So everybody says to each other “saehae-bok mani-padeu-seyo” [new year (good-) fortune receive do] (implying that i hope you do). That “receive” in there comes from the ancient belief that good or bad fortune comes from the spirits (or gods, or God, or Heaven, or what have you), in a somewhat arbitrary way that can only be influenced by rituals, prayers, geomantic adjustments, etc — but is still mostly a matter of fate be falling you. It represents a deterministic-fatalistic fairly-passive traditional view of life.
I seem to remember that more than a decade ago (early to mid 90s, when the Won was so strong and the economy raging, everybody seeming to get rich without hardly trying) many younger hipper Korean urbanites started going around saying “saehae-bok mani-mandeu-seyo” at this time of year — that “mandeu” meaning make or create, deliberately changing the meaning to an active positivistic injunction, something like ”May you create good fortune in the New Year”. This signaled a whole new attitude towards life and its events, like from Oprha or Dr. Phil or New-Age self-help but anyway much more American-sounding, and it was said pointedly and proudly.
But then came the great economic crash of November 1997, what they call the IMF era, and all that attitude was gone; once again it seemed that our ups and downs are due to forces quite beyond our control, that we barely understand. I’ve never heard that new usage again, everyone has gone back to “padeu-seyo” since then.
My question to you all is, does anyone else out there remember this happening anywhere near as i have recounted it? Or is this another thing that my aging and Scotch-soaked brain has just made up on its own from cobbling together random false fragments, like dreams or theories of late-19th-century political history or Bob Dylan’s songs or Bush Administration war-justifications…?
7 Comments
The (Korean) Mrs., of appropriate age, says she never heard that. It might just be the aged scotch.
My wife too has hasn’t heard that one. Good idea, though.
I heard, and hear, this in Korean Buddhist communities, both in the US and in Korea. I don’t know how widespread it is, but I’ve heard it in both places. The emphasis was precisely on the fact that we have a will - that karma is not simply causes and conditions, but what we then do with them. Neither fully free will or determinism. I loved it when i heard it and i love it now, but…. I still use the traditional greeting more often than not. Why? Because it has a social meaning that simply indicates… “i wish you the very best,” which is, in and of itself, a very nice sentiment. I guess for a day, I’d rather not remind an already insanely busy peoples to get busy, yet again!
I never heard it, despite having been there for most of the ’90s. For myself, I am frequently guilty of making up things that were never, ever said. Slight deafness is the primary culprit “in my case.”
Well, gakseoli’s #3 makes some sense of it to me, as i used to hang with a lot of Korean Buddhists in those days… maybe it was a Jogye Thing.
My Korean activist friends tell me that it is common in social movement/leftwing circles to use the phrase 새해 복 많이 쟁취하세요! ‘Win much good fortune’, or perhaps even ’struggle for good fortune’, which somewhat like the Buddhists mentioned above, deliberately puts the emphasis back onto human agency. I expect, though, that it is said in a slightly tongue-in-cheek fashion.
Huh, that’s interesting, never heard that.
> It might just be the aged scotch.
That’s the problem — i keep praying that the Scotch will get older and i won’t, but…