Seoulscapade

We found our pet rabbit, Panda, on the edge of a forested area of Seoul National University campus. How did it get there? Well, someone probably left her—I mean, dumped her in the area. For Koreans in Seoul, it’s a common practice, when animals have outlived their usefulness, to head for one of mountainous spots around the city and leave their pets there. I don’t think it dawns on many people that a domesticated animal may have no idea about how to find food. But that’s a whole other issue.

I remember one night in the back of a taxi, heading home around midnight from a drunken evening, we were half way through a tunnel, the traffic was bumper to bumper but moving fast, and I saw right in the middle cowering on a ledge, a huge hairy dog. No one was stopping. No one could. The tunnel had no emergency lane, it was just two lanes of bumper to bumper traffic with people no doubt wanting to get home. I alerted everyone about the dog, the people I was with in the taxi, but no one had seen it. We’d been moving too fast.

I wonder what the fate of the dog was, cowering there on a ledge in the middle of a tunnel, breathing in fumes, surrounded by loud traffic noise, and completely lost. It may have ended up killed and cooked and eaten, as happens in Korea still. Maybe someone was able to stop later and rescue it. I’ll never know. But I suspect it got there by being abandoned. I’m not saying it’s the solution all Koreans opt for when they can’t be bothered with an animal any more. Many use the Internet to advertise. But abandoning animals does seem pretty common, not that many people/families in Western societies are from the guilt of such behavior. But that’s a whole other issue.

These are other issues aside from what I really want to note down here, but they are not unrelated. In earlier times in Korea, there was a practice of abandoning old people in the mountains. This was when the old people had become too infirm or demented or whatever—just too much to handle. They were taken into the mountains and left there. Everyone knew they would eventually die, but no one would have to see it. Plus I guess guilt was assuaged by the thought that, well, in the mountains you have a fighting chance if you make a go of it amongst nature. Yes, it’s all very natural, and so a natural way to go—perhaps that’s how it was rationalized.

The thing is, this practice did not really die out in Korea, and in my view, I think we may see an increase of it in the coming years. Why? Well, I’ll explain that by quoting something one of my Korean coworkers never misses an opportunity to say when talking about the rapid changes Korea has undergone, the generation gap, family life, and so on. It refers to her generation, to those a little older than myself and to those of my age, and it goes like this: “We are the last generation to serve our parents and the first to be abandoned by our children.” It’s perhaps not that clear cut but I guess you could say the scales have dipped more to the abandon side.

Here are a couple of stories I heard recently that illustrate the phenomenon of abandoning old people in Korea today. An old woman was found wandering the streets apparently lost. The police tried to find out who she was but the woman didn’t know. She also didn’t know how to get home or even where she lived. A cell phone number was found and police rang that but it was never answered. Eventually, somehow, one of her sons was located. It was discovered by police that the woman was kind of abandoned by default. She had been in the street somewhere with her sons and, I think, a daughter, who were all arguing over who should look after her. None of them wanted to. Each one insisted the other should do it. Eventually, they abandoned their arguments in frustration and left, each thinking one of their siblings would take care of Mum. Old Mum, however, ended up with no one and alone in the street.

In Korea, the first son gets shouldered with all of the responsibilities and weight of family matters. But apparently, a first son told a second son that it was his turn to look after their parents. The second son reluctantly took them in. It seems that he was fairly well off and lived in a good area. However, the parents were a burden, and what’s more, they smelled. Eventually, it transpired that the son and perhaps his family went off somewhere, perhaps on vacation, leaving the parents alone. The son also left the balcony doors open to prevent the house from smelling because of the old folks. The only catch with this is that it was winter. Now, on top of that, the old parents were pretty much disabled in terms of movement. Apparently, they survived on noodles until their situation was uncovered by the buildings guard. By then the effects of the cold had caused infections of some kind. The upshot is the the father died. At the moment, I think the government is considering legal action.

What can be causing this to happen? Korean culture has rapidly modernized over the last few decades and with that traditional values have been crumbling away. That might be part of why it’s happening. Economic circumstances might be another. Just plain bad sons and daughters might be yet another. Whatever the cause, authorities are certainly not ignoring the phenomenon. It’s in the public eye, too. I recently saw a documentary on lost old people on TV. And another side to it is that old people do genuinely become lost, and some are never found much to the distress of their loved ones.

But is abandoning something so easily when it becomes inconvenient peculiar to Koreans? That’s a difficult and touchy subject to broach. The fate of the elderly here probably is not that different from in the West—the same things are done in different ways, I suppose, although outright abandonment is much less likely. It does seem more prevalent here. Then is it a cultural trait of some kind? I’ll say probably not, although I can’t help being reminded that for many years South Korea was the world’s adoption capital (perhaps it still is, I haven’t checked). It had more abandoned, I mean, orphaned kids than anywhere in the world. I say probably not, but it makes me wonder when these kinds of thing add up. That’s enough questions for now, boys and girls—sons and daughters.