General Society: Society: News: Hankyoreh

Beomcheol Kwon [email protected]

“If you have time, can you listen to me for a second?” Two years ago, I met a familiar face in a strange city in Northern Europe. Local reporter L, who came to cover the International Book Fair, took out a thick envelope from his bag after the interview. Inside it was a document that had been smeared by hand, which seemed to be decades old. L introduced himself as an adoptee from Korea. He couldn’t read Korean, so he wanted to know what kind of words were in this document he had come to a foreign country with, so he came out with an envelope to meet Korean picture book writers. As soon as I opened the file folder, what caught my eye was the name of the baby who pressed the ballpoint pen with shaking strokes. In this order. I often see these writings. The three letters written by the grandmothers writing down one leek and one abandonment of cabbage showed that L was called in this order until leaving Korea. He was not even stoned, and he said that in 1981 he was left with a note with his name on it. I had to tilt my head. It is not common to give babies born in the 80s the name’Jeon Soon Lee’. I recalled the possibility that a grandmother would have written her name instead of the baby. When I imagined the grandmother putting a note in her arms and laying the baby down, it was grim. In the meantime, L repeated aloud’i, dot, order’ as if he would remember how to read. The place of birth was written as’Chunggeum-dong’. When I searched it, it came out that it was a place name called Chungjang-ro and Geumnam-ro in Gwangju. So, Lee Sang-soon-L was born in 1980 and the place is Gwangju. Feeling distant, I read the words written on the papers. Records indicate that the baby’s mother was in a state of being unable to raise because of sudden mental difficulties, and the father was unknown. I don’t know what happened to a baby born in Gwangju in May 1980, but he came to the northern country like that. Lee Sang-soon-L asked what kind of neighborhood Chunggeum-dong is, and whether it is a very difficult place to eat and live so that it is impossible to raise babies. When you were born, you said that Gwangju was going through a terrible time, and he nodded with a dark expression. He replied that he knew the pain of the city of Gwangju, and that he had read the English version of the writer Han River. However, I soon realized to Lee Sang-soon-L that no words could explain why the Republic of Korea sent you to another country. After being silent for a long time, he asked me why no one could raise me together. Young Lee Sang-soon-L could not understand that the country that held such a splendid festival while watching the 88 Olympics on TV had sent herself to here because it could not raise a single baby. He asked us if there was no parenting community. It was the work of the state at that time that encouraged abandonment of parenting, not a community of parenting. Children are the first to be sacrificed in the tragedy. According to statistics from the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Korea’s overseas adoption in the 1980s reached its peak. When the government sent more than 1% of the children born and more than 8,000 children per year to other countries, the cause was’immigration activation and private diplomacy’. It became a means for children before taking steps to collect foreign currency in the name of’private diplomacy’. At that time, adoption agencies received $5,000 per child from adoptive parents, and it is estimated that about $44.18 million came into Korea in 1985, when 8837 people were adopted overseas.

Kim Ji-eun (Children and Youth Literature Critic, Professor, Seoul National University of Arts)

From the first week of the new year, our society was filled with grief in commemoration of a child who could not survive. As important as revealing the reality of death is to rescue children in blind spots. With the increase in family education due to Corona 19, the likelihood of children being neglected for abuse has increased. Nothing brings the future of the community to despair more than the misery of children. Caldercutt’s 1879 picture book deals with a true story about a child named Thomas D. Gray at Greston Hall, Norfolk, England in 1560. Seven-year-old Thomas and his younger sister lose their parents and are adopted by their uncle, but after a few years they are thrown into the forest due to unknown disease and hunger, and die. The two children laugh and chatter with people who will soon take their lives on the way to the forest, not knowing that they will be abandoned. Thomas’ uncle killed the brothers and sisters in order to monopolize the inheritance that the children inherited. Weylandwood, the place where brothers and sisters died at the time, has since been referred to as’wailing wood’. It is said that after the incident, the people of Greaseton Hall took two children in the woods and hung them on wooden boards as lessons. It was written in a book to make sure that this would never happen again without forgetting the mistakes of adults who could not protect their neighbor’s children. How can I make a child unhappy? Children are humans, and humans can never be happy in a society where they use themselves as tools and throw them away. Last year alone, digital sexual exploitation criminals such as the N-Bun Room and Doctor’s Room made money by opening a nursery, while chat app users bought and sold the bodies and personalities of girls. The birth policy mechanically converts the amount of subsidy per child or the number of apartment subscriptions, and rewards them as if they were patronizing. Not long ago, a case where a multi-child man and a multi-child woman got married under the guise of getting an additional point and won an apartment is an example of how children became a currency item. Children in the media in the non-face-to-face era are loved only through’views’ and’likes’ only when they are exhibited in a way that gives pleasure to adults. People bother near children and only like images of children far away. Images of children processed in the direction of satisfying the desires of adults are sold with fire. And children who stay only at home with Corona 19 grow up and are used as tools while thinking of such a tooled image as a role model. There is no community of nurturing, and’sadly crying forests’ are everywhere. How can I make children happy? In the May 1956 issue of’Are Korean Children Happy?’, author Ma Hae-song published an article entitled’What Do Children Ask for?’ In this article, the children ask for a place to play to their heart’s content. “Where are we surprised at the beginning? When I play in the room, I am amazed and scolded, and if I play on the floor, I am scolded. . If you go up on the roof, it’s a thunderbolt, and if you go into the ground and play, how much moisture is there? How do you feel free to play?” Even children in the non-face-to-face era, who couldn’t go to the field trip once, would ask for a place to play when asked what they desperately. A year of their precious growth has passed, with places to play closed or forbidden. The above special feature says, “I’m soaked in the convention of thinking of original children insignificant, but is there a place where I can’t see happiness like Korean children do?” In 2021, Korea’s economic power has grown higher than then, surpassing the national income of the seven major countries (G7), but among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, the happiness index of our children is the lowest. To make these precious children grow up well and live healthy before it is too late, we need to build a social safety net and a nurturing community. Not a single person is another’s baby. All of them are our babies. We need to create a forest that smiles brightly, not a forest that weeps sadly.