Heartache Engulfing Korean Fathers

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.

Applications for admission to orphanages here in the capital surged nearly fourfold in the past year, according to the city’s youth and juvenile welfare division. About 7,000 parents applied through official channels; others simply dropped off their children and vanished, or took them to private facilities.

Things have grown so bad that social welfare agencies mobilized a “Do Not Abandon Your Family” campaign--a startling concept in this Confucian society where kinship is a supreme virtue.

With the official jobless ranks swelling past 1.8 million--more than 7.3% of the work force, up from 2.7% before the economy crashed in late 1997--desperation is mounting as some parents lose their homes, livelihoods and hope. Few shelters exist here for homeless families, and foster care for children is rare.

The massive layoffs have increased the number of divorces--up 20% in 1998 compared with the previous year, which also saw a double-digit climb--and have altered family dynamics. Mothers are leaving the family fold in unprecedented numbers, says Kwak Bae Hee, vice president of the Korea Legal Aid Center for Family Relations in Seoul. Some are going because tradition-bound husbands refuse to let them work, even if the men are jobless, she said; others leave to find jobs outside the capital.

Men automatically gain custody of their children unless mothers file legal challenges. As a consequence, several social welfare officials and orphanage directors said, it is newly single fathers who are most often leaving their children at orphanages, which house more abandoned children than they do those without parents.

Few of the fathers agree to give up their children for adoption. Instead, they promise to visit and to retrieve their children, as only the parent who signs in a child can do, when things improve. But about four out of five never visit, directors of several orphanages say.

“They feel if they cannot give the child anything or contribute materially to his upkeep, they shouldn’t come,” said Chung Soon Ran, who cares for several abandoned youngsters at the House of Children orphanage here.

The stories of two fathers, Lee Kye Soo and Choi Sok Koo, illustrate the depth of the problem. Both did strive to keep their promises. Each appears to have deeply loved his child and struggled with thoughts of suicide over the issue of giving up his son or daughter, if only temporarily. Ultimately, one man chose death and the other life.

Lee Kye Soo: Burdened by Debt

Lee, 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.

A Hotel Room as Last Refuge

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.”

Choi Sok Koo: Year of Losses

When Choi dropped off his 6-year-old son, Choi Jin Yung, at the Angels’ Haven orphanage last March, it wasn’t the boy who cried.

For Choi, a good-looking, stylishly dressed 35-year-old with bushy black eyebrows and a cell phone in his pocket, giving up custody of his son capped a year in which much of what mattered to him had disappeared. His 30-year-old wife died in May 1997 after a two-year battle with heart disease, forcing him to leave Jin Yung with the boy’s aunts and uncles in Seoul while he traveled to jobs across the countryside. Then the economy collapsed, almost killing his once-thriving elevator repair firm.

About the same time, Choi’s brother and sister began to complain about the burden of caring for Jin Yung while their own families were struggling. Shuttling his son from place to place wasn’t healthy, Choi concluded, and he decided that Jin Yung would be better off in a more stable environment. Choi applied to the city government to place the child in an orphanage while he got back on his feet.

Once government approval came, Jin Yung, with long black eyelashes, dark eyes and a maturity well beyond his years, seemed to understand his father’s predicament. He scolded Choi for his tears. The boy’s stoicism wounded his father even more. “My heart ached that his pride was hurt, even though he didn’t show it,” Choi said.

The boy’s response wasn’t entirely a surprise. When Jin Yung’s mother was bedridden, the boy had helped out by washing socks and dishes. “I can do everything except cook,” he told his dad then. Jin Yung had not even cried when his mother died. He seemed to understand that she was out of her pain, his father said recently, speaking meekly while chain-smoking over a cup of coffee.

After he left his child at the sprawling Angels’ Haven, Choi said, his feelings of failure and pain were nearly unbearable. He recalled bitterly resenting his siblings for not helping more. And being angry at the world. As he drove home, for the first time he thought seriously about killing himself, an act he would have once considered cowardly.

“I had the strong urge to just drive on blindly and crash,” he said.

But love and a feeling of responsibility for Jin Yung stopped him. “I thought about my son’s life, which would become even more miserable without me. To him, I would be everything, his only hope.”

Accommodating to Separate Lives

Now he calls his son daily and tries to visit every Saturday, commuting 90 minutes each way. Asked what he misses most about his son, Choi mused: “No one thing in particular. I just want to be with him all the time.”

Jin Yung seems well adjusted and happy at Angels’ Haven, which is about as cheery as an institution can be. He and 13 other children age 6 and younger share a two-bedroom suite, with a living room, bathroom and small kitchen, where they have a live-in caretaker. The orphanage cares for 44 healthy and 110 handicapped children.

Jin Yung said he doesn’t want to go home: “I like it here--there are lots of books.” Does he wish his father was here? He looked down and nodded his head yes, playing with a loose tooth.

Choi’s goal is to get a small apartment for himself and his son by the time Jin Yung starts first grade in March. The odds against that are mounting, however, since he hasn’t worked in months. And nowadays, getting paid is even more difficult than finding work: He risks losing money on new contracts. Several times, companies whose elevators he has repaired have gone bankrupt before paying him, while Choi has still had to pay wages to his small crew.

“There’s no sign that things are getting better,” Choi said. “I don’t know if this is the bottom or we’re still going down.”

His son gives him hope and inspires him not to give up. “Without him, I would be very aimless,” he said. “Without him, I may have been a different person.”

Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.