hankyoreh

By Kim Myoung-in, literary critic and professor emeritus of Inha University

When I first heard about young Koreans being kidnapped in Cambodia and forced into working for criminal operations involving voice phishing, romance scams, stock fraud, and other online financial crimes, I thought, well, I suppose such things happen sometimes. I’d just watched “Citizen of a Kind,” a movie about a woman who travels to China to dismantle a voice phishing operation and rescue kidnapped Koreans, so I thought similar incidents were happening in Cambodia. 

However, as time went on, I realized that it wasn’t just a small number of victims of spontaneous crimes. These crimes have been conducted nonstop and on a massive scale. I also realized that they aren’t just the result of unprecedented incidents of kidnapping and confinement. The phenomenon resembled economic migration in the form of young Koreans voluntarily going to Cambodia in large numbers. 

Some Cambodian cities house illegal criminal compounds that are almost a formal presence, where numerous young Koreans engage in all kinds of online financial crimes. While many are kidnapped and forced to work there, many voluntarily offer their services — as many as 2,000-3,000 — a fact that still has me in shock. 

At first, I blamed the young Koreans themselves. Anyone with their head on straight wouldn’t believe an ad for a job in Cambodia that offered around US$10,000 per month, or so I thought. But as I continued to look at the reports coming in, I became aware that only a very select few are handsomely rewarded. As is the case with criminal organizations, someone who endures the initial trials of membership and makes his way up the ranks to become an integral member eventually reaps immense profits. They become recruiters, pulling from their experience to entice others. I suppose that’d be enough to fool some.  

After a painful initiation period — encompassing both forced and voluntary elements — one can eventually become a high earner, allowing them to evolve from pathetic victim to voluntary criminal. They then become permanent members of the underworld from which they cannot escape. If they fail the initiation, they must either endure horrific lives of slavery or escape, standing at the crossroads between life and death. It’s like a scene from a movie — a type of hell where considerable numbers of otherwise healthy young people volunteer to serve a criminal underworld. 

In a top 10 world economy and the home of the globally popular K-culture, thousands of young people are opting not to study abroad or go on a working holiday but are offering themselves up on a platter to online criminal operations. It’s frankly unbelievable. 

Nor is it acceptable. I knew that the barriers of entry for professional positions are getting higher, and that quality jobs above the average level are mostly divvied out to the elites, but I didn’t know that young people were gambling with their lives in what’s so clearly a perilous endeavor. If financial capitalism is a symptom of late-stage capitalism, then this proliferation of financial scams is the worst of the worst of capitalism. What could drive people to throw themselves into such hellfire? At this point, the people who chose to go to Cambodia are not the problem. The problem is our society, which makes them flee.

Another thing to consider is that the majority of these young people were men in their 20s — the problematic “young Korean male.” They elected President Yoon Suk-yeol as president, and even after he was booted from office, they still threw most of their support behind his allies and supporters. They are now one of the main factions of Korea’s growing far right.  

These young men are the crux of the “Ilbe” faction, the young Korean males who are so easily passed off and looked down on by their female cohorts as losers, potential sex offenders, stalkers, domestic assaulters, brainless scum who don’t read, and incels who can’t even dream of getting married. 

During the riot at the Seoul Western District Court in January, half of the perpetrators were men in their 20s and 30s. Realistically, they are now viewed as the demographic most likely to become the spearheading force of Korean far-right fascism. 

At some point along the way, the young Korean male has become the main object of social contempt. I held a promotional event for one of my books recently, and around 90% of the attendees were women. I still remember one middle-aged woman asking about what we’re supposed to do with these young Korean men who never read books. 

Yet among these young Korean men, objects of social contempt, are people falling into the hellfire of the criminal underworld. I feel there is a need to change the way we look at the young Korean man.  

What are we to do with them? Looking at the some 60 young men — dressed in slippers, t-shirts and shorts — getting off the chartered plane from Cambodia after being “rescued” and then lined up by the police as suspects, I felt an immense grief. 

They are another type of “homo sacer” abandoned by Korean society. In my eyes, they overlapped with scenes of residents of underground worlds frequently seen in dystopian science fiction films. 

Having given up all hope for a decent life and sold their souls for cents on the dollar, they are now branded criminals. To teach them how to live a proper life, to inculcate them with political correctness and demand gender sensibility, to tell them to stop their hate, I suppose, is out of the question. 

They are people in our society who are “beyond saving,” to borrow a phrase from Bae Su-chan in “Chronicles of Souls in their 20s and 30s,” another type of “other” in our era — minorities who have been marginalized. 

To my shame, I don’t have a solution. It’s easy to say that it’s the fault of the extremes in a Korean society that’s undergoing the polarization of neoliberalism. To say we need fundamental changes in politics, economics, culture, and education is simply empty. However, it’s clear that they can no longer be abandoned in this fashion. They, too, along with women, irregular workers, sex and gender minorities, the disabled, and migrants, need liberation. The fight for minorities across the world cannot be a zero-sum game among the marginalized. Not a single group must lose. We cannot view the unhappy men, a new type of minority, as simply a giant “subaltern” who have been excluded from our communal language, culture, and practices. If you do nothing, then nothing gets done. 

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]