Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (46 page)

However, Dr. Uh’s perspective on homelessness gradually changed. When homeless people first emerged as targets of government workfare, the overall perspective was that homeless people should have the potential for rehabilitation and employment (Song 2009). At this stage, there were few experts in the field of homelessness. Although Dr. Uh was already employed as a regular researcher in a state-sponsored research institute, he soon joined the Presidential Secretary Planning Committee to Improve the Quality of Life. He then published a report on homeless women after I quit my work in the city office. His report concluded that due to the costs and complexities of welfare support for homeless women, it was not an appropriate domain for
state
administration and therefore assigned responsibility for it to “civil society” groups. This astonishing shift in Dr. Uh’s perspective is symptomatic of how a leftist intellectual had become complicit with a neoliberal welfare project.

Prior to joining the presidential office commission, Dr. Uh had told me that he could not understand why the regime included middle-class citizens as deserving subjects of the welfare state. He may have hoped that the welfare regime would focus more on the working poor. However, in his policy recommendations, Dr. Uh ultimately relegated the responsibility for addressing the needs of homeless women to civil society and urged the state to focus its attention on the dire situation of male day laborers who were at risk of losing their homes. Dr. Uh’s willingness to accept middle-class men as proper targets for the state’s new welfare system could be rationalized with his leftist idealism as follows: The middle class bears the financial burden for the needs of the working poor through taxes as well as through their voluntary labor and resources for civic organizations to help the working poor. However, I question whether this rationale truly meets the needs of complexly stratified categories of deprivation.

Mr. Ku

While working on a report on the new homeless shelter system for the SCCUP, I met Mr. Ku when I visited the House of Freedom Homeless Shelter. He had been assigned to coordinate the work of civil representatives of the Seoul City Commission on Homeless Policies with city officials in related divisions. Mr. Ku was also head of the Homeless Rehabilitation Center (
Nosukcha Tasisŏgi Chiwonsentŏ
),
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a government-organized nongovernmental organization (GONGO) that coordinated the work of 120 homeless shelters with the government office that had been set up as an emergency response to the Asian Debt Crisis to craft policies for the homeless. The shelters that he worked with included the Houses of Hope, which I discuss later in this section. Mr. Ku was a doctoral student in a department of social work at a renowned university. As a former student activist from the 1980s, he made it clear to me that the student movement of the 1980s had been much more intense and difficult than what student activists of the 1990s such as myself would have experienced.

It
is notable that Mr. Ku did not immediately understand my status as a temporary researcher in the Seoul City Office, for I was neither a regular staff member nor a government-affiliated researcher. Rather, I had an ambiguous status, as both state agent (a government manager or government-affiliated researcher) and state subject (a citizen receiving workfare subsidy and a Public Works Program worker). However, Mr. Ku and I were in somewhat similar positions and, interestingly, we had become involved in city work in very much the same manner. We were both PhD students who had reluctantly but seriously undertaken government-related work that neither of us could have imagined ourselves doing because of our antiauthoritarian politics. Mr. Ku may have thought that his situation was unique and had not anticipated meeting another “reckless” intellectual willing to advance social causes through government programs and to risk being criticized by other activists as either an opportunist or a collaborator. Arguably, we were both attempting to carry out the militant leftist guerilla tactics of the 1980s by showing that strategic leadership and sacrifice can make a difference in the lives of working-class people. But, at the same time, I wonder if our strong, individuated sense of intellectual agency was, in fact, the sign of a liberal ethos. How was it possible that a liberal and leftist sensibility could coexist in the efforts of South Korean intellectuals such as Mr. Ku and myself in this period of postdemocratization?

Although it was intended as part of a critical intervention, Mr. Ku’s role of managing homeless shelters that were run mostly by civilian organizations also helped to intensify practices of neoliberal social policy during the Asian Debt Crisis. Nonetheless, Mr. Ku also questioned the dichotomy between deserving and undeserving homeless people. As a front-line social worker meeting and living with homeless people, he contested this division as arbitrary. Along with many other social workers, he also questioned the image of the “IMF homeless” as middle class and therefore easy to rehabilitate.

Mr. Ku was a midlevel worker in an interstitial space between the NGO sector and city government. Seoul has two facilities for homeless shelters: the House of Freedom (
Chayu ŭi Chip
) and the Houses of Hope (
Hŭimang ŭi Chi p
). The House of Freedom is a large building located in the Kuro industrial area of Seoul. The building is owned by the city of Seoul and was once the Pangnim Textile Factory. It had been one of the first and largest textile factories of the Korean economic developmental period during the Park Chung Hee regime. During the 1970s, it had been an early symbol of South Korean economic
success, which had been based on the development of light industry. During the 1980s, as heavier industries such as automobile manufacturing began to represent South Korean prosperity throughout the world (E. M. Kim 1997; Cumings 1997), the Pangnim Factory was closed.
14
By the 1990s, the former factory building was housing thousands of homeless people.

The House of Freedom was named by the city government to suggest an environment that offered homeless people temporary shelter with fewer regulations and relative freedom, as compared to the Houses of Hope. The city government created the Houses of Hope to remove street people from public places. They are smaller shelters built specifically to accommodate the IMF homeless. Many homeless people dislike them because of their strict prohibitions against drinking, smoking, staying out after hours, and sexual relations. On the other hand, the advantage of staying in a House of Hope is that residents can be paid for work through a public works program and given free meals and a place to sleep. Although the House of Freedom does not offer work and wages, many among the homeless prefer it because it imposes fewer restrictions on their behavior.

A salient example of neoliberal state practices in South Korea through privatization of the public sphere is the outsourcing of administrative work to NGO or private consulting groups such as the Homeless Rehabilitation Center, a GONGO that is neither a grassroots organization nor part of the state machinery. The center works with the Homeless Commission in addition to various levels of the government, mediating conflicts between the commission’s civilian members and its bureaucrats. It also runs the House of Freedom and determines which categories of homeless people can reside in the Houses of Hope. Very few operating shelters actually comply with the center’s regulations because most of the Houses of Hope are run by small welfare agencies, which receive minimal state support and are funded by religious groups. For them, running a homeless shelter was an additional task without any government incentives or benefits. In view of the difficulties Mr. Ku faced in managing these small homeless shelters, he criticized the city government’s policies as shortsighted and unrealistic. The problems of homelessness were long-standing and could not be solved by merely providing temporary shelter. He pointed out that the city’s objective to remove all the homeless from public places to the Homeless Rehabilitation Center ran counter to its intention to provide services for IMF homeless only. Distinguishing the IMF homeless from long-term street people was not an easy
task
because the causes of homelessness ran much deeper than the recent economic troubles.

Mr. Ku’s positions were therefore in conflict between his being both an agent of state policy and an advocate for the homeless. On the one hand, he was able to successfully use his mastery of social policy language in pursuit of social equity. He challenged the assumption of government officials on the causal association assumed between homelessness and the Asian Debt Crisis. During the annual ceremony for the Homeless Rehabilitation Center, he publicly announced that the premises of government homeless policies were false. Based on his own data, he argued that short-term homeless people who lived on the street were for the most part not homeless because of the Asian Debt Crisis. Further, he questioned whether such a category of homelessness could even be clearly distinguished and whether it was even possible for short-term street people to easily resume a normal social life.

However, Mr. Ku also actively participated in neoliberal social governing when he relied on conservative gender and family norms to endorse the idea of rebuilding middle-class stability and social morale.
15
At the same public event, for example, Mr. Ku noted that 55 percent of the homeless people at the Homeless Rehabilitation Center were classified as “single homeless people because of family breakdown,” which is an example of how social anxiety about family stability had become magnified during the crisis. According to his report, the majority of homeless people had fragile family relationships. However, the boundaries that separated “normal” from “abnormal” families, in his view, are premised on heterosexual conjugal relationships, based on the cultural assumption that middle-aged men cannot live alone and require the unpaid labor of their female partners.

During the Asian Debt Crisis, when mass media represented the family and its breakdown as the cause of social problems such as divorce, homosexuality, teen prostitution, and homelessness, homeless welfare agencies responded to these representations by encouraging a variety of rehabilitation programs. The Homeless Rehabilitation Center held a contest in 1999 for the best rehabilitation program among the 120 Houses of Hope. The award-winning program included matchmaking services, wedding ceremonies, short-term reunion events with relatives, and transportation and gifts to families or visits to hometowns during the holidays.
16
These programs and events were designed to motivate homeless people to resume a “normal”
way
of life and to promote ideas of the nuclear family as the unit responsible for social needs.
17
Marriages between homeless men and women were represented as success stories by the hosting homeless shelter, the Rehabilitation Center, and the media. Many high-level government officials, as well as civil leaders, visited the winning shelter to express their approval of those willing to assume the status of “normal families.”

In this way, Mr. Ku participated in the neoliberal governing of homelessness through disciplining gender and family relationships. As with Dr. Uh, Mr. Ku’s perspectives as an intellectual appeared to shift from a leftist to a more liberal democratic position (or possibly, a complex amalgam of both), which has become symptomatic of neoliberal governance in South Korea. As a leftist, he created some space to address the problems of disadvantaged groups, in this case, homeless people; as a liberal, he acquired and employed a managerial position and competed with neoliberal social engineers to control and manage homeless issues. Ultimately, Mr. Ku’s strategies for managing the homeless converged with the dominant neoliberal rhetoric, perhaps most significantly by supporting conservative norms about gender and family. Mr. Ku’s reiteration of normative family ideology contributed to the discursive formation of “deserving” homelessness. Only employable male breadwinners, who could be rehabilitated to assume a normal family life, emerged as deserving welfare subjects. South Korean neoliberal logic aimed to preserve national prosperity by promoting norms of productive citizenship at the expense of excluding vulnerable homeless populations who were a drain on the public purse.

Reverend Kang

When I first met Reverend Kang through a personal connection, I immediately recognized that she could best help me understand the problems of homeless women.
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As a religious leader, Reverend Kang occupied a vocation unusual for a woman. In the spring of 1998, she was also the first civil activist to address the needs of homeless women in Seoul City (Song 2009). In a City Commission on Homeless Policy, which consisted mostly of civil activists working in their local communities, Reverend Kang was the first to volunteer to run an emergency shelter for women. This decision reflected
her
ten-year experience as a minister serving in an industrial area of Seoul, during which she had observed at close hand the destitution of women living and working in that area.

Reverend Kang countered the demoralizing government portrayal of homeless women by organizing the Homeless Women Shelters Association (
Yŏsŏng Nosukcha Shimtŏ Yŏndae
). It consisted of eight shelters for women and families (six shelters sponsored by the city government’s homeless policies and two funded by other agencies). From the time of the Debt Crisis, all eight women’s shelters belonging to the association were run mostly by civil activists, religious organizations, or private welfare institutes. Reverend Kang gave some insight into the invisibility of homeless women. Many lower-class homeless women were victims of domestic abuse who became homeless after exhausting their stay with relatives or at inns, all-night church services (
ch’ŏryayebae
), and prayer houses (
kidowon
).

Homeless shelters were one of the outcomes of the partnership between civil society and government initiated by the Kim Dae Jung regime. The city government had originally planned to entrust the management of homeless shelters to established civil associations, especially religious groups such as Chogyechong (a popular Buddhist denomination in South Korea), as well as other Roman Catholic, Anglican, and other Protestant church groups. However, within a month, the city changed its strategy to pursue a bureaucratic top-down process due to the urgency imposed by the Asian Debt Crisis. This is an example of the intensified effects on homeless policies, combining neoliberal governance by the new presidential office (partnership between an NGO and a GO) with long-standing regulative governance (top-down bureaucracy).