By Robert Neff
In Joseon Korea, finding money or other small treasures wasn’t always a lucky thing — sometimes it was a ploy by the original owner to transfer his bad luck onto the lucky finder. Often the target of this ploy was young children or desperate beggars.
While traveling north of Seoul in late 1891, James Scarth Gale, a Canadian missionary, encountered a number of straw effigies hanging from trees along the path. These effigies were “somewhat human in shape, about a foot and a half in height, and each supposed to be the likeness of some one. Inside (was) a little cash (a Korean coin), and accompanying it a written statement, saying whom it represented, with a prayer for the coming year.”
According to Gale, these straw dolls were left up until the evening of the fourteenth of the first month (lunar), when wandering beggars would go from house to house demanding the effigies and the coin they contained. The effigy was then “passed through the partially open gate, it and the misfortunes of the year becoming the property of the old beggar, who (sold) his peace of soul for the few cash inside.”
In Seoul, similar straw effigies were cast into the streets for the oxen and horses to trod upon in belief that the bad luck plaguing the household would be driven away. Some people affixed cash to the effigies to tempt small children to pick them up and take them home, thus bringing bad luck into their families’ homes.
Straw effigies were not the only way of ridding one’s household of unluckiness. During the New Year, Korean boys and young men found great enjoyment in kite fighting. For nearly two weeks the Korean sky was filled with colorful kites engaged in aerial combat. Horace Allen said that when one of the kites fell there was so much excitement in the chase to recover it “that even old men caught the contagion and hobbled off in search of the unlucky kite — finders being keepers.”
The kites were only flown for 13 days and then afterwards were deemed a nuisance. That final evening the boys wrote the names of diseases and misfortunes upon their kites and then, attaching a couple of coins to it, released them into the air to be found by some young child unaware of the significance of his find, or perhaps one of the spry old men Allen spoke of, who would take the coins and thus accept the former kite owners’ ill-fortune for the coming year. (Rosetta S. Hall, The Life of Rev William J. Hall, p. 143-151).
In the past I have been told by my Korean friends that I should spend any money I find before going home, this may relate to this old belief, or it may have just been my friends’ desires to share in my good luck and have me buy them some beer.
Robert Neff is a contributing writer to The Korea Times.