Thread- I have reprinted the article about Kim Eun Joo that Stephen Yeo linked a few weeks back. Normally, I respect copyrights, but I wanted a cyber-record of this article. Three ago, I asked the Washington Post for permission to display this article in cyberspace, on SI specfically. I have not received a response, and the article will not be linked much longer. Therefore, I have copied it. If the Post denies me permission, I will request that this post be deleted.
I've broken the article in two, because I got a server error when I tried to post it in one post.
Larry
S. Korea's Middle Class Hides Its Despair
Fifth in an occasional series
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 22, 1998; Page A1
ANSAN, South Korea - Two men on
bicycles pedal up. Kim Myung Yun hops
up from the curb, takes a deep breath,
pulls his hands out of his pockets and
musters a decent "Kookyunghaseyo!" -
"Please take a look!"
It's almost noon, and there hasn't been a
customer for hours. Kim feels more like a
fire hydrant than a hat vendor, so he's
fidgety when one of the bike men picks up
a New York Yankees cap and checks himself out in the side-view mirror of Kim's car.
"I look good in hats," he says.
"That's because they cover your face," his friend shoots back.
Kim laughs with them and relaxes a bit. Still, for a guy who was a white-collar manager
making $40,000 a year until he was laid off five months ago, in the midst of South
Korea's continuing economic crisis, it's tough to work this hard for a $4 sale.
Hours later, long after dark on a 14-hour workday that started before dawn, Kim packs
up and heads for the hour-long train ride home. He's sold the Yankees cap and one
other all day. Subtracting his train fare, that gives him a profit of 25 cents.
At home late at night, Kim, 39, sits at his kitchen table beneath a tapestry of the Last
Supper on the wall, in the glow of a single neon light overhead, drinking a cup of milk.
His wife won't be home from work for at least another hour. His two young daughters
are doing their homework in their bedroom, so he keeps his voice down.
"I feel guilty when I look at my family," he says, through eyes wet with tears. "A father
has certain responsibilities. A man has certain responsibilities. In my heart I want to
give my wife and my daughters everything, but I can't make anything work out."
* * *
If there is joy in this house, it comes from a violin.
Kim Eun Joo, 12, sets up her purple music stand in the kitchen, in the narrow space
between the refrigerator and the stove. She puts her long black hair up in a ponytail,
tucks her violin tightly under her chin and begins playing it with a bow half as tall as she
is.
Staring hard at the somber Bach piece before her, Eun Joo plays with long, smooth
strokes of the bow, which leaves a dusting of white rosin on her instrument, as though
someone had sprinkled it with confectioner's sugar. The fingers of her left hand tickle
and tweak the violin's neck. Close your eyes and it could be a professional; open them
and see the chipped red nail polish of a young girl's hands.
As music fills this tiny three-room apartment, the first floor of a two-story brick
building in Seoul, her father stares into space through a pile of pots next to the sink. He
seems to know each note of a piece he's heard practiced a thousand times. In a day
spent hawking hats to strangers, this is the only peaceful moment.
Eun Joo finishes, bows deeply and says, "Kamsahamnida" - "Thank you."
"I am so proud of you," her father says, sliding his arm around her waist.
Kim and his wife have refused to give up Eun Joo's violin lessons, which cost about
$460 a month - a sum they really can't afford when they are surviving mainly on a $750
monthly unemployment benefit, which runs out in December.
They already have cut piano lessons for their younger daughter, Eun Hae, 9, whose
tastes run more to sports than symphonies. But Eun Joo shows uncommon promise as a
musician, and her parents refuse to accept - so far, at least - that the nation's
economic crisis might steal her future. They think if it takes that, it has taken
everything.
The family has cut the phone service at home. They want to sell their 10-year-old
Daewoo car, but they would have to pay about $500 in parking tickets first, and that's
probably more than the car is worth.
Kim lost his medical insurance when he lost his job. The family now pays a small
monthly fee for bare-minimum coverage. But when his wife, Moon Mi Ya, recently fell
down some stairs and required stitches on her head and chin, the family had to pay the
$380 in doctor's bills. Still, the music comes first.
"Eun Joo prays to God every night that she can go to the United States to study at a
music college," says Moon. "I don't want to break her heart, but one day I will have to
tell her that she will never be able to do that.
"I can take twice this much pain, but I can't take it when it hurts my children."
This is the pain hidden behind the doors of hundreds of thousands of South Korean
homes as families cope with the country's worst economic crisis in nearly half a
century. Kim and Moon aren't the newly homeless beggars staring back from the covers
of magazines. They aren't the poor driven deeper into poverty by the crisis. It's hard to
tell from the outside that their lives have been shattered. But the pain in this
middle-class home is the ache South Korea will feel long after the economists declare
"recovery" and move on.
For the first time in a year, the stock market is moving upward and foreign investment is
trickling in. But hope is not always comfort, and a spark on the trading floors doesn't
warm Kim's feet on these cold fall mornings. Kim knows the catch: Too many
companies here gave too many people employment for life, so firms are "recovering" by
shedding thousands of middle managers like him. Even the optimistic government says
unemployment will continue to climb to almost 9 percent by next spring - four times
what it was a year ago.
Despite a college education and 14 years' experience in insurance, Kim is considered
too old and too inexperienced in high-tech skills to be attractive to most firms here.
Construction workers can go back to plastering walls and installing plumbing when
South Korea starts growing again. But soft-palmed managers such as Kim, many of
them the first generation in their families to trade rice paddies for an office building, fret
that they could be the most permanent casualty of the Asian financial crisis.
"The more time you have to think, the harder it is," Kim says.
* * *
In Ansan, a suburb of Seoul, rap music pounds from speakers outside the Hot People
clothes boutique. Businessmen with black briefcases stride by in a hurry, and
well-dressed women on their way to the shops clickety-clack past, all avoiding a
glance at Kim, who is sitting on the dirty curb with his head down.
Kim used to be one of them: Sales chief at a big insurance company, he was
management, a suit, a comfortably middle-class provider for his family. But since his
company laid off 76 workers at the end of June, he's ended up here, reading the want ads
next to a noxious sewer manhole, waiting for someone to stop and shop at his "Hat
Department Store."
The "store" is his brother-in-law's car, parked on the sidewalk and covered with green
mesh netting. His hat display hangs on clothespins hooked into the mesh - dozens of
baseball caps, ski hats with pompoms, berets. Each time Kim sells one, he and his
brother-in-law split the $1.50 profit.
Kim says he visited several vendors in Seoul and asked them what sells best. They told
him hats are cheap and sell well, so he and his brother-in-law pooled some money and
bought 100. But the way things are going with hats, it might be time to try something
else - maybe fruit, they think.
"There isn't anything I haven't thought of trying," says Kim, who already has sold shoes
and water filters door-to-door and been rejected by construction foremen because of
his slight stature. "I can't even count how many companies I called and went to. I have
been working for an insurance company for so long, I don't know what else to do. It isn't
like I just want a job where I can wear a suit. I'll take anything."
Kim's situation is so common in South Korea that everyone recognizes it and
sympathizes - sometimes even the police. His hatmobile is parked illegally, and Kim
can't afford the permit required to be a legal sidewalk vendor. On his first day here, he
pleaded his situation to the officers who threatened to tow the car away. They still come
by each day and tell him to move. But he never does, and they never do anything about it.
Today, the police tow a car right across the street, but they never look at Kim.
It's easy to tell the newly unemployed amateurs from the people who have been on the
streets all their life. The guy selling rubber gloves from a cardboard box on the subway,
shouting and laughing and cajoling and charming the housewives with promises of no
more dishpan hands - he's too good at it to be a laid-off accountant or engineer forced
into the streets. But Kim, with his downcast eyes, soft voice and nervous smile - you'd
trust him with your insurance portfolio, but you'd never hire him to run a garage sale.
"At first it was difficult for me to say anything to the people who came by, but I have to
adapt to my new life," he says, shuffling and reshuffling a pile of wool caps on the car's
hood.
The traffic is heavier at lunchtime in Ansan Square. A couple of people stop to look at
Kim's hats, but nobody buys. His feet hurt. He can't stop thinking about his children.
The sewer manhole smells especially bad today, so at least he's not hungry. But the
questions nag. What happens next? How bad can things really get?
He admits he has no plan for when the unemployment checks stop around Christmas. He
knows his prospects of finding work are no better than hundreds of thousands of other
guys looking for jobs. He feels too "emotionally unstable" to think about it much.
"The reality now is so tough," he says, "I don't even want to think about one year from
now."
* * *
Moon Mi Ya named her beauty salon
"Noel," because her father told her it
evoked Christmas and peace in English.
But the place is far from a Silent Night.
It's one brightly lit room up two flights of
rickety stairs in the middle of noisy Seoul.
The place has the sharp, chemical smell of
hair being dyed, dried and gooped. Moon's
four employees are busy clipping and
brushing and perming, and snippings of
hair pile up like black pillow down at their
feet. Loud pop music - a silly old tune
called "One Night in Bangkok" - blares
from a boombox and mixes badly with the whiny drone of blow-dryers.
Once a week Moon gets up before dawn to hand out fliers at the subway station. She
hates doing it, but it works: The six chairs are filled with yuppie men in blue suits and
white shirts having their brush cuts shortened and working women having their hair
straightened.
Amid all the clatter, Moon sits at a table covered with hair-care products and glamour
magazines. As soon as she starts talking, the words and the tears come fast, and they
won't stop, until she's 20 Kleenexes into the box.
"Thirty-nine is an age when you should be working. My husband was the chief
salesman. He was the flower of the company, then it was all taken away from him in one
day.
"My husband feels guilty and so sorry. He keeps saying 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' But it's
worse when we feel sorry for him."
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