Autumn Korea is peak Korea

There were all sorts of things that surprised me when I first arrived in Korea: the garlic, the toilets that were nothing more than holes in the floor, the widespread availability of counterfeit CDs and movies, the spitting and the cults and religious performers on the subways.

And when talking to Koreans, it felt like all the memes were actually true: “Do you know kimchi?” was actually something people asked me fairly regularly. To be honest, at the time, I had no real idea what kimchi was or why it was so important to Korean people. I do now.

But there was another question/statement which always caught me off-guard: Do you know Korea has four seasons? I say question and/or statement because it was often used by people in a way as if to tell you something awesome about the country. The grammar structure itself was also the bane of many an English teacher’s life: the phrase “Do you know…” obviously featured in some old education models somewhere, and basically everyone went around using it. A conversation sounded closer to an interrogation at times if you weren’t careful.

But four seasons? Of course. I’m from the South of England. While we don’t get much snow, we go through all the typical seasons in wonderful fashion, and behave and dress accordingly. Koreans do that too, they were proud to tell me, only as with everything else, they do so to an outrageous extreme. The summers have you pouring sweat from places on your body you didn’t know existed, while the wind during winter goes straight through you. It didn’t take me long before I bought a couple of pairs of long johns for football in the darker months.

I soon discovered that the question and affirmation of Korea having four seasons was in some ways a sense of pride, possibly aimed at those from Southeast Asia. Singapore doesn’t have four seasons. Nor does Indonesia. Malaysia and the south of Vietnam probably fall into that category, too. Some places are always hot and instead alternate between dry and wet. Or maybe it was because I arrived in late November and Koreans were already lamenting the passing of autumn and reminding themselves that the good times would come again.

Because autumn in Korea is probably the best season of all. We’re living through it right now. And we’re also loving it. The roads out into the countryside are full because there are more national holidays and days off than you can imagine: one for the rice, one for the language, one for the god that had sex with a she-bear and founded the nation. It’s hard to imagine Korea with nice weather and people not working, but that’s what happens in autumn. Instead, they sit around in service stations eating delicious hot walnut cakes.

Autumn Korea is peak Korea.

The mountains and rice fields that cover this land and provide the source of spiritual power to people are changing color every day. The trees create a moving, breathing collage of reds, yellows, greens, oranges, and browns. Each direction you look produces a slightly different ratio of hues. And I can only imagine what it must be like to sit down on acid and watch the color of the world change before your eyes.

As a historical aside, there’s also something marvelously modern about observing the mountains change color. Many of my friends who arrived here in the 60s and 70s said that when they came, the mountains were bare, the trees all chopped down for firewood. The place didn’t look that pretty.

Then came that man nobody really wants to talk about: Park Chung-hee. He once said, “A man who does not love trees cannot be called a true lover of the country. The green of the countryside is a measure of the wealth of the nation. A poor nation is characterized by a lack of green.” And taking that to heart, he embarked on a mission to return the trees to the mountains.

This admittedly military government-led obligation was so successful that by the time I arrived here, there was no longer a national holiday for people to plant trees. I can’t help but wonder how something like that might be wonderful today though, at least for the spiritual and mental health of the nation. Go outside and get your hands dirty would be a great government initiative.

So, we have the beautiful mountains to look at. And on top of them rests the sky. One of my favorite expressions about this time of year is “chon-go-ma-bi” (the skies are high and the horses are fat). Apparently the expression has dark origins, coming from China and talking about oncoming Mongolian hordes, but today it simply means “Bloody hell! What a lovely day.” It’s the perfect thing to say to someone when you pass on a mountain or squint into the sun as you order some snacks.

Randomly, the first Korean song I ever learned to play also featured autumn: Dongmulwon’s “Heurin Gaeul Haneure Pyeonjireul Sseo,” usually translated as “Writing a Letter on a Cloudy Autumn Sky.” It was brought to wider fame with Kim Gwang-seok’s version in 1993. The most haunting part of the song is not necessarily the lyrics but the vocal refrains and utterances. The sounds, which are not words but, at the same time, define the song and made it something that I simply had to learn when I first heard it.

And spiritually, it moves the people here towards introspection and memory. The blue of summer is fading. The winter is approaching. We are now in a transition phase. Autumn becomes a season in which a person looks back at the life they've lived and wonders what happened to the person they once hoped to become. Book sales go up. Diaries get written. The season's emotional register is nostalgia, regret, memory and the sense that time is passing.

When I first arrived here, the idea of there being four seasons seemed comical. It was something we would joke about after too many pitchers of beer and stale cigarettes in dimly lit tents. Now I understand that it’s something different. Autumn is not about national pride. It’s about remembering who you are in life. Understanding that the summer has passed and the dark winter approaches. It is the human moment between the yin and the yang. Conscious of nature. And my word, the colors of this place!

If there’s ever a photo of Korea that I would have on my wall forevermore, it would most likely be the danpung (autumn foliage). The beautiful red, orange and yellow. The mountains. The music. The country that I’ve come to call home and its most beautiful season.

David Tizzard is a professor at Seoul Women’s University, holds a PhD in Korean Studies, and hosts the Korea Deconstructed podcast. He has lived and worked in Seoul for more than two decades. Reach him at datizzard@swu.ac.kr.