THE SEOUL GAMES / DAY 14 : The View From Hard-Luck Hill : In a Land Where Image Is Everything, Even the Poor and Downtrodden Feel a Need to Support the Games

An old man is lying in the gutter, sound asleep, oblivious to the Olympics that have enraptured South Korea.

His forehead is scraped raw, as if from a recent fall, and his shoes are his pillow. It’s likely he’s snoozing off an afternoon of soju , a cheap and potent distilled liquor.

The man’s shirt and pants are freshly cleaned and pressed. Even in the slums, Koreans take pride in their appearance.

The neighborhood, however, is densely packed with tiny, charmless concrete houses--the only elbow room afforded by lots on which about a third of the houses have been sledge-hammered into heaps of rubble to make way for a planned apartment development.

Those who remain, renters with no place else to go, hope to keep their homes at least through the winter. Can these people possibly care about pole vaulting and table tennis?

The Olympics have given a giant boost to South Korea’s global standing, but what impact has this lavish and expensive party had on the down and out?

It’s easy to gauge the mood in the modern mid-city. Hop in any taxi and the driver will have his radio tuned to play-by-play. In every shop, clerks and customers conduct their business with one eye on a TV set. During the opening ceremony, streets throughout the city of 10 million people were deserted by pedestrians and motor vehicles as nearly everybody stopped normal daily life to watch the spectacle unfolding on television.

But what about Seoul’s slums? Could the city’s downtrodden be wrapped up in the growing controversy over American athletes’ behavior and NBC’s coverage of the Games?

Shinrim-dong precinct, a predominantly middle-class neighborhood, is about 15 miles from the middle of the city, but the precinct’s 10th sub-district is perched on a hillside so steep that no one but the poor would live here. From the top of the hill, the domed National Assembly building is visible on the horizon and the 63-story Daehan Life Insurance Building, tallest in South Korea, glows in the sunset like a pretty postcard. This is gloom with a view.

Electricity is available and, for a short period each morning and evening, so is running water. Many homes have large plastic barrels to store the water for use during the day. Women squat outside to do the family laundry over washtubs, scrubbing the clothes on washboards.

There is almost no litter, graffiti, garbage piles or similar trademarks of American ghettos. But aside from the location, Shinrim-10, as the sub-district is usually called, is a drab and depressed neighborhood, with no outward sign of Olympic festivity.

Here, there are no posters or paintings of Hodori, the Olympic tiger mascot. There are, however, banners stretched above the 8-foot wide street, with red and blue Hangul letters that read: “We can’t live on the street. Don’t force us out!”

Residents need more compensation to find other homes than the city government is offering, explains Hwang Jung Nam, a 39-year-old part-time construction worker who lives with his wife and three children in a two-room home the size of a one-car garage.

“Obviously we will get nothing from the Olympics,” Hwang says. “Nevertheless, we want the Olympics to be successful, because we have invested so much, as a nation. If it ends in failure, we have so much to lose.”

Hwang also shares the national pride--and resentment against the United States--that is increasingly visible elsewhere in Seoul.

He watched the opening ceremony--”Far better than those of Los Angeles or Moscow,” he boasts. And he watches the Games daily, often with friends, drinking soju and eating meat “because it’s the Chusok (Fall Moon Festival) season.”

“But pork, mind you--not imported American beef,” he adds in a reference to pressure from the United States on South Korea to open up its market to unrestricted imports of beef and other American farm products.

South Koreans consider the demands unfair to poor farmers struggling to make a living on tiny plots of land no bigger than an average American barn.

Hwang turns the questioning around to ask about the two American gold medal-winning swimmers who walked out of a hotel discotheque with a $900 decorative mask and were arrested during a night of celebration. He notes that NBC reported the incident perfunctorily but gave intensive coverage to five South Korean boxing officials who were suspended after attacking a New Zealand referee after a controversial boxing bout.

“Is it OK for Americans to steal something for fun but wrong for Koreans to protest out of sincerity?” Hwang asks.

“The (Korean) boxers all did their best and have sportsmanship,” he says. “It was the referee who was lacking the qualifications.”

Shinrim-10 is hard-luck hill, a thousand sad stories. Mrs. Moon Bong Re, a 55-year-old mother of five with a mouthful of silver teeth, is coming home from the market. She stops to tell us how her husband, a Korean War veteran who still suffers from his war wounds, lost his official army papers in a fire and can’t collect government compensation. What little money they have goes to hospital bills.

“It is hopeless,” she says.

Still, every evening Moon and three of her children watch the Olympics on TV.

“I don’t know much about sports, but the children enjoy it,” she says, adding, “I am proud that Korea is hosting the Olympics.”

She is interrupted by a man in a purple sweat suit, charging down the hill, obviously angry. He shouts and waves his arms.

“Why are you here?” he demands. “Why do you come into our neighborhood? What does the world care about us?”

He is disturbed, the interpreter explains, that news of Shinrim-10 will give South Korea a bad image overseas.

But a moment later, two men stagger out of a renters’ meeting hall, welcome the visitors warmly and invite them to join them in some soju.

As the visitors trudge up the hill, dozens of small children tag along playfully, laughing and chattering, eating candy and ice cream treats. Puppies trail the procession. One little girl caresses a cat in her arms.

Poverty hasn’t broken the spirit of the children here.

There are no yards or play areas, only an occasional tiny garden. A dirt lot with two trampolines, on which about a dozen children are jumping happily, serves as the only playground at the foot of the hill. Virtually every child is dressed in neat, clean clothes. Some wear shirts featuring Mickey Mouse and Popeye.

The children attend a huge, modern school at the bottom of the ravine, a beautiful building standing in stark contrast to the squalor of the hill.

A 12-year-old girl, Kim Mung Jung, and two of her classmates have volunteered as tour guides, accepting ice cream cones as their pay. Mung Jung introduces us to her grandmother, 70-year-old Park Jom I, one of the few inhabitants of Shinrim-10 who have actually attended an Olympic event. She was one of three residents chosen by the ward chief to receive a free ticket for the opening ceremony.

Few here have the time or money to actually attend an event.

“The Olympics have made me realize the distance between the haves and the have-nots,” says Lee Yong Sun, a 17-year-old high school student. “Tickets are too expensive, so we get the feeling of being isolated. It’s a monopoly for people with money.”

But a blanket criticism of the Games, even here in Shinrim-10, is out of character for the balance-and-harmony South Koreans. Yong Sun admits that he does watch the Games on TV, and that he enjoys them.

In a tiny drugstore at the bottom of the hill, a woman and her son are watching the judo competition on TV. The druggist, 49-year-old Mrs. Yoon Tae Yun, says she watches the Games every day, all day long, and she is more than willing to offer several cultural and athletic observations.

“I am a typical Korean,” she says for openers. “I don’t like Americans too much.”

Yet she speaks cheerfully and at length. She explains why South Koreans do poorly in the sprints.

“It is the Korean mind,” she says. “Under Confucianist teaching, we are told not to run, but to walk, whenever we can--not to show our heels to heaven.”

Although South Korea’s national sport, taekwondo, was added to the schedule here as a demonstration sport, the events in which South Koreans are winning medals--judo and wrestling--are cited by her and others as their favorites.

Yoon’s hero is Kim Young Nam, a gold medal-winning Greco-Roman wrestler who showed great respect to his grandmother after winning.

Her unfavorite?

“I don’t like Carl Lewis asking for 150 special bodyguards.”

Yoon also brings up the arrest of the U.S. swimmers.

“I would say it was some kind of divine act, because of the boxing incident,” she says. “Justice was done. They (NBC commentators) abused their right in reporting the boxing incident. When Korea was poor, there were people who stole food who were pardoned because they needed food to survive. But the Americans stole for fun.”

She has three Olympic thoughts:

--She hopes that all visitors leave South Korea “with a good opinion of our proud culture, our 5,000-year history, the warm hearts of the people.”

--”North Korea is also part of Korea. They should have joined us in hosting the Olympics.”

--She wishes to express her contempt to any athletes (referring to Americans) who went to Japan for training. “That is an insult. The Olympics are being held here. They should have come here.”

Down the street, in a tiny sundries shop with soccer balls and basketballs hanging in the front window, high school senior Cho Won Hyung, 18, minds the store while watching the Games on TV. Sales of sporting goods, he says, have risen during the Olympics.

His Olympics hero is Korean judo star Ahn Byung Keun.

“But I also like Carl Lewis,” Cho says. “He’s fast and he has great showmanship.”

He says his favorite sport is basketball. Asked his favorite player, Cho smiles and replies “Jabbar.”