By Kim Ji-myung
Recently I stayed one night at Seongyojang Manor ― the best remaining example of a hanok house that once belonged to a family of nobility during the Joseon Kingdom.
Designated as Important Cultural Asset No. 5, the compound includes a main building, an ancestral shrine, pavilions and a garden with a lotus pond and pine forest. An exhibition hall will soon open to display some 8,000 artifacts, including artwork and clothes, of this family that has a 300-year history.
And yet, it was quite surprising to see the changes taking place at this historic manor. Probably to take care of the 300,000 annual visitors, new buildings and facilities to service guests are being built, supported by the local government. “Experience” is a keyword in their promotional efforts.
It is necessary for people to have access to places where they can experience and learn something which they cannot find in ordinary life. In this rare environment, they want to eat, drink tea, get some rest and buy some souvenirs. And the house will probably need additional funding to run the big estate, which is maintained by 20 full-time staff workers.
A nice, big, tile-roofed, ondol-floored house with an elegant scholarly ambience, but also all modern facilities, welcomed our mixed group of three Korean and 13 foreign visitors. A maximum of 40 people can spend the night, but only if you make a reservation. Here again, I found the term “experience” Korean culture and hanok-stay being used.
Sitting down on the floor of the room and sleeping on a traditional mattress (yo in Korean) on the warm floor reminded me of the rapid changes that have taken place in our lifestyle. Even if we do have floor-heating in apartments now, beds are so common that not many people sleep on warm floors anymore.
Before going to bed that day, we heard a vigorous explanation of the ondol heating structure and mechanism from a Canadian guide, who has lived in a hanok in Seoul for almost 40 years. He elaborated on the scientific and delicate design of the fire-hole, flue and chimney of the ondol, which utilizes energy very effectively. I failed to ask him if he sleeps in a bed or on a traditional mat on the floor.
To be honest, my husband who has a “warm” body is very vulnerable to heat. The warmth from the ondol and even a mild summer heat can easily wear him out. People of this “warm physical type” should not consume ginger, according to herbal medical theory.
He claims that a traditional ondol becomes burning hot when wood is burned in the kitchen early in the evening, but then becomes ice cold again before dawn. Room air gets very dry, and these extremes made asthma a nationwide ailment in the past. This time too, he could not sleep well. By the way, he is also slightly atopic and sensitive to dryness.
The next morning an American lady who slept in the next room whispered into my ear, “That was really a very unpleasant experience; I could not sleep at all, because it was too hot.” I understood that she is the same “warm” type of person. As this case shows, experiencing something does not always entail positive results.
In my village, kindergarten children arrive by bus to “experience” strawberry picking. I like the idea, but I am sorry to see children moving around inside a greenhouse that looks like a strawberry factory. You can buy them almost all year-round and people have totally forgotten that the strawberry season is in late May.
Providing“Experiences” seems to have become a new area of business; people create places with facilities offering a range of experiences. All sorts of imaginable experiences are to be found in different places. Parents take children to outdoor facilities such as swamps and farm-fields. Apple picking, chestnut gathering, cheese making and potato harvesting are all popular programs.
An impressive experience program is Famine24 organized by World Vision. The “24 Hour Famine Experience” is a representative program that aims give people the chance “to experience famine, diseases and effects of wars and other hardships that our global neighbors go through for a day” according to World Vision. The campaign claims that even today, 1 child dies from malnutrition every 4 seconds.
I hope these “experience” projects will successfully fill a cultural gap in Korean society, which has changed so rapidly. Much of what people used to see, hear, eat and do in everyday life just one generation before can be only “experienced” by visiting intentionally prepared places.
For one moment, I believed the blue sky above the indoor shopping mall at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas was real. There is no harm in being briefly deceived like that.
However, children should not think that insects live in mesh cages and that snakes sleep in glass boxes. Canned nature cannot and should not replace nature. If a hanok experience tells you about how Koreans lived in the past, it is only part of the reality of the past.
Is it far off-base if I ask young parents to think about the difference between “living” something real and “experiencing” pre-prepared things, before they pay for such programs?
The writer is the chairwoman of the Korea Heritage Education Institute (K*Heritage). Her email address is Heritagekorea21@gmail.com.