For Irene Kim ’26, Chuseok, the Korean holiday celebrating the fall harvest, includes sharing inside jokes with family, preparing food together, and sharing a meal with one another. She and her family usually come together every year to make traditional Chuseok foods. Although Kim wasn’t able to celebrate the holiday this year with her family members, who live in Korea, she instead attended the Chuseok celebration hosted by the Korean Culture Club (KCC) on October 5.
Kim says she found the club’s event especially heartwarming “because I think a lot of students coming from Korea or a Korean family miss that gathering and that feeling of making food together and enjoying it while being in your family’s presence.”
In the VCAM kitchen and lounge, the KCC served a variety of traditional Korean dishes like pajeon and japchae — two foods Kim shares with her family — as well as kimchi, bulgogi, Korean fried beef, and dumplings called mandu. Although many of the 85 people who attended the event are of Korean heritage, it attracted many non-Korean people from the Tri-Co community, too.
Angela Um ’26, who joined the KCC leadership last year, helped organize the event and was grateful for the large number of participants. “I see Chuseok as a fantastic way to kick off the school year,” Um says, “since this is our very first event of the year. It’s a great way to introduce students to Korean culture because food is such a big part of the culture, and there’s no better way to bond than with food.”
Chuseok has been a tradition of the KCC since it was created in 2022 by Heewon Yang ’25 and Yehyun Song ’25, who formed the club to share Korean culture with Haverford’s community. Unlike other affinity clubs, which gather based on a shared heritage, the founders of KCC wanted their events to be open to Korean and non-Korean students alike.
“We made the Korean Culture Club because there were a lot of students interested in Korean culture, and we wanted to share our heritage with the Haverford community,” Yang explained in 2022.
Chuseok is similar to the mid-autumn festival celebrated by Chinese communities because it is celebrated in accordance with the Lunar calendar during a full moon. However, it is often nicknamed Korean Thanksgiving because both holidays emphasize the annual coming together of family and loved ones over a set of traditional foods, despite both emerging from different histories.
“Because Korea is a small country that’s been colonized, l feel that the society emphasizes sticking together, community values, and putting your family before yourself,” Kim says of the holiday’s impetus. “In that way, Chuseok is an embodiment of those values of family coming together, making time to come together, enjoying food with one another, every pitching in to make the food together.”
Kim, as well as many others who attended the event, is very grateful to the KCC for hosting events that bring together such a warm community. “I love how they bring in the same communtiy aspect of gathering around food and enjoying one another’s presence. I’m so grateful they worked so hard on this to bring it to the Tri-Co,” she says.