[MORNING CALM TALES] Carving jack-o’-lanterns at an English academy and the ‘Great Pumpkin Showdown’ of 1991

It was October 1991, and I was teaching English at ELS, a private English language institute in Seoul, when a rather unusual confrontation took place just outside my classroom.

One of the institute’s cleaning women stopped at the classroom door and stared into the trash can. For a moment, she didn’t say anything. Then she looked at my students, looked at me and began speaking rapidly in Korean. I understood enough of what she was saying to know that it had nothing to do with cleaning. Her tone alone was enough to send chills down my spine.

It was all over a pumpkin. Or, more precisely, what had once been inside it.

I was nearing the end of my first year teaching English in Korea, and Halloween was still something of a novelty. Most of my students had never heard of trick-or-treating, carving a jack-o’-lantern or dressing up as witches, ghosts and monsters. For English teachers, that made the holiday a wonderful opportunity to introduce a little Western culture into the classroom while giving everyone a break from grammar drills and pronunciation exercises.

As Halloween approached, several teachers gathered in the staff room to discuss how we might celebrate the holiday. Someone suggested a haunted house in the basement. Another proposed a costume contest. Then someone suggested a jack-o’-lantern carving contest, and everyone agreed it was a wonderful idea. Most of our students had never seen a real jack-o’-lantern, much less carved one themselves, and we were excited about introducing them to the tradition.

Of course, teaching something like pumpkin carving in 1991 required a little more preparation than it would today. There was no internet to search for lesson plans, no YouTube videos demonstrating how to carve the perfect jack-o’-lantern and certainly no ChatGPT to put together a classroom activity in a matter of seconds. If we wanted to teach our students how to carve a pumpkin, we had to come up with the lesson plans ourselves. That meant figuring out how to explain the tradition, introducing the necessary vocabulary and demonstrating each step of the process. We couldn’t simply pull up a video and let someone else do the explaining. We were the video, the instructions and, more often than not, the entertainment.

There was also one small problem. We needed pumpkins. Although pumpkins are easy to find all around Korea, they aren’t quite the same as the big orange ones found throughout North America. Korean pumpkins tend to be smaller, flatter and often a pale brownish-orange color. They’re excellent for cooking but not particularly well-suited for carving scary faces. Fortunately, whoever had been assigned the task of finding pumpkins managed to locate a supply that looked reasonably close to the American version. They weren’t perfect, but they would do.

What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was how differently Koreans viewed pumpkins. Of course, we eat pumpkins in North America, too. Pumpkin pie is practically a Thanksgiving tradition, and there are plenty of other ways to enjoy them. But come Halloween, those big orange pumpkins are more likely to end up on someone’s front porch with a face carved into them than in the kitchen.

In Korea, pumpkins are a familiar ingredient in soups, porridges and other dishes. One of my favorite Korean foods would eventually become “hobakjuk,” a thick pumpkin porridge that’s particularly good on a cold winter day. But in October 1991, I wasn’t thinking about pumpkin pie or pumpkin porridge. I was thinking about carving a scary face into a pumpkin and winning a contest.

The day before Halloween, pumpkins were distributed to classrooms throughout the institute. My students were immediately enthusiastic, although most had no idea what they were supposed to do with the strange-looking vegetable sitting on the desk.

Armed with our homemade lesson plans and whatever pumpkin-carving experience we had brought with us from our respective countries, we set about introducing the tradition to our students. After all, our teaching staff included Canadians, Australians, Brits and Americans, all of whom were familiar with Halloween to varying degrees. I introduced the vocabulary, explained the tradition of carving jack-o’-lanterns and then demonstrated how to remove the top of the pumpkin before scooping out the insides.

Soon my students were gathered around our pumpkin like a team of surgeons preparing for an operation. Hands disappeared into the hollowed-out pumpkin and emerged covered in slippery orange strands and fistfuls of seeds. The classroom erupted in laughter as students who normally approached English conversation with caution suddenly became animated and competitive.

One student, a former Korean Air flight attendant, laughed as she dug both hands into the pumpkin. “I never did this on airplane,” she said.

“No?” I replied.

She held up a dripping handful of pumpkin guts. “Maybe the passengers would not be happy.”

Everyone burst out laughing.

Another student quickly took charge of designing the face, sketching out the familiar triangular eyes, a triangular nose and a wide, toothy grin with a few crooked teeth. Nothing particularly fancy, mind you. It was your standard, garden-variety jack-o’-lantern, the kind you might see sitting on a front porch in any American neighborhood on Halloween night. All it needed was a candle inside to make that goofy grin glow in the dark. Still, we were proud of our creation, and everyone seemed convinced we had a good chance of winning the contest.

As the carving continued, pumpkin seeds and stringy orange pulp accumulated in the trash can. Students scooped out handful after handful and tossed them away without a second thought. After all, that was what you did when carving a jack-o’-lantern. You removed the insides, threw them away and got on with the important business of making your pumpkin look scary.

At least that’s what we thought. The cleaning women had other ideas.

The first sign of trouble came when one of the cleaning women discovered what we had thrown away. After staring into our trash can in disbelief and making her feelings quite clear, she hurried off down the hallway. A few minutes later, she returned with reinforcements. Three more cleaning women arrived behind her, and together they stood outside our classroom staring at the pumpkin remains. They began talking excitedly among themselves, occasionally pointing at the trash can and looking at us as though we had lost our minds.

Then, without warning, they sprang into action.

The four women descended upon the trash can and began rescuing handfuls of pumpkin innards, placing them into plastic bags they had somehow produced from nowhere. My students stopped what they were doing and watched in amazement. I stood there wondering what on earth was happening.

One student turned to me and asked, “Teacher, what are they doing?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” I admitted.

It soon became apparent that similar scenes were taking place throughout the institute. In classroom after classroom, cleaning women were intercepting pumpkin remains before they could be thrown away. The foreign teachers tried to explain Halloween, while the cleaning women tried to explain that perfectly good food was being wasted. Neither side seemed particularly convinced by the other’s argument.

To us, the pumpkin guts were something to throw away. To the cleaning women, throwing them away was the problem.

What followed became known among several of us as the “Great Pumpkin Showdown.” There was plenty of excited talking, pointing and gesturing as teachers and cleaning women tried to make themselves understood. The students, meanwhile, seemed to be enjoying the unexpected entertainment almost as much as the pumpkin carving itself. At one point, I wondered whether we might have to call off the contest altogether.

Fortunately, a member of the Korean office staff stepped in and helped settle the matter. The solution was simple enough. Students could continue carving their pumpkins and the cleaning women could collect the insides instead of having them thrown away. Everyone was happy. The students got their Halloween activity, the teachers got their jack-o’-lanterns and the cleaning women went home with what must have been an impressive amount of pumpkin.

And the following day, our rather ordinary-looking jack-o’-lantern somehow managed to win first prize for the scariest jack-o’-lantern.

Looking back, it remains one of my favorite memories from my first year in Korea. At the time, it seemed like a simple misunderstanding.

Years later, I realized it was something more. It was one of my first lessons that culture often reveals itself in the smallest moments. The foreign teachers and students looked at a pumpkin and saw Halloween. The cleaning women looked at the same pumpkin and saw food. Neither side was wrong. We were simply seeing the same pumpkin through different eyes.

Jeffrey Miller is the author of several novels. His latest is “The Tree at Panmunjom,” about the 1976 Axe Murder Incident. Reach him at daejeonscribe@yahoo.com.