Class strife in film ‘Parasite’ a reality for Seoul’s poorest
Movie exposes grimmer side of South Korea’s economic growth
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA—The sunlight peeks into Kim Ssang-seok’s home for just half an hour a day. When he opens his only window and looks up, he sees the wheels of passing cars. Kim dries his clothes and shoes in the sunless inside because of thieves outside. He wages a constant battle against cockroaches and the sewer smell emanating from the low-ceilinged musty space that is his toilet and laundry room.
This 320-square-foot abode, built partially underground, has been Kim’s home for 20 years. His late mother smiles from a portrait on the wall.
“You end up in places like this when you have nowhere else to go,” said Kim, 63, a taxi driver.
But Kim, a widower, said he was still “grateful that I have a roof over my head and a warm floor to rest on.” He fears the city will clear out his neighbourhood in a few years to make room for more of the apartment towers that increasingly dominate Seoul’s skylines.
If that happens, Kim said, he has “no plan” on where to go — just like the desperate family in “Parasite,” which became the first foreign-language movie to win the Academy Award for best film this month.
Overseas, South Korea may be best associated with its Samsung smartphones, Hyundai cars and K-pop stars like BTS.
But “Parasite” has mesmerized viewers around the world by exposing a much grimmer side of South Korea’s economic growth: urban poverty, and the humiliation and class strife it has spawned.
The movie does so through the tale of a family in Seoul who lives in a “banjiha,” or a semibasement home like Kim’s, and whose initially hilarious subterfuge to latch onto a wealthy family unravels tragically.
The fictionalized story reflects the lives of Seoul’s so-called dirt spoons, the urban poor, many of whom live in semi-basements in the congested city, where living high and dry — in apartment towers and away from the honking, yelling and odoriferous squalor of down below — symbolizes the wealth and status of the gold-spoon class.
In Seoul, where housing prices have been rising fast, many students and young couples start out renting in a banjiha, with the hope that enough striving and toil will eventually lead to homeownership in an apartment tower.
“It’s clearly a basement, but people living there want to believe they belong to the abovethe-ground world,” the director of “Parasite,” Bong Joon-ho, said last year at a news conference with South Korean media after his film was invited to the Cannes Film Festival. “They live with constant fear that if things get any worse, they will be completely swallowed underground.”
While younger banjiha occupants may dream of escape, many others are elderly or unemployed people who have all but abandoned hope for social mobility. They live hand-tomouth, one step away from becoming homeless.
Hundreds of thousands of people live semi-underground in Seoul, scattered around the city, according to government statistics. They remain largely invisible unless you explore back alleys at night and see their lit windows below street level. Many live, literally, in the long shadows of shopping and apartment towers.
Even before “Parasite” won the Oscar, local movie fans and foreign tourists had begun visiting the locations where some of the film was shot, to sample the sights and smells of the reallife Seoul that inspired the story. They visit Ahyeon-dong, a hillside shantytown covered with identical two- or threestorey tenements. The cheapest rooms are available in semibasements there for $250 (U.S.) to $420 a month.
During a recent visit, “Piggy Super,” a grocery store that appeared in the movie under a different name, offered no fresh meat, but was selling plenty of dried fish, liquor and other cheap fare.
When Kim climbs out of his den, he sees a view of tall, sleek, brightly lit apartment blocks looming in the distance like a mirage.
“They keep going higher and higher, so they won’t have to smell the smell down below,” Kim said of the tower dwellers. “Those living up there must look down on people like me like pigs.”