The economic upheaval now racking South Korea is driving an increasing number of parents, many of them newly single fathers, to resort to drastic measures: They are deserting their children. Or worse….

Lee Kye Soo, an unemployed worker facing large debts, showed up at the House of Children last February with his infant daughter, Lee Hye Jung. “If you don’t take her,” he told Chung, who runs the home, “we’ll both have to die.”

The distraught father desperately needed someone to care for Hye Jung until he could return for her–after serving a four-month prison term.

He faced jail because of unpaid debts that he and his girlfriend, the baby’s mother, had racked up while operating a coffee shop that went bankrupt, Lee told Chung. His misery had mounted when, soon after the couple’s baby was born, the mother left and went into hiding from creditors.

Hye Jung was a month old when Lee dropped her off at the small two-bedroom apartment where Chung cares for abandoned children referred by priests and nuns. Every few weeks, Lee called and asked that the phone be held up to Hye Jung so he could hear her gurgle.

Three months after he left the baby, an agitated Lee returned. He desperately missed the child, he explained. He hadn’t gone to prison, he told Chung, and had found a job that he hoped would allow him to pay off the debts and start a new life with the baby. But he was never paid for the work. Now he was planning to take Hye Jung to live with her maternal grandmother while he searched for his girlfriend.

Just before noon that day, Chung bundled the baby up and gave Lee a bottle of warm milk to take along.

As Chung later took out pictures of the baby with dark wisps of hair and a round face, tears welled up in her eyes. “I was very attached to her,” said Chung, who cares for six other children in the orphanage. “I fed her, cuddled her, slept with her.”

The 44-year-old former Roman Catholic nun has been running the unlicensed home for 12 years in a low-income section of the capital. The priests and nuns who refer children also contribute to their upkeep. Since the recession, referrals to such private, unlicensed homes have surged as a spillover from other facilities. The Seoul city government has accepted only about one of every nine applications for its homes; in rejecting most, it usually cites family assets that exceed limits or the availability of other child care options.

Making ends meet has been getting harder for Chung as the recession takes its toll. The local bakery no longer brings day-old cookies or bread, and contributions have shrunk. Among the few furnishings in the threadbare apartment is an old upright piano covered with statues of the Virgin Mary; a broken leg of its stool is propped up by an attached tennis ball.

A rat could be heard rustling in the kitchen as Chung told what happened to Lee and his baby. The call from police came just hours after Lee had retrieved his daughter. They had been found dead in a small hotel nearby. Could Chung come identify them? Crying, she raced to the station. The baby bottle she had prepared, still half full, was there. But she refused to believe what had happened until she saw the infant’s body in the morgue.

According to police records, the father had checked into the Hanyanjang Inn soon after he picked up the baby, explaining to the clerk that he needed the room for the day and maybe the night; he would decide later, when the baby’s mother arrived, he told the clerk.

About 11 p.m., the clerk knocked on the door of Room 211 and got no answer. Inside, he found the two bodies sprawled across a futon on the floor. Lee was face down, blood running from his nose and a puddle of vomit on the floor beside him. The baby was face up, white foam oozing from her mouth. Police later determined that they had drunk hydrochloric acid.

Photos of their bodies and dozens of others fill the pages in the precinct’s blotter these days. Since South Korea’s miracle economy collapsed, suicides have skyrocketed. In the low-income ward where the House of Children is located, which is home to 400,000 people, the casualties have been particularly high. Lee was one of 67 suicides in the first nine months of 1998, a toll that was 40% higher than that in the same period the year before.

The detective who worked the Lees’ case, Kim Seung Kie, sympathizes with the father’s plight. “Though it’s not the right thing to do,” he said, “I can certainly understand not wanting to leave someone behind not knowing what problems she faced and the difficulty she’d have in society.”

Lee left five suicide notes, to each of his parents, a brother, his ex-girlfriend and a friend. One explains his state of mind–the heartbreak of a broken love affair and the unconditional love he felt for his daughter–as he wrestled with his decision.

“I’m too tired, I want to rest,” he wrote. “Every day is a difficult day, it’s too much of a burden. . . .

“My head is bursting, I miss Hye Jung so much. . . . I’m coming to take her; I don’t have the right to take her and this will be a sin and crime, but I’m ready to commit a sin and take the punishment.”

In a long and meandering epistle to his girlfriend, he wrote: “Many a night I stayed up all night crying: our baby, who had to be abandoned as soon as she was born. The hardships and difficulty she would have to bear growing up. . . .

“Even if I am a foolish man, since she’s been alone all the time,” he wrote, “I want to be with her, even in death, so that she feels less lonely.”

“The suicide rate is up more than 30 percent since the crash, with a noticeable shift in its composition, from teen-agers to middle-aged businessmen. Yesterday a man named Lee Myung-Chul, an executive of the Hansol paper company, was dragged in by the Korean police for questioning about his balance sheets. During the session, according to news reports, he tried to kill himself by banging his head against the table. When that failed he stabbed a pair of scissors into his neck. A financial collapse is a tsunami of the soul.”

From The Economist, 12/18/1999:

“In South Korea last year, 20 out of every 100,000 South Koreans aged 60 or over committed suicide. Many blame rapid westernization and reforms introduced as a result of Asia’s downturn.

At noon each day, hundreds of elderly men form a long queue outside Pagoda Park in Seoul. Decades ago this was where freedom fighters opposed to Japanese colonial rule read out a charter of independence. But it is not in reverence of those heroes that the men queue. They go to the park to get a free meal, supplied by charities. Many of the mendicants have no family, no home and no money. Some are so destitute and lonely that they end up killing themselves. The suicide rate among the elderly is rising dramatically.

Last year 20 out of every 100,000 South Koreans aged 60 or over committed suicide, nearly three times the rate of ten years ago. Many blame rapid “westernisation” and reforms introduced as a result of Asia’s financial downturn. In a country of Confucian tradition, Koreans have long regarded filial piety as the source of all virtue. Children, especially the eldest, were expected to support their parents. No longer. Parents, especially those with no money, have become a burden. Some children move out and leave no forwarding address. others have been known to take their parents on visits to remote islands and abandon them there.

The elderly have few places to turn to. The government provides shelters for the homeless who have no relations to fall back on, and gives them some $33 a month. But only 285,000 of the 3.2M people aged over 65 in South Korea are qualified for the programme. if they are ill, their plight is even worse. Nursing-homes are scarce and privately run ones are usually too expensive, even for the middle-class.

As South Korea lost more than 1m jobs last year in its struggle to restructure, the social fabric has suffered more than at any time since the Korean war in the 1950s. Though the economy is now recovering, the strain on Koreans will continue. So will the queues at Pagoda Park.”

Scholarly articles have also noted the incredibly large rise in suicide rates:

“In Korea, the crisis hurt the common people the most: one out of five households had someone unemployed, suicide rates rose by 50%, and homeless people slept outside the subway stations (Park, 1999). Statistics showed that the number of poor people living below the poverty line rose to 7.8% in 1998. Men who were the primary breadwinners for their families left home in shame and embarrassment after they were laid off. They did not get much assistance from the state. As expected, services for homeless people were underdeveloped in Korea. Social tensions rose to a dangerous level. Social security benefits for unemployed people were inadequate. This was attributable to the strong family network in the past three decades (Yoo, 1998). As a consequence, urgent relief for suffering people was much needed. ”

– Tang, Kwong-leung. “Asian crisis, social welfare, and policy responses: Hong Kong and Korea compared”.
The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. 20:5/6 (2000)