[WHY] Why do divorces go up after Chuseok?

Social Affairs

Published: 28 Sep. 2023, 07:00 Updated: 30 Sep. 2023, 21:47

[WHY] Why do divorces go up after Chuseok?

After spending a three-day national holiday with the family for Chuseok, Korean people get full from all the food and tired from all the moving around — and then many also get divorced.

Every year in Korea, there is an increase in the number of divorce papers filed to the court in March and October compared to the previous months. The predictable surge is not due to the change in weather, but because these are the months following Korea’s two biggest national holidays: Chuseok and Seollal.

While the three-day harvest and New Year holidays are seen by some people as a welcome chance to get together with family members they haven’t seen in a long time, the festivity doesn’t prove to be so cheery for many married people, for whom the three days act as a sexist and oppressive tradition that failed to adapt to the changing society.

The battle is fought over having to squeeze two grand family gatherings and an even grander charye — the ritual of preparing a full meal for the ancestors — into three days.

On the one side, traditionalists argue that it is customary for families to get together with the husband’s side of the family first, and then leave to meet the wife’s side of the family afterward. On the other, the increasing awareness of equal rights has led to wives demanding the same treatment as their counterparts.

But what has turned this time of joy and celebration into a battle of the sexes and generations?

A traditional charye table is laid out at by the Korea Agro-Fisheries & Food Trade Corporation on Sept. 22 in western Seoul. [NEWS1]

What does a regular Chuseok look like?

For the typical family consisting of the parents and children, it is considered normal for them to visit the father’s parents’ house the day before Chuseok and stay overnight.

On the first day, the mothers — and usually the grandmother — prepare the dozens of dishes that go into a charye meal, while the men and children gather around the table that has been prepared by the women busying around the kitchen.

On the day of the holiday, the charye ritual is held in the morning and the food is served for everyone at lunch. Only after finishing cleaning up the table and doing the dishes can the wives begin to think about going to see their side of the family.

Since they don't have to prepare a grand meal at the wife’s parents’ house, the couple or family usually returns home on the night of Chuseok after a dinner at her parents' house and then spends the last day of the holiday resting at home. But if the wife’s parents’ house is far from home, the family may stay the night there, too, and then return on the last day of the holiday.

A traditional market is filled with customers on Wednesday in Seoul, two days ahead of Chuseok. [YONHAP]

Why does the food take a full day?

A typical charye table requires at least two dozen different dishes to be served according to meticulous rules based on the color, ingredient and gender of the ancestors that are being honored.

According to an official picture of a jesa (ancestral rites ceremony) table posted on the Seoul Facilities Corporation's website, a city-run company under the Seoul Metropolitan Government, with “information on how to prepare a jesa table,” five different types of jeon (egg-coated deep-fried foods) are joined by two different steamed fish, five different namul (seasoned vegetables), rice, soup, five different types of fruits of different colors and two different desserts all need to be laid out on the table.

A plate of freshly-made tteok (rice cakes), drinks for the ancestors and sikhye (traditional sweet rice drink) also need to be prepared.

The dishes are then laid out according to rules including: meat goes west and fish goes east; the tail of a fish points west and head points east; namul go west and kimchi goes east; red fruits go east and white fruits go west.

Spoon and chopsticks sets are laid out at the opposite end of the table from where the families bow to the table, in the thought that the ancestors come and dine while their descendants honor them during the ritual.

A charye or jesa table is usually prepared by the breakfast of the day of Chuseok or Seollal. Preparing for it takes days, from shopping for the ingredients to then together preparing the two-dozen dish course.

A scene from Kakao TV original series ″No, Thank You″ (2020-22), depicting the inequalities and sexist practices that happen within a typical Korean household [KAKAO TV]

How does the typical day progress?

In order to prepare such a grand meal for the husband’s ancestors, tradition dictates that couples always visit the husband’s side of the family first, before leaving for the wife’s side of the family after the charye is over and everything has been cleaned up.

The biggest issue is that women do the work of preparing for the charye, while also taking care of everything else for everyone else, including providing all the other meals in between the cooking, and again cleaning up after them.

During this time, the men are not required to take part and usually spend time drinking together in the living room while the women occupy the kitchen. More men these days try to offer their assistance in the kitchen with the changing times, but it is still the wife who is expected to take charge of her mother-in-law’s kitchen and helm the workload.

The ailment worsens when the husband’s parents ask the couple to stay a little longer until the husband’s sister returns from her own visit to her in-laws, thus delaying the departure to the wife’s side of the family.

One drama series that best depicts this practice is the Kakao TV original drama series titled “No, Thank You” (2020-22).

The whole story revolves around newly-married Min Sa-rin, who tries her best to conform to the unjust duties thrown upon wives in Korea but slowly comes to realize that the burden had been hers and hers only, never equally shared by her husband Mu Gu-young.

During her first Chuseok after getting married, Sa-rin has to wait for Gu-young’s sister to arrive with her husband after she finishes her own schedule at her in-laws. Instead of going to her own mother, Sa-rin has to serve the food for her sister-in-law and husband at her mother-in-law’s house while everyone else enjoys the festivities.

A scene from webtoon ″Myeneuragi,″ later adapted into Kakao TV original series, ″No, Thank You″ (2020-22) [SCREEN CAPTURE]

What are the biggest sources of dispute?

For women, the whole lopsided tradition that revolves around men wears them out, whereas, for men, the financial and physical burden becomes a source of stress.

While the women are required to spend their holidays in the kitchen, it is the men that are usually in charge of driving here and there and lifting heavy loads from in and out of the car when making visits to different places.

With the whole country on the move, traffic becomes a nightmare in which people have to spend hours stranded on the same road filled with families trying to make their way to all different destinations. This year, some 8.15 million people are expected to be on the road on Sept. 29, the day of Chuseok, according to the Korea Transport Institute.

The congestion and sheer number of cars extend driving time by twice as much, if not more. On Chuseok day, it is expected to take 10 hours to drive from Seoul to Busan, which is twice as long as the average five hours that it usually takes on the same route. The same way back to Seoul is expected to take just under 9 hours.

Going to cut the grass around ancestors’ graves, which are usually located on a low hill and covered with overgrown grass since the last holiday, a couple of weeks before Chuseok in an event referred to as beolcho is also often blamed as another major frustration for families.

Chuseok divorce graphic [KJD]

So do people get divorced more after Chuseok?

The numbers say yes.

Last year, the number of divorces shot from 7,100 in February to 7,900 in March after Seollal, which fell on Feb. 1. For Chuseok, which was on Sept. 10, the number of divorces fell from last September’s number of 8,200 to 7,500 but shot up to 8,500 in November, according to a report on the number of marriages and divorces in 2022 released by Statistics Korea.

The average number of divorces typically goes up by the highest percentage from February to March and from September to October, according to data compiled by the statistics authority from 2012 to 2021.

Though the reasons for why couples get divorced weren’t compiled, multiple surveys conducted on adults give a better insight into the story.

Over half of 1,004 respondents said that they felt stressed out about Chuseok and Seollal in a survey conducted on grown-up men and women by recruitment service Saramin in 2019.

Fifty-eight percent of married women said they were worried about the amount of money that has to be spent during the holiday — on food, gas and pocket money for the nephews, nieces and parents — followed by 44.4 percent of married women who felt uncomfortable because of their in-laws. The third reason was that preparing for jesa and charye was taxing, with 38.9 percent. Multiple answers were allowed in the survey.

The stress sometimes causes both mental and physical symptoms in married women, according to the Korean Academy of Family Medicine.

Roads of Seocho District, southern Seoul, are filled with cars on Wednesday, a day ahead of the six-day public holiday that begins Sept. 28 and lasts through Oct. 3. [NEWS1]

Where did it begin?

The deep-rooted inequality comes from Confucian traditions of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) captured by the phrase chulgaoein (pronounced chul-ga-way-in), which deemed that once a woman married, she belonged to her husband’s side of the family and was no longer a part of her birth family.

Under the chulgaoein rule, women of Joseon lived with the husband’s side of the family for the rest of her life and was only allowed to visit her own parents on very rare occasions. It was common for a woman to not be permitted to ever return, and families that let the woman visit her family were seen as generous.

So around Chuseok and Seollal during the olden days, there was no fussing over when women got to go see their own family or why they were the only ones in the kitchen. Joseon’s dominant agricultural structure meant that women stayed home and took care of the household while men worked outside in the field.

Modernization and industrialization led the younger generation to leave their home towns and start living in smaller families in the city, which is right when the issues we see today started springing up.

The “once married, no longer family” principle mostly died with the Joseon kingdom, but the remnants of an undying mindset, together with a perpetually patriarchal society, meant that women still had to fight for their right to visit her family, let alone boycott a ritual that was built entirely upon her unrequited labor.

"Our culture has been built on a Confucian idea, and it's only natural that the rituals also remain even though time has passed," Koo Jeong-woo, professor of sociology at Sungkyunkwan University said.

"But times have changed and so have the gender roles, so the conflicts that arise may not just be about the specific work that must be done but the idea of women's rights in general. Many people now celebrate the public holidays in different ways, and the discussions surrounding women's labor and family structure is the main cause of it."

A logistics center in Gwangjin District, eastern Seoul, is filled with parcels sent across the country ahead of the Chuseok holidays on Sept. 19. [NEWS1]

What can be done?

Besides the obvious equal rights awareness that would have to make its way into the minds of the older generations, experts are also calling for traditional rituals such as charye to be simplified so that the idea of Chuseok and Seollal can actually bring joy instead of stress.

“You don’t have to put jeon on a charye table,” Choi Young-gap, head of Korea’s largest Confucian scholars’ association Sungkyunkwan Confucian Association, said in a press conference last year before Chuseok.

Traditions should be kept where they can, but details should be up to the families that actually carry them out, he said. He recommended that a simplified charye table only have one plate of namul, fried food, kimchi and soup each, together with four different fruits.

Another key point is accepting the changes of society and engaging in an open and friendly discussion surrounding the new phenomenon, instead of viewing it as all negative, according to Cho Eun-suk, a professor of family welfare at Sangmyung University.

"It's not Chuseok or Seollal that's the problem — the problem has been there all along for families that clash with one another," she said.

"People these days spend the public holidays in all different ways, so it's wrong to say that these occasions themselves are the problem. It shouldn't be about who goes to which house first or who does what chore when, but people should learn how to communicate in a way where they don't hurt each other and listen to each other."

BY YOON SO-YEON [yoon.soyeon@joongang.co.kr]