Getting Out — page 2

The skyline of Seoul is dominated by neon advertising and the illuminated crosses atop the spires of seemingly numberless churches. A first-time visitor will be taken aback by the omnipresent Christianity, but it serves as a vague social indicator. For all the dance clubs of Hong Dae and the wine bars of Gangnam, this has never been a permissive city. Changing something as fundamental to conservative values as marriage, or the status of women, has taken time and patience. Since 1956, the Korean Legal Aid Center for Family Relations has been on the front line of that war of attrition. At its splendidly named One Hundred Women's Building on Yoi Island in the middle of Seoul, it campaigns for female equality and provides women with free workshops, counseling and legal aid, helping them endure the bureaucratic and emotional mess that is the average Korean divorce. The modest brick building sits in the vast, looming shadow of the Yoido Full Gospel Church, and fittingly so: on one side of the street they're solemnizing marriages, on the other they're holding the postmortems.

"South Korea has experienced abrupt change in all areas of society—politics, the economy and culture," says center president Kwak Bae Hee. "In one generation, there has been a whirlwind of change, and that change has been even more acute in the family domain." The causes are familiar throughout Asia: as economies shift from agrarian to industrial, large numbers of women enter the work force and discover that with a regular income comes the ability to delay getting wed or the freedom to jettison a miserable marriage. Meanwhile, the move from village to high-rise housing spells the end of the extended family, leaving unhappy couples bereft of the mediation (and censure) that in-laws may once have provided.

At the same time, the globalization of ideas and popular culture holds up plenty of role models for any woman thinking of going it alone. Many Koreans are addicted to KBS's Love and War, a weekly TV show that claims up to 25% of the country's total viewing audience. Love and War uses actors to dramatize actual divorce cases and marital conflicts, which are then dissected by a panel of actors and actresses. Viewers can vote online on whether a featured couple should stay together or not. Park Hwan Wook, the show's producer, says the program was conceived after Asia's 1997 economic crisis, when men lost their jobs and housewives were forced to go out to work, discovering new freedoms in the process. Park adds that while marriage breakdowns are depicted "frankly and cynically" on the show, divorce is now so commonplace in Korea as to be mundane. So Love and War has turned to dramatizing less tame subjects such as wife swapping, too, which Park claims is the "latest fad" in Korean society.

	In Tokyo, you can attend a divorce school to learn the 50 ways to leave your lover

With these increasingly liberal attitudes toward marriage on the rise, Korean women now initiate twice as many divorces as do men, says Kwak. Yet Korea's laws remain mired in a patriarchal past. One abiding quirk of family law is the hoju, or "head of household" system of family registration. When a man marries, his wife and subsequent children are added to his household register like footnotes. When it comes to the paperwork and minutiae of civil life—dealing with government agencies, banks, school applications for the children—it is the man's signature that matters. Upon divorce, a woman can be deleted from the household register, but the children never can unless the man gives up all paternal rights. If that surrender is not forthcoming, a woman will continue to need her ex-husband's imprimatur every time she wants to apply for passports for her children or put them in a new school.

The tedious consequences of hoju are everywhere. Lee Seung Soon shares a one-room apartment in a suburb of Seoul with her two children and second husband, whom the kids regard as their stepfather. But outside the home, the children are still considered the responsibility of their absent father—and are officially obliged to use his last name. Says Lee: "I went to see my son's teacher one day and she told me, 'Your son doesn't even know what his real name is.' My son used his stepfather's last name, but that's not his legal name." The situation can't be remedied unless Lee's ex-husband can be traced, but she no longer knows where he lives. "My son wants to change his name," says Lee. "I asked him why, and he said, 'My old father isn't even a father.' I hope he can hear him say this."

Fortunately for Lee and many Korean women like her, efforts to do away with hoju are gathering momentum, with opinion polls indicating that about 50% of Koreans are opposed to the system. At the forefront of the campaign is the Organization for the Abolition of Hoju, a coalition of 113 civic, feminist and human-rights groups. The organization has brought a case before Korea's Constitutional Court and expects a verdict later this year. An abolition bill has also been submitted to the National Assembly by liberal legislators. Prominent among them is the Uri Party's Lee Mi Kyung, born into what she calls a "Confucian family"—one where her grandfather took a second wife because his first could not produce a son, then kicked out the second wife when she, too, failed to produce a male heir. Hearing stories like this drove her into feminist politics at an early age. "It's been a long fight," she says over a mid-morning cappuccino in the lobby of her office building. "But the war that has lasted 30 years is about to end." The struggle isn't over just yet. The bill will likely be diluted in the National Assembly by lawmakers eager to appease older Koreans who equate the dismantling of hoju with an attack on the institution of family.

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