Chuseok 추석 2026 | By Susan Vinzents Jensen (Fall 2026)
During Chuseok families across Korea gather. They set the table for their ancestors, bow and honor them. I will not be at the table. My closest Korean family has chosen not to include me. I have accepted that. But it does not change where I come from.
I choose to remember my great-great-grandfather Ha-young Lee 이하영 (1858–1929). Our lives and fates are very different, yet I feel connected to him. We are both stories the family preferred not to tell.
Ha-young Lee was born poor and rose further than anyone could have expected. In the 1880s he learned English from the missionary Horace Allen, became King Gojong’s interpreter, and later minister of foreign affairs. His name is also on Korea’s official list of pro-Japanese collaborators.
The story should not be romanticized. Chuseok should not be a day for editing ancestors into something cleaner than they were, but even the sinners are human.
Earlier this month I wrote in The Korea Times that shame is a poor archivist. The family edited itself, as the Korean family registry allowed: A register altered, a name left out or deleted, a story forgotten. In 1972 a child from that line was sent to Denmark and removed from the Korean records. That child was me. I highly doubt I am the only broken line in my family.
Children have always followed in the wake of powerful men, through concubinage, arranged and forced marriages, and relationships no register was allowed to show. Their names were rarely written down, and their mothers quickly forgotten.
I have stopped begging for a seat. I am writing because remembering is something no one can exclude me from. Ancestral rites are not about honoring the living even though it is up to the living to remember.
I cannot claim to officially belong in my Korean family, but I acknowledge what reached me against all odds. History does not stop existing because you wish to forget.
In Korean there is a word for the bond between people that fate does not let go of: 인연, inyeon. The records let go of me and some of the living have too. I am grateful for the bond which can never be broken.
