Dear Family and Friends,

“Sleep be damned!” I muttered to myself when our alarm later sounded on January 1^st. I continued to mutter grumpily even as I pulled on my warmest outfit; I continued muttering grumpily even as we trudged through the darkness to the subway. The train was already filled, people clinging to high handles as the cars screeched to a halt at the station. The crowd compacted itself as we plus more stepped aboard and each minute of that ride was filled with shallow breaths of crowded air and the careful clenching of muscles so not to injure the people that we were crammed against. Then we, with hundreds of others, were mostly silent as we alighted from the train and began walking towards the Gwangalli Bridge.

The morning air was cool around us, the city lights kept jarring me into wakefulness, and as we got closer to the bridge, the crowd grew thicker. Stella broke our silence to explain that Koreans, mostly children, attach written hopes to helium balloons and release balloons at sunrise. The child in me glommed on to this notion so we stopped to scrawl hopes onto a scrap of paper, which was then attached to a pink balloon for the bargain price of 1,000 Won (about a dollar). We continued to walk, switching from the sidewalk to an already emptied freeway while the wind battered the balloons against us.

It was still really dark when we arrived at the bridge but by the time we selected our place in the crowd near the center of the bridge, light had begun to streak the clouded horizon. We, like the family next to us, sat down to await the sunrise but as 7:32 am approached, the crowd behind us began to press so we stood up to jockey for a position in order to watch the sun rise.

We might not have bothered – the sun never appeared from behind the clouded horizon. But at 7:32 or so, the crowd cheered a bit and we whipped our heads from side to side to watch balloons take to the air. I looked at my pretty pink balloon and the five-year-old in me wanted to pout and refuse to release the balloon. But the thirty-year-old in me allowed the balloon to the end of its tether, smiled, and then released the balloon. My friend did the same. And while the sun stayed resolutely blanketed, our hopes, attached to helium balloons rose and gathered with other hopes before vanishing into the gray sky.

We didn’t see the sunrise from the bridge that morning but it didn’t really matter. Our beginning had been more beautiful than I could’ve imagined; we had celebrated New Year’s Korean-style, with bells, with balloons, and on the sea. We had released our hopes into the New Year and satisfied, we sleepily turned towards home.

Roughly translated, the Korean statement “say hay bok mani pah du sae yeo” wishes you much good fortune upon the New Year. And indeed, a belated Happy New Year to you all; may you be most fortunate during 2007.

Love,

Laura