Blast from the Past
blast from the past
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▲ Figure 1. The various names for Korea’s end-of-year parties.
The End Is Near! Mangnyeon-hoe
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
December 2020
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As the end of the year approaches in Korea, it is customary for groups of friends to gather around a table for dinner, conversation, remembrances, gaiety, and often alcoholic beverages. Over the years, as Korea has transformed as a nation, the name by which these get-togethers have gone has also experienced change. Prof. Shin Sang-soon wrote about this in his The Korean Way column in the January 2006 issue of the Gwangju News. That article, “Mangnyeon-hoe, the Year-End Party,” with some additions, has been resurrected for this end-of-year issue of our magazine. — Ed.
s the end of a year nears, many Koreans, especially those in the 20–50 age bracket, will feel obliged to attend several social gatherings at which some kind of alcoholic beverage, strong or mild, depending on the occasion, is likely to be served. The meeting will be of school classmates, alumni, colleagues, or of business associates, friends from the same childhood village or town, or other affinity group. If the get-togethers take place in the latter half of December, one may have something scheduled for almost every other day. By their nature, these meetings may be generalized as yearend gatherings to reconfirm friendship with each other. These end-of-year events have gone by various monikers in Korea. The first of these was mangnyeon-hoe (망년회; see No. 1 in Figure 1), whose Chinese characters give it the literal meaning “forget-the-year meet.” This name was widely used in the colonial days when times were tough for Koreans while under the heavyhanded rule of Imperial Japan. Almost immediately after the end of colonial rule, the Korean War (1950– 1953) broke out and devastated much of the alreadyimpoverished peninsula. With all of the hardships that
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Koreans had to endure throughout any single year in those times, there is little wonder that people wanted to forget the bad times that they had endured, and the name for these year-end get-togethers stuck: mangnyeon-hoe. As Korea was transforming from the underdeveloped nation of the 1950s and 1960s into a developing nation in the 1970s, industrialization was taking hold and the decade began to record double-digit annual growth rates. Life was not as harsh – indoor plumbing was no longer unheard of and portable TV sets were appearing in living rooms for the first time. People began to have a more positive outlook on life, and this positivity began a trend to change the Chinese characters for mangnyeon-hoe (see No. 2). With a single character change for mang, the moreupbeat meaning of mangnyeon-hoe was transformed into “looking-forward-to-the-coming-year meet.” Since the two terms (No. 1 and No. 2) were homophones and their meanings referred to the same year-end event, the only real discrepancy came when writing them. At the time, Chinese characters were still widely used in the print media – instead of the Hangeul alphabet (especially
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