Chuseok

Pine resin.

Hot, sharp and a little sweet, it rushes straight up into the face at the very moment the lid comes off the steamer. That smell arrives first. Before the rice, even. Only a second or two later, as the steam thins out, does the smell of the rice find its way through, soft and gentle, walking along behind the pine.

Under that steam sits a rack lined thickly with green pine needles. Lying among the needles are a few dozen small rice cakes, ivory white and glossy with water, each one barely bigger than a thumb. Every one of them is curved. Not one is round.

These cakes are called songpyeon. The song in the name means pine tree. The pine made it into the name because it lies right at the bottom of the pot, a cushion of needles for the cakes to sit on while they steam.

The night that lid is lifted is the 14th night of the eighth lunar month. The night before the full moon.

In Vietnam, the full moon of the eighth lunar month brings the Mid-Autumn Festival, the night families know best in the whole year. Star lanterns go round and round the yard, little toy drums thump, papier-mache masks come out, and a moon-watching tray is laid with pomelos and persimmons. Under that same moon, on that same 15th day of the eighth lunar month, Korea has a great holiday too. But there are no star lanterns there, no drums and no lion dance. The holiday is called Chuseok, and its main business is not parading lanterns.

Its main business is going home.

Chuseok is a harvest festival. The rice has just been cut in the fields and the fruit has just ripened on the trees. People set aside three whole days in a row to give thanks for that harvest, and to give thanks to their ancestors as well. The holiday usually falls in September or early October, when the air turns cool and the sun has softened.

But before the smell of pine can fill the kitchen, there has to be a drive.

Most Koreans now live in cities, while their grandparents' graves lie out in the countryside. So every Chuseok, the whole country sets off at once. The expressways fill solid with cars. Train stations fill with people carrying bags. One year, the drive from Seoul down to Busan took five and a half hours. That was about an hour and a half longer than on an ordinary day. On the Gyeongbu Expressway, traffic crawled so slowly in places that the average speed dropped to only 40 kilometers an hour.

Sitting in those cars are families. The back seats are piled high with gifts for the grandparents. Children doze off, wake up, ask whether they are nearly there, then fall asleep again. Thousands of cars run nose to tail, each one bound for a different place. Yet in the end they all head the same way, toward the old family home.

Once they arrive, the first task is usually not eating.

The first task is climbing a hill.

Korea has a custom called beolcho, usually done in the days before Chuseok. The whole family heads out to the ancestors' graves, carrying knives, shears and grass cutters. Then they set to work cutting the grass and trimming the trees, until the graves are neat and clear again. In a single summer the grass grows tall. The job of the children and grandchildren is to bring it back down.

It sounds simple, but it is a morning of real sweat. Shoes get soaked with dew. Backs ache. A grass cutter hums steadily along the hillside, falling silent now and then while someone clears a clump of grass caught in it. The smell of fresh-cut grass rises, green and sharp, like nothing in the city. When the grass is short again, everyone stands still for a moment, bows, and walks back down. This custom of visiting the graves is called seongmyo.

On the morning of the holiday itself, there is a different task at home. A table of food is laid out in memory of the grandparents. On it go new rice from the harvest just finished, some liquor, and the very cakes that came out of the steamer the night before. That rite is called charye. When it is over, the whole extended family sits down together and eats the same food that was just offered. This shared meal has a name of its own too. It is called eumbok.

Yet the most fun part of Chuseok has already happened the evening before, right down on the floor.

Grown-ups and children sit on the floor around a big tray. White rice dough is divided into small balls. Each person pinches off a ball and presses it flat in the palm. A little filling goes in the middle, then the dough is folded in half and the edge pinched firmly shut. The filling might be sesame, or beans, or red beans, or soft, nutty chestnuts.

Once it is folded in half, it makes a half moon.

Here is the curious part. Tomorrow night is the full moon. The moon over the yard will be perfectly round, bright enough to show the path clearly. And yet the cake in the hand will only ever be half a moon.

While dozens of hands are pinching cake edges like this, Korean grown-ups often tell the children a familiar saying: whoever makes a pretty songpyeon will one day have a pretty child.

The saying works wonders. A small child who has been idly poking at the dough suddenly sits up straight. The child reshapes a lopsided edge, squeezes it again and again, studies it closely, then sets the finished cake in the most visible spot on the tray. The few that went wrong are quietly pushed down to the bottom row. The grandmother sitting alongside sees all of it, but she says nothing.

Later in the evening, when the moon is high, some country places still have an old dance called ganggangsullae. Women join hands in one great circle in the middle of the yard. They wear hanbok, the traditional Korean dress. They walk and sing as they go, under the very full moon of the eighth lunar month. A circle of people, under a circle of light. In 2009 the dance was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. That list is for living traditions, passed on from one generation to the next.

Then, when the three days are over, everything happens again in reverse. The cars leave the countryside, the roads jam up once more, and there are hours more of inching back toward the city. This time the trunk holds what the grandparents pressed on them to take home.

So the smell of pine resin in that kitchen is, in the end, the smell of someone who has just come hundreds of kilometers through traffic to be here. Someone who has just finished cutting the grass on a windswept hill. And who is now sitting on the floor of the old family home, hands covered in rice dough, arguing over which cake is the most lopsided.

At the full moon of the eighth month in Vietnam, families light lanterns for the children to run around the yard. At the same full moon in Korea, grown-ups grip the steering wheel for a whole day on the road toward home. Two very different ways to go, under the same moon, and in the end both of them lead to the same place.