After almost four years in South Korea, working with countless colleagues attending numerous birthday parties and weddings, I finally experienced a Korean funeral for the first time.
This is one type of ceremony you really don’t want to participate in, especially when the deceased is the mother of a close friend, but the nature of a Korean funeral is so surreal, I felt oddly compelled to write about it.
Much like Korean weddings, these events are rarely if ever closed ceremonies. During a wedding, the bride and groom are devoting their lives to each other while those in attendance eat copious amounts of food, chat on their cell phone or converse loudly with their friends. Weddings are merely a means to gather hundreds of people to an expensive wedding hall for a small sideshow: the wedding itself. One could easily attend a wedding for three hours and not hear a single word the bride or groom has said, let alone meet them!
Often they are a ridiculous spectacle, with the priest singing solo on a big screen behind the alter, pyrotechnics as the groom walks down the aisle to ‘Auld Lang Syne’, fake plumes of smoke, garden chairs masquerading as wedding furniture and female wait staff dressed as flight attendants.
Recently, a Canadian friend went to a wedding where the groom accidentally head-butted his future father-in-law when trying to bow to him. Afterwards, the groom and best man sang Psy’s smash-hit ‘Gentleman’ in front of the entire congregation.
Images of Korean weddings and funerals a century ago are staggeringly different from today. Somehow, they have since managed to combine a minuscule amount of what they had before with the worst examples of Las Vegas-style nuptials, and turned it into a microcosm of 21st-century Korea.
It would be an understatement to suggest that funerals in Korea have also developed a little bit. Highlighting particular aspects of the funeral system might seem decidedly distasteful because we are talking about a death, but everything I write is merely an observation, and not a criticism.
In the basement beneath the hospital in Sincheon, Seoul, where her mother lived the last months of her life, was the ‘Funeral Centre’. This modern hall, sprawled out over three floors, was nothing like I expected. Each floor had approximately 10 funeral rooms, a convenience store and even an ATM. The elevators connecting the floors were made almost entirely of glass, and an impressive waterfall system sent huge volumes of water around the building. It all looked remarkably like a fancy hotel.
Funerals take place inside one of the ten rooms, which were also partitioned. In one room, the casket stood next to the back wall draped in flowers, pictures and other gifts. The close family stood at an angle from the entrance, head bowed, tears rolling down their faces. The mourners – myself included - arrived in small groups, said a little prayer in front of the casket, and then turned to face the family. After a brief moment, we fell to our knees and bowed to the family.
Once we offered our sympathies, we were led to the second room by one of the grieving girls, and sat on the floor eating food and drinking alcohol. We barely had time to talk to my friend as more mourners arrived. And this same routine continued for two full days. The family stand in the same spot, effectively unfed, for 12 hours at a time. And people come with even the most obscure connection to the family, each donating some $50 each to help towards the cost of the funeral and the food.
One hour later you’re gone, but the family have many more ahead in what is a very public funeral ceremony.
Andrew Farrell works as an English language teacher in Korea.
