South Korea’s ‘seal men’ suffer in downturn

Kim Young-bae spends his days with his nose inches from the pavement. The only things lower are the cigarette butts and the sewer grates.

Lying on his stomach, he uses his knuckles and elbows to drag himself along, his torso resting atop a padded cart. He wraps his useless legs, long ago withered by polio, in a swath of black rubber inner-tubing that gives him the appearance of being half-seal and half-man.

Clinging precariously to the lowest rung of the country’s economic ladder, Kim is one of the seal men of Seoul.

As the crowds surge along the city’s Gangnam business district, Kim is there, purposefully in the way. He parts the pedestrian flow; people nearly trip over his shriveled body.

Women in high heels step past without looking. A few foreign tourists turn to gawk, but they too keep moving.

Kim, 55, keeps his head low, refusing to look up or make eye contact. On a small cart ahead of him, he pushes the tinny sound system he uses to broadcast his music. Kim prefers classical.

There is also his red plastic dish for donations, which on this Friday afternoon contains four 100-won coins -- worth about 30 cents.

Kim and half a dozen other seal men claim turf throughout Seoul’s busiest pedestrian walkways. Given a meager monthly allotment by the country’s social welfare system, they take their chances on the street.

In a nation that prides itself on its wide social safety net, the seal men are a reminder of the harshest effects of the global financial crisis. Although they have been on the streets for years, they are suffering like never before.

“In South Korea, the middle-aged housewives keep control of the family money,” Kim says. “They’re the ones who used to donate most, but I don’t see many of them these days. Maybe they don’t have cash to shop for clothes and nice things. But things are bad for me.”

Kim doesn’t crawl in his “off” hours. He can walk fitfully with crutches. He lives in a first-floor apartment on the outskirts of Seoul. At 7 a.m. each day, before the morning rush, a disabled friend who can drive drops Kim off at his chosen spot.

He spends the next 10 hours in a rough-hewn horizontal world.

“I know I look pathetic,” he says. “But if I used my crutches, nobody would give me money.”

Kim grew up on a farm in Gangwon province, the oldest of three children. He contracted polio before he learned to walk, so he doesn’t miss what he’s never been able to do, he says.

His father died shortly thereafter, and Kim left farm life when he was 23, feeling like a burden to his mother.

In 1988, during the Seoul Olympics, he arrived in the capital to fail at a series of menial jobs.

Then he spotted his first seal man. “I thought, ‘Why is he doing that, crawling along the ground like an animal? It’s so demeaning.’ ”

But he needed the money. So Kim asked a disabled man to set him up with the seal man essentials: the padded cart, the gloves, old clothes and elbow pads.

He learned how to attract attention and fight boredom by hooking a music system up to a car battery. He cut up truck tire inner tubes to fit his tiny frame and protect his legs from blisters.

In 20 years, he has met a cadre of other seal men. They have a special camaraderie, rarely fighting over turf. He’s seen the old-timers, their knuckles bruised and bleeding underneath their impossibly soiled gloves.

He’s seen kindness and cruelty. People who look little better off than him reach deep into their pockets for a few coins. Mean-spirited teens kick him and steal his money.

Good days once brought about $20. But last fall, the coins slowed. Now he can spend an entire day on his cart and get less than $5.

“I see people who want to give me money but can’t,” he says.

Often, he swears he’ll quit. Waking up, he can’t bear the thought of another day on the ground: Push the cart ahead, pull yourself forward. Repeat a thousand times.

“But I have no choice,” he says. “There is nothing else I can do.”

The South Korean Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs offers free healthcare and monthly payments of $360 to people such as Kim who were disabled by polio and live on their own.

Officials acknowledge that struggling consumers are less likely to offer handouts to the seal men, many of whom stubbornly forsake job programs to remain on the dole.

There are job programs. “However, there might be some of them who think that begging makes more money than working,” an agency official, who asked not to be named, says of the disabled.

But the seal men’s work is hard. The Internet is full of rumors that they are run by organized crime. Some people call the men scam artists, pretending to be disabled to prey on public sympathy.

“The fake guys victimize the real disabled,” says Choi Jun-young, one of the principals behind a new magazine on South Korean homelessness. “These men on the ground, it’s almost impossible for them to survive just by begging. They have to find a way to get attention.”

Kang Nan-won, a trading company manager, says people who ignore the disabled should be ashamed.

“I feel sorry for him,” he says of Kim. “What’s 1,000 won? It’s less than a dollar. Not much.”

Yet he walks away without dropping anything into Kim’s basket.

Kim seems a man of contradictions: He smiles easily, but his dark eyes are etched with sadness. On this day, he wears a black-and-gray hat with a skull-and-crossbones design, its brim turned jauntily upward.

He moves along snail-like, a few feet an hour, peeking up now and then to avoid head-on collisions.

Eventually, an old woman drops a few coins into the plastic tray. Then a man adds a 1,000-won note, worth about 75 cents.

Kim waits until they’re gone, and then scoops out the money.

He needs all the handouts he can get. Unable to cook, he buys his meals ready-made. He lives alone. Though he has fallen in love a few times, he never married.

“Who would have me?” he says, quickly adding that it’s not so much his deformity as his independence that chases women away: He likes to be left alone with his music and books on the economy.

“I’m sort of a loner,” he says.

Covered with grime, he doesn’t get philosophical about how he makes his living. He’s not ashamed -- he may not have much, but he has his pride.

“Look at politicians -- many are dishonest, yet they make good money,” he says. “Why should I be ashamed? I don’t harm anyone.”

Hours later, the salary workers have gone home and the streets are crowded with young people launching into the night.

The light is shadowy, but the seal man is still there, on the street, more invisible than ever.

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john.glionna@latimes.com

Ju-min Park of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.