Park Han-sol reports on Korea's financial regulators, along with fintech and insurance. She previously wrote about the art world, from biennales and exhibitions to fairs and auctions, with a focus on Seoul and the figures shaping the scene. Before joining The Korea Times, she spent a year at ABC News' Seoul bureau, contributing to coverage of major Asia-Pacific events.
Review: Book redefines Korea's urban poor
A waste picker rides on the back of a three-wheeler stacked with folded cardboard boxes in Seoul in this April 3 photo. / Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul
By Park Han-sol
By Park Han-sol
Yoon Young-ja, 75, bustles down to the street market on a hot summer afternoon with a half-filled cart carrying recyclables and folded boxes.
Sweating profusely, she finally makes it to the spot she had her eyes on. As expected, there isn't a lot left to salvage: some boxes, three white 20-liter plastic soy sauce bottles and one 3.3-kilogram ketchup can.
After picking out the items that look the cleanest, she starts wiping down the dirty ones with a rag from her cart. A brown mix of ketchup and soy sauce soon covers her hands.
So Jun-chol's book “Grammar of Poverty” follows Yoon, an elderly waste picker, for an entire day as she does her rounds in her neighborhood to retrieve anything salvageable. Based on his four years of field research from 2015 to 2019, the urban sociologist attempts to redefine the state of urban poverty in Korea through the lives of these aged female scavengers.
“The grammar of poverty has changed. The impoverished in the city are no longer limited to those who reside in shabby shelters lacking any furniture or those who fall asleep in the street, all disheveled,” the author said.
Instead, the author continued, the old waste pickers with a mountain of cardboard and recyclables collected from the streets, a scene that others either ignore, pity or fear, have emerged as another representation of urban poverty.
Bearing the most common name registered in 1945, Yoon Young-ja is a fictitious yet real character. Her story from marriage and motherhood to failure of her children's businesses and their demands for money coincides with the 1997 Asian financial crisis, urban redevelopment and the 2008 financial crisis. Now, she gets by with a meager state pension and money from her job as a waste picker.
She is faceless yet made up of bits and pieces of the real lives of countless senior citizens of her generation.
“Grammar of Poverty” by So Jun-chol / Courtesy of Prunsoop Publishing
As of this year, senior citizens over 65 accounted for 15.7 percent of Korea's population, Statistics Korea reported. But the poverty rate of the elderly in 2017 recorded 43.8 percent, the highest figure among all OECD countries.
As to why there are more female trash pickers than men, So explains that many older women were not able to receive a proper education and had to depend on their partners' wages their whole adult life, often being unable to become breadwinners themselves.
“Destitute elderly women were created by Korean society,” he said. “It set their life goal as supporting their husbands and rearing children without providing these women education or job opportunities.”
By taking a look at the fictionalized life of Yoon, So analyzes Korea's aging society, the ecosystem of the waste and recycling industry, the blind spots in the country's social welfare system for the elderly as well as the physical and psychological dangers they face every day.
In doing so, the book forces readers to face the ideas they dread the most ― poverty and aging ― and asks whether it is possible to escape such a system through individual effort alone.
“The book is not a political statement claiming it is possible to eradicate poverty nor a romantic assertion that poverty should be viewed optimistically. It's only to make visible the path leading to a poverty-stricken life and the inevitably relevant social structure,” So writes in the book's prologue.
“What I am trying to say to the readers is simple. The reason for the elderly waste pickers' lifestyle is not solely their own fault.”