Is success killing South Koreans?
THREE WEEKS AGO, 39-year-old Hyang Sun Lee of Fullerton allegedly tried to set her three children and husband ablaze after she doused them with lighter fluid while they slept. Though she didn't succeed, police said, within the last year, three other Korean immigrant parents in Southern California did.
News reports invariably point to economic hardship and the difficulties of immigrant adjustment as the source of the parents' despair. And clearly they were factors. But real answers to these incidents are more likely to be found 6,000 miles from Los Angeles, in Seoul.
Although family murder-suicides are rare in South Korea, the nation has one of the world's highest suicide rates, coupled with what is perhaps the lowest fertility rate. After experiencing one of the most extraordinary economic and social transformations in history -- from a traditional rural society in the early 1960s to a hyper-urban industrialized one in the 1990s -- South Koreans have to wonder if all that success isn't, well, killing them.
Over the last decade, suicides in South Korea have more than doubled, from 11.8 per 100,000 people in 1995 to 26.1 per 100,000 in 2005. Today, suicide is the No. 1 cause of death for South Korean men in their 20s and is increasingly common among the growing ranks of the elderly. Overall, it is the fourth-leading cause of death in the country, ahead of traffic accidents.
No sector of society seems immune to the epidemic. In the first two months of this year, two highly successful female entertainers, actress Jeong Da-bin and pop singer Yuni, hanged themselves. Last October, just before I visited Seoul, three young people carried out a suicide pact in a public park in the capital, drawing attention to the existence of South Korean websites that glorify -- and offer advice on -- suicide. In 2005, 400 students held a vigil in Seoul to mourn the growing number of their friends who had taken their own lives because they couldn't stand the highly competitive educational environment.
South Koreans spend more hours on the job than their counterparts in any other comparably developed nation. Indeed, it is this work ethic that was at the core of the country's remarkable late-20th century economic miracle. For nearly 40 years, South Koreans were confident that if they worked long hours and sacrificed for their children's education, their status would improve. Most people had only to look back to the hardship of a brutal colonial past to know that their sacrifice was paying off.
