Part Two: She says Kim comes home late at night, exhausted, legs aching and hoarse from calling to customers on the street. He's lost a lot of weight, and he can sleep only a few hours a
night from worry. "When I look at him sleeping, I can't help but cry," Moon says. "It's so hard to see someone I love, someone who works so hard and was so successful, in so much pain."
Moon has not told her children the truth; she has said something about Daddy getting ready to start a new business. She is trying to wall them off from the turmoil and worry.
"Every day is a nightmare for me. I'm so scared," says Moon, 39. "I pray to God to give me the strength to overcome this crisis so we can hold on to what we have." Moon knows there are people who have it worse. She visits orphanages and homes for pregnant single women, giving free haircuts to all. She has always done this, and she's trying to keep her life as normal as possible.
Moon grew up in a hard-working home in the South Korean countryside. Her father was an executive at a gold mine, then a carpenter when the mine went bust. When his job changed, the family moved to a cheaper home and neighborhood, giving Moon a taste of shifting fortunes before her teenage years. She moved to Seoul when she was 17. She heard that it was possible to earn money working in factories during the day and study at night. She finished high school that way, and she married Kim 13 years ago.
"Until now, I believed that if I just worked hard I would always get what I wanted," she says. "Look at my hands." She holds them up, showing deep nicks and scrapes and scars on her knuckles from painting the walls of her shop. "I've always worked so hard, and I believed that would always pay off. But now I realize that is not so."
Moon works more hours since the crisis began, but like many small business owners, she no longer can meet her bills; she is behind two months in the rent. Business is off drastically. People are cutting their hair less often, or even doing it themselves. She fears she may have to cut salaries for her four employees - whose monthly wages range from $175 to $575 - but if they leave, business leaves with them, since many customers come because of a favorite stylist. Moon also feeds her employees - all single women - breakfast, lunch and dinner to try to keep them on, but this cost is growing heavier too.
Eun Joo senses her parents' angst. She is the studious one, the one who is too shy to speak to boys but too sharp to miss what is happening around her.
"Her allowance is the same now as it was before, but she doesn't spend it now," Moon says. "She saves it because she is a smart girl and she understands our problems. That is so heartbreaking for me.
"She loves to skate, too, so we used to take her to the ice rink whenever we could. We'd all eat chicken afterward, and it was such a nice family outing. But now it's impossible. She doesn't even ask why we can't go anymore. The fact that she knows hurts me so much, because I know she's hurting inside." Eun Hae shows no signs of pain. She's still the family clown, the class jump-rope and swimming champion, and fearless. Not long ago, when a boy flipped up her skirt at school, Eun Hae chased him up four flights of stairs, pinned him down and pulled down his pants. "He won't do that again," Moon says, laughing through her tears.
She says Eun Hae too senses that things have changed and keeps asking why she can't have chocolate, or new shoes, or other treats they used to have. "She asks why, and I can't explain it to her."
* * *
At his kitchen table, Kim walks through the finances that are squeezing him tighter every day. As he starts, he tries to soothe Eun Hae, who is sulking because she wants to watch television instead of doing her homework. Like many Korean men, Kim never spent much time with his children because he worked such long hours, so he's had to
learn fast. "Okay, okay, you win - watch TV if you like," he says, and he closes the door to her room.
Kim used to earn more than 33 million South Korean won a year as chief salesman for Korea Life Insurance, a large firm in Seoul. Until the crash of the won one year ago, that was nearly $40,000, and it placed him squarely in the middle class in South Korea - especially with profits from his wife's beauty salon added in.
But the company laid off Kim and 75 others at the end of June because of decreasing sales in the sudden recession. Kim received $5,000 in severance pay and was without a job for the first time in his life.
He immediately found out just how fragile his middle-class status was. He had no savings and a pile of debt. As the economy soured late last year, people started canceling their insurance policies to save money, and few were purchasing new ones. So Kim's sales staff started coming up short on their monthly quotas.
But rather than report that bad news to the company, Kim began making up the difference out of his own pocket - a common practice in a country where managers often accept personal responsibility for their employees. Especially in lean times, Kim says, it was his responsibility to keep sales figures on target to prevent layoffs among the salesmen who counted on him.
To make his sales goals, Kim borrowed more than $11,000 from the company and nearly $4,000 more on his credit cards. He put the severance check toward that debt, and he says half of his monthly unemployment benefit goes to debt payments. Late payments on his credit card debt are hit with 30 percent interest penalties, so he must keep paying on time to avoid going further into the hole.
The family is in no danger of losing their apartment because of the South Korean system of chunse, which governs almost all property rentals. Under that system, people pay a large, one-time lump sum to their landlord, who invests it, and the interest income is the monthly rent. Kim paid the equivalent of $35,000 to his landlord three years ago, so he's secure in his home for the time being.
The government has not forgotten the unemployed: President Kim Dae Jung's
administration has pledged about $7.5 billion this year to build a social safety net for the
nearly 2 million workers who have lost jobs in the last year. There used to be just about
nothing to help the unemployed, because there were just about no unemployed. Now,
there are benefits for up to nine months, and the government is putting about 300,000
day laborers to work on public works projects.
The government says growth in new high-tech fields will fire a South Korean
renaissance, and plans to train more than 300,000 workers in computer programming and
other high-tech skills. It promises loans to help entrepreneurs start new ventures. But
at Kim's kitchen table, where beans have replaced meat on the family's dinner plates,
those programs look like something conceived in some academic bubble far from the
realities of the streets.
"Even if I take these courses, would I really be able to get a job when all these
companies are laying people off?" Kim says. "I have plenty of friends who have taken
those courses, and they don't have jobs now."
Kim says he'd love to learn computer skills and better English to help him get a job. But
he says, "Where would the money come from while I'm in classes? We need money
now, so I can't afford to go to school." He says the government is tighter with its
entrepreneurial loans than it lets on, and "somebody like me would never qualify for even
one won."
He says he'd like to emigrate to the United States to work, but he knows no one there
and has no idea how to go about it: "I don't see anything I can do but sell hats."
Lowering his voice further, Kim says he's fighting depression and the urge to just give
up. He says he never used to understand why the unemployed would sleep on the floor
of a subway station, drinking and withering away instead of trying to fight for a job - any
job - to keep their dignity.
"But now I know how they feel," he says. "I realize that if the situation does not allow
them to get a job, it's easy for them to turn to alcohol. It's so depressing. It's impossible
for them to climb out of the hole they're in.
"Sometimes my friends will call and say, 'Let's go out and talk about what's happened
to us,' but I don't feel like it. It just feels like I'm closing myself off from society."
Kim keeps looking toward the room where his daughters are watching television. His
eyes are red and his voice is raspy. He doesn't refill his milk cup. He has been wearing
the same clothes for two days.
* * *
The beauty salon has emptied out and it's after 9 p.m. when Moon finally locks up. It's
Saturday night, time for her weekly grocery shopping. She hops the No. 135 bus for the
15-minute ride home with one of Seoul's daredevil public bus drivers.
When she arrives, she finds her girls laughing and playing in the narrow street in front of
their house. Their cousins, the two daughters of Kim's business-partner
brother-in-law, have come for their monthly visit, and the four girls are kicking a ball
and raising a happy racket in the tiny street.
Moon drops off a couple of plastic packages of rice and seaweed for dinner, just as Kim
arrives home from another day of selling hats: 11 today, not bad at all, considering. After
getting the girls settled with their dinner, Moon walks to the store. Late at night is the
only time she can get away to do the shopping.
At nearly 10:30 p.m., the all-night grocery is fairly empty, so Moon takes her time
poking through the produce. A big red banner that reads "Let's all be healthy to
overcome the IMF crisis" hangs over a dazzling display of dried fish, squid and
six-foot-long plastic bags of dried seaweed. The abbreviation for the International
Monetary Fund has become shorthand for pain in South Korea.
Moon says she used to spend more than $200 a week on groceries, grabbing whatever
she wanted without paying much attention to price, and stocking up on big tubs of ice
cream, all kinds of beef and pork, and lots of other treats for the kids. Now, she tries to
keep it to half that or less.
She turns over six heads of cabbage to check the price tags before finally dropping one
in her basket. She weighs some loose-leaf salad greens on a scale, replaces them and
buys a cheaper bunch. Her basket of food is long on essentials: cabbage for kimchi,
vegetables, eggs, a package of clams and two whole chickens. It fills four small
shopping baskets and must last the family for a week. From the same load, Moon also
will feed her four employees, supplemented with a little convenience-store rice.
At the cash register, Moon peels off eight 10,000-won notes, about $61. It is the price
of 10 haircuts at her shop - it might take her husband weeks to make that much selling
hats. Kim arrives with the car to help his wife get the groceries home. They tease each
other as they load bags into the trunk.
"I really feel bad that you have to stand out on the street all day," Moon says.
"Yeah, but you still bug me for money," Kim says with a laugh.
* * *
The picture in the newspaper is enchanting: children playing and laughing in the tall
grass on a mountainside near Seoul. Moon stares at the big color photo and sets it aside
in the beauty shop. Her family used to take trips all the time to see the mountains or the
sea, to give the girls a sense of nature and beauty, which all great musicians need, she
says. But since Kim lost his job, the family hasn't been farther from home than the
grungy neighborhood park.
So on this beautiful late fall Sunday morning, Moon decides the family needs a break.
Church is the first priority, though, so she and Kim drop the girls at the morning
children's service at their neighborhood church. For an hour, a dozen children listen to
Bible stories and sings songs, accompanied by Eun Joo playing the old upright piano in
the corner.
When the service is over, Kim and Moon arrive at the church door in hiking boots and
old flannel shirts and carrying backpacks filled with boiled chicken, eggs and rice - a
splurge that will set them back, but that doesn't seem to matter today.
Moon and her girls hold hands and skip down the city streets, then bundle together
happily in a corner seat on the subway. Almost an hour later, they arrive at Bukhansan
Mountain, a national park just north of Seoul.
They join the crowds hiking up the steep hillside paths, shedding their heavy shirts as
the sun rises into a perfect blue sky, on a day that smells like leaves. Soon the vast
mountain park absorbs the noisy crowds, and Moon, Kim and the girls find a quiet spot
next to a mountain stream.
They spread their blanket out on a slab of smooth granite and lay out lunch - Moon has
even brought along chocolate bars for her girls, a rare treat in this, the worst year the
family has known. The kids roll up the legs of their overalls and wade into the cold, clear
water. They crouch and dip their faces into the water - they say they're looking for fish
- and they come up dripping and laughing and splashing each other.
"We didn't live a luxurious life, we didn't overspend, we just worked hard and tried to be
honest, and suddenly this has happened," Moon says. "It's so scary. Today is a nice
break for us, because we've been losing the little bit of courage we had."
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company |
