October is festival season here in Korea, and it feels like we have been to a million of them already, even though the month is only halfway over.  And at every festival, in every town, they’re there, tucked into the back of a festival booth, nestled in neat stacks in cardboard boxes, or waving proudly in the breeze:  the wish lanterns.

I’m a sucker for the power of a dream.  I think all Americans are, at some level.  My favorite novels focus on hope and potential.  When I teach American literature, I can tear up at the mere mention of Jay Gatsby’s “incorruptible dream” or Zora Neale Hurston’s celebration of the limitless possibility held within the horizon.  I may play the cynic on the surface, but I’m a total romantic at heart.  I believe in the power of hopes and dreams, the genuineness of wish.

And to me nothing is more naked than a wish exposed.  Nothing is more telling about one’s personality than the revelation of our deepest desires, our real wishes, the things we simultaneously pray for and guard ourselves against hoping too hard for.  What we want is essentially who we are.  Everybody wants something, and these wishes are both our strongest motivators and our most vulnerable places.  We guard our deepest, most precious dreams carefully because to attack someone’s dream is to attack the very notion of hope itself.  And I think it’s this fear that sometimes teaches us to quit hoping, lest we find ourselves disappointed. And I think there is nothing more sad than losing the ability to hope or to be afraid to hope.

So that’s why I love the lanterns.  They are utterly guileless, frank, naked wish on display for the masses in the most vulnerable way possible, a plea to the heavens made in public, an incorruptible, pure dream set afire and floated down a river.  It’s here, amid these lights and lanterns, in the midst of thousands of flickering, floating examples of supplication, that Korea is reminding me about the meaning of the American dream.  

 

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