When I was a teenage girl living in North Korea, one of my innermost desires was to eat my fill of songpyeon (glutinous rice dessert). When I walked along dirt roads in the rainy weather, I would imagine that the sticky mud underfoot was songpyeon, and that I could gobble it all up with a wide grin on my face.
Every Chuseok (autumn harvest holiday), the tradition was to make songpyeon and place it on a special table in honor of one’s ancestors. The majority of my friends would eat songpyeon until their bellies were full, but I wasn’t so lucky. We had some ancestral sites to visit outside of Hwanghae Province, but we didn’t have enough money to travel there. We rarely had the time or money to make songpyeon.
When I look back now, it seems silly. But when I was a little girl, I had no concept of how difficult the regime made it for normal folks like us to eke out a living. So instead of blaming the Chosun Workers’ Party, I resented my parents. My mom and dad were constantly busy with work. Too busy to care about me, I thought.
But every few years, my mom would make some time to travel about 16 kilometers to a nearby mountain where she collected acorns. Then she’d make the long journey back home. At that point, she boiled the nuts and crushed them in a large mortar. Then, she mixed the powdered acorns with water and saccharin. She did all this just so we could eat songpyeon.
Rice was expensive and difficult to procure, so my mom would try to stretch the rice dough as far as she could; making the most out of limited supplies. She made little pockets in the rice dough and stuffed them fat with the acorn filling. I remember it like it was yesterday. Neighborhood kids would burst into the house and we’d laugh and play while we munched on the delicious songpyeon. The sun always seemed to set early on those pleasant autumn nights.
As time went on, I eventually prepared the same acorn songpyeon during Chuseok. Only this time, I did so in order to honor my mother, to hold onto my memories of her. So each time I make songpyeon, I think about how my mother silently persevered under an oppressive regime. She made those mountain journeys for the express purpose of giving me and the neighborhood children some semblance of solace, some notion of normalcy. The simple act was an expression of love during a difficult time.
Now I live in a free country. I buy most of the traditional Chuseok foods at the market, but I still make acorn songpyeon by hand. It’s part of a deliberate effort to remember the sacrifices my mother made for us and cherish my memories of her.
I know that there are still mothers in North Korea who make the difficult journey to mountainside locales so that they can give their children the exact same kernel of hope that my mother gave to me all those years ago. I pray their missions are a success. I anxiously await the day when our disparate countries are reunited again, so that we can smile as we remember what bonds us together.
