Chuseok at the Orphanage

Bill in a traditional Korean hanbok — green jacket, white trousers — at Hwarang Children's Home during Chuseok, 1985.

Chuseok is the Korean harvest holiday — the lunar calendar's equivalent of Thanksgiving, one of the most important family gatherings of the year. A time when Koreans return home, honor ancestors, share food, and give thanks.

Bill put on the hanbok to observe the occasion. He was at an orphanage full of children without families, on the holiday most defined by family, dressed in their traditional clothes.

The grin says he knows exactly how he looks. What it doesn't quite show is what it meant to be there — fully present, fully participating, belonging to a country that had become his own.