meju was then fermented for three months in the cold until the Lunar New Year. By then, the mold blooming on the block would hopefully be yellowish white or persimmon-colored, not black or blue. After the new moon of the new year, the meju was placed into brine-filled ceramic jars, where they would slowly break apart into "jang," or the mother sauces of Korean food — soy sauce and soybean sauce. So many of the spiritual rites actually come from a time when farmers prayed to stave off the wolf — that is hunger — since a spoiled batch or a poor harvest meant a year of meager or flavorless meals.

More than a century ago, the celebrated novelist Younghill Kang decided to leave Korea for New York: “I said to myself, ‘I want neither dreams nor poetry, least of all tradition, never the full moon.’ Korea even in her shattered state had these. And beyond them stood waiting — death. I craved swiftness, unimpeded action, fluidity, the amorphous New … So I came adoring the crescent, not the full harvest moon, with winter over the horizon and its waning to a husk.” It’s easy to imagine the Korea he left in “East Goes West,” under the Japanese occupation; a place of cracked earthenware and households that dare only to rely on moonlight and men drinking away their grief with cloudy wine.

Yet since Kang wrote those words and left to chase “the crescent” and “the amorphous New,” the flow of movement has changed. Many are headed east to find that this country offers greater stability, if not fluidity. As the United States hardens its isolationist policies and aggressive deportations, the country is experiencing a net negative migration not seen since the Great Depression. Hundreds of thousands left in 2025. Under this government, the pull of the New World has weakened.

Korea today can hardly be considered the Old World. It's more “cyberpunk” than it is “cottagecore.” Besides, “authentic,” “heritage,” “tradition” and “master” don't interest me. “Continuity” and “access” do. Something has been lost in the modern process of designating one master, one race, one crop and one path, and creating scarcity where there are or could actually be multiple teachers and multiple paths.

The daily, boring business of simply maintaining the living earth is one such teacher. Meju contained in the ceramic pot was exposed to frost and wind and slowly given time to ferment. Earthenware breathes. The round belly of the jar had to be wiped daily and its contents skimmed for mold and flies. A home and a pot must be tidied. Rather than purchase containers, food, shelter or clothing, people labored year-round to secure these, gathering and manipulating ingredients from the natural world. There’s something in these humble, repetitive and frankly laborious acts of care.

In February, I spotted a crowd of people suddenly standing stock-still in the park holding their phones up to the night sky. I assumed that they’d spotted some big celebrity, but it was only the moon, which glowed red. A blood moon; a worm moon rose. For a moment, we were spectators streaming the moon into the cloud.

Esther Kim is a writer from New York. She is a guest columnist for The Korea Times. The opinions and conclusions presented here, though shared with many seekers, are her own.

© The Korea Times