For the past four years, Oh Soon-ja has pushed her rusty cart through the streets of Seoul, collecting boxes and cardboard.
“It’s hard for me to move around at my age but I have no choice — there’s no one to support me and my husband,” says the 68-year-old, who makes Won20,000 ($17.50) a day for her efforts. “It’s my fate — I have to live with it.”
Poverty afflicts almost half of Korea’s elderly — a generation that was once the lifeblood of the country’s remarkable postwar transformation into an advanced economy. With the basic monthly state pension of Won200,000 barely sufficient for food and lodging, many resort to menial or degrading jobs to make ends meet.
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