I bet you are wondering too. Allow me to explain. I had returned from Daejeon early in the afternoon on a Sunday about a month back. Quite a large group of ETA's got together for the weekend and we had a terrific time in what was, for many, the first time they had seen fellow Fulbrighters since orientation.
Suffice to say that after a weekend of ETA re-orientation, I wasn't exactly in top form for an afternoon spent at the printing museum, but I was not about to let down my little brother Jin. Somehow I had it in my mind that this was a family affair, but Mr. Choi dropped only Jin and myself off at the 'Jikji' (the term used for the first book created by movable metal type in Korea – a book any Korean will proudly inform you predated Gutenberg by 50 years) museum.
Jin and I spent an hour or so exploring the robotic figure displays as we followed the process used to create Jikji. We picked up a few items at the gift store and I considered the day a success. Silly me – I should have known better. Jin wanted to attend the demonstration at 3:30 so I bought him some ice cream and we waited. As 3:30 approached, Jin inquired and discovered that the demonstration – I distinctly heard 'word' demonstration which made perfect sense given our location at the printing museum – was actually in a completely different location across town.
We quickly hopped into a taxi and made it to the police barricades of a centrally-located park in Cheongju. After noting hundreds of people dressed in odd white uniforms and wielding fake pikes and swords, I asked Jin to spell out what exactly we were here to see and was told 'w...a...r'. Of course. Unfazed – and somewhat excited for a reenactment – I prodded Jin until he found out what time festivities began. I began losing excitement when Jin told me that we had an hour wait with about as little confidence as he could muster. Jin was my lifeline to the world at the moment and if he didn't quite have a handle on what was going on, I certainly did not. We looked through out Jikji postcards a dozen times before people began lining up alongside a large braided rope that stretched down the center of the park.
I will stop here to clarify. 'Rope' is misleading. Imagine if a tree two feet in diameter and the length of a football field fell on the sidewalk. Then imagine someone tied small ropes to that tree about every two feet or so. Now imagine that the tree is made out of rope and the smaller attachments were there to lift and carry said rope. That's what I saddled up next to that afternoon as I realized that Jin had more than observation in mind.
Hundreds of fellow...Cheongju-ites?...grabbed a hold of an attachment ropes and began to slowly snake our rope out of the park and through the downtown streets which had purposely been closed by our police escort. It took over ah hour to move two blocks and, upon more than one occasion, I was almost dragged under the larger rope thanks to the cornering limitations of our charge. Traditional Korean drumming kept time and there was a fellow dressed like some sort of warrior king urging us onward at the front of the line. Seeing as how I was lugging the rope, he was standing on a cart that supported a large loop at the front, and I hadn't any idea about what he was saying nor still what we were doing, my patience was waning.
Jin then found out that there was another – equally as massive – rope being navigated from another part of town. I gathered that, when the two ropes met, serious things were in store. It took at least another half hour to position our rope in front of the downtown shopping thoroughfare. Standing on the beast, I could detect the enemy approaching with its own marching band and color guard from the opposite direction.
The cacophony from the drums reached a new crescendo and announcers spent literally 45 minutes hyping the event. The nattily-clad king fellow and his counterpart from the other rope then proceeded to trash talk each other – at least that's what I imagined for myself as I sat on the rope and understood absolutely nothing. I was definitely the only foreigner in the procession. At one point I counted no less than eight camera lenses pointed directly at me.
But this was just the type of adventure – albeit awkward adventure – that I signed up for! Up at the front of the rope there were now ceremonial dances being performed. By this time I had figured out that we were playing tug-of-war on a grand scale and I was anxious to get the show on the road. I'm as interested in cultural displays as much as the next fellow (that's a bold-faced lie – I had my fill by that point) but I wanted some action.
After what seemed like an eternity of additional trash-talking, singing, drumming, flag-waving, and general melee, we actually played three rounds of tug-of-war. I'm pleased to report that the team Jin and I were on won all three. Nevermind the fact that we would find out later that night that, given the part of town we live in, Jin and I actually took up arms for the wrong team.
We also learned from Mr. Choi that the event was a yearly festival dating back long into antiquity – a standard applied to much of Korea. And like many of Korea's festivals, it has something unpleasant to say about the Japanese. This particular tug-of-war game celebrates Korean forces reclaiming the castle in Cheongju from the Japanese during one of the latter's invasions. When in doubt about the origins of a cultural display in Korea, one would be wise to include Japan in their explanation.
But that mattered little to our mild-mannered heroes. We had begun the day innocently exploring early printing methods and ended it locked – or tied – in an epic battle of strength. And while the fickle tides of Korean events as they unfold throughout the course of a day may come as a surprise to some, it is this ever-present chance of being tugged to something random that I have come to expect – or perhaps suspect – in this country. I don't suspect I'll ever grow to enjoy this unpredictability, and maybe it's causing me to wind a little tighter rather than to loosen up, but at the very least I'll have stories to tell.
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