Rubbernecking in South Korea: April 2007

I've been trying, off and on, for quite a bit of my stay here to find out information on the suicide problem gripping this country. I first heard about the seriousness of suicide in this country very early after my arrival here. It's always in the news, though in a language foreign to mine. Every other day, it seems, there is a funeral on TV, which I am later to find out at work from a colleague that it was a person who committed suicide. And not just any person, but a celebrity who has committed suicide, and is therefore being adorned the attention of the news media.

However, information of this kind is hard to come by, which is the reason for my long overdue thoughts on this topic. Its something that is just not to be talked about in Korean culture, much like the practice of eating dogs. Koreans are very conscious of their image in the international community, and don't appreciate criticism.

Whereas it is likely there are many studies in Korean being taken on this topic, there is not much in English, and so I cannot speak on this through the evidence I was looking for. It has been, however, a topic of great interest to me, so I would bring it up whenever I felt it was no longer an offensive thing to talk about when meeting a new person here. For some reason, this seems to be the best way of looking into the problem. And so this is information I've encountered from conversations with regular people in Korea, who are not experts in the field and who have likely not studied the suicide problem in their country. Rather, this is the general feeling of what's going on here, through the stuff these people may have read in the newspapers or have dealt with throughout their lives. So there may be some debatable information to follow here, but I'm not making it up, at any rate.

Suicide is a major problem in this country. There is a very high suicide rate. The celebrities that I mentioned earlier created a wave of suicides among the younger generations in this country. I read that it led to a myriad of websites promoting preferred methods of suicide. There has been either 5 or 6 Korean celebrities kill themselves just since I arrived here in November. And the kids around age 16-19, just before entrance to university, had a spike in their rate of suicide.

In Korea, a high school accepts students much like a university. Its based on grades and entrance exam scores. There is an entrance exam that the students study and study and study for. They cram as much as they can into their under-matured teenage brains. Because its just as important in Korea, what high school you attend as the university you attend. Many young students feel their academic lives may be over before they're finished high school as a result of not attending the right school. Many universities here only accept students from certain universities. As a result, right around the time of entrance exams, there is a wave of suicide and suicide attempts. There's another one corresponding to the time when the results of these exams are released. And yet another one when students find out what universities and high schools they've been admitted to. All in all, it seems students are at the highest risk to commit suicide in the country.

Korean parents seem to put an incredible amount of pressure on their children to become highly respected members of society. I teach at a private academy where students come to learn English after school. This is something that's added to their mandatory English classes they receive in school. I have to give them a arm full of homework because the academy demands it. The academy demands it because the parents demand it, and if you don't give it to them, they take their kid somewhere else that will, regardless of the quality of teaching. And its not just for English. Many students attend four or more of these after school and weekend academies outside their required schooling in many different disciplines. Many of them sound like fun, like TaeKwonDo, or piano, or art. But these things are not treating as hobbies, like they would be in other parts of the world. They're a class, just like English. Many kids once they hit about grade 3 or so, are doing school work most of the day. They're given about an hour or two a day to themselves to play soccer or computer games with their friends and devote the rest to studying.

Young girls have it even worse than the boys, as far as family pressure is concerned. It is custom in this country for an unmarried woman to live with her parents, even if she's 45 years of age. So parents of young girls spend a lot of dollars (specially when they're younger, because its cheaper the younger the student is) to make sure these girls have a lot of offer a husband in future years so that they aren't living at home for longer than they have to.

There's also a large number of Korean men who lose their desire to live for some reason, long after being students. Surely, there is a plethora of reasons as to why this is. Korea seems to be a much more depressed country than Canada, despite all the cool things I've said about the place so far (don't get me wrong, I'm having a blast here, but it seems like this is not always the case for those who've lived here their entire lives). I can marginally understand this notion. Korea is quite drab as far as everyday architecture is concerned. For example, it seems that there is only about 4 designs of apartment buildings across the country, and one of these designs is far and away the most popular. You can actually tell where the major residential districts are, because there are sometimes twelve or so of this same style of building clumped together. Aesthetically speaking, this feature of Korea is an incredible eyesore. Another example are the automobiles and subways. Korea only has 3 car makers, I believe, and two of them are using very similar designs, as they employ the same engineers and are owned by the same family (Hyundai, Kia). Subways are very similar across the country as well, no matter how far away from the central Seoul system you are.

A man who works for the subway told me that an average of 4 people per month kill themselves at his particular station. That's one station out of hundreds.

Many children who will be studying for these exams in the coming year attend my academy. Their exams this year aren't as important, but they still study like mad for them. This is their last year at my academy. Once they reach the next year, they're too old for ECC and often go to another English academy. Either way, its depressing to know that they're entering a dangerous time in their lives to be at such a high risk of something like this.