Vol. 09, Issue 01 January 2009 
Korean Ajummas: A Vanishing Culture?
The Korean Way
She is a wilderness harvester and an urban gardener; she is the connection to the past and to the earth that many of us in the West have already lost.
By
A former Gwangju resident (and Gwangju News contributor), Kelly Shepherd is a Canadian currently teaching in Seoul. He writes for DailyHaiku.org and dreams of graduate studies in ecology, creative writing, anthropology, or some combination thereof.
In his book Light at the Edge of the World, National Geographic Society’s explorer-in-residence and renowned anthropology writer Wade Davis describes various disappearing languages and cultures. Some of these vanishings are due to violence, war and genocide. Others are due to subtler forms of colonialism – a more technologically-developed culture displacing a less developed one; one group simply taking the land formerly occupied by another, or taking its natural resources; one way of thinking, one way of knowing, being replaced by another. These occurrences are part of what we generally call “progress”. Little attention is given to the fact that when a language is lost, or when the vital components of a culture disappear, it is the human race as a whole that suffers the loss. Along with a specific culture’s memories and stories, we also lose forever their complex layers of versatility, imagination, and creativity. In short, humanity itself is weakened.
The ajumma: you see her every day in Korea. In the city you see her toiling in garden plots on the narrow strips of red earth alongside buildings, or on hillsides, or in vacant lots. You might see her hauling cardboard or removing trash from the streets. If you hike up a mountain you see her selling drinks, ice cream, cucumbers, and hard-boiled eggs to the hikers. In the autumn you see her gathering chestnuts from the forested hillsides; later, she roasts and sells them on the corner. Any time of year, in any weather, from Seogwipo to Seoul, you can see her tending and selling her fruits and vegetables, her squid and bondaeggi at the open-air market, at the bus terminal, or on the sidewalk. She is a mother and a grandmother; she is the keeper of memories for this proud and determined nation. She is a wilderness harvester and an urban gardener; she is the connection to the past and to the earth that many of us in the West have already lost.
I remember one of my first weeks in Gwangju, when I lived there in 2005. I was walking one morning to my hagwon job, and I passed a small elderly woman who was pulling a cart full of bags and bundles down the street. She had stopped beside the road and was struggling to lift something. When she saw me, she motioned for me to come help her. Not understanding a word of her fast Korean monologue, I lifted the heavy bundle onto her cart. I was rewarded with a wide, wrinkled grin and a hearty chuckle before I went about my business. I remember being amazed by the difference between these senior citizens and those in Canada!
Another image comes to mind: a group of co-workers and I were spending a long weekend near the beach on the southern coast of Jeollanam-do. I can’t remember the name of the beach, or the island, but I think it was a fairly typical one: rocky shore, coarse sand, warm water. We were picking our way along the rocks and wading in the surf, exploring. There were several elderly women there too, using sharp, hooked tools to harvest shellfish from the rocks. They had baskets slung over their shoulders to hold their catch. With that same mischievous grin, which I have come to think of as iconic or even archetypal, one of the women offered us some raw shellfish. One or two of us obliged, and were rewarded with a familiar good-humored laugh. Again, and not for the last time, I was struck by the toughness and resilience of these elderly people, especially the women. Walking further on the beach, I asked one of my Korean co-workers if she could picture herself doing that same type of work when she was older. “Absolutely not,” she replied sharply, and proceeded to list everything that was wrong with the idea: that type of job would be dirty, smelly, and unpleasant, hard on the back, terrible for the skin, and so on. I don’t think my co-worker was being judgemental or unreasonable. I don’t think she was especially unique or unusual in feeling this way, either. How many university-educated young people would relish doing manual labor on farms and in factories? In these new generations of well-traveled and bilingual Koreans, how many will want to take jobs straining their backs and getting their hands dirty with seaweed or shellfish?
All of this came back to mind when recently, at my current job, a North American co-worker suggested that perhaps in another few years, perhaps in another decade or two, the foreign visitor to Korea will have a very different experience than the one we are currently enjoying. One of the reasons he cited was that there would be no more ajummas. “Think about it,” he said, “Who’ll make the kimchi? Who’ll want to clean the shellfish, or peel the garlic?” I thought about that, and I wonder still: is it true? Do young people in Korea know how to do these things? Do they even want to? The rapid growth of the industrial and technological culture of South Korea may have made such things impossible.
Certainly with the passing of an older generation in any country, there will always be a set of memories and skills that can potentially be lost. On a small scale, perhaps this always happens: a family or even a town might lose some of its memories, some of its own distinctive history, with the passing of its elderly members. But I wonder if in Korea there is more at stake than that. I wonder if this might become an example of what Wade Davis refers to as a vanishing culture?
