‘Squid Game’ strikes nerve in debt-ridden South Korea

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA “Squid Game,” a brutal Netflix survival drama about desperate adults competing in deadly children’s games for a chance to escape severe debt, hit a little too close to home for Lee Chang-keun.

The show has captivated global audiences since its September debut on its way to becoming Netflix’s biggest hit ever. It has struck raw nerves at home, where there’s growing discontent over soaring personal debt, decaying job markets and stark income inequalities worsened by financial crises in the past two decades.

In the dystopian horrors of “Squid Game,” Lee sees a reflection of himself in the show’s protagonist Seong Gi-hun, a laidoff autoworker coping with a broken family and struggling with constant business failures and gambling problems.

Seong gets beaten by gangster creditors into signing off his organs as collateral, but then receives a mysterious offer to play in a series of six traditional Korean children’s games for a shot at winning $38 million.

The South Korea-produced show pits Seong against hundreds of other financially distressed players in a hyper-violent competition for the ultimate prize, with losers being killed at every round.

It is raising disturbing questions about the future of one of Asia’s wealthiest economies, where people who once crowed about the “Miracle of the Han River” now moan about “Hell Joseon,” a sarcastic reference to a hierarchical kingdom that ruled Korea before the 20th century.

“Some scenes were very hard to watch,” said Lee, a worker at South Korea’s Ssangyong Motors who struggled with financial difficulties and depression after the carmaker laid him and 2,600 other employees off while filing for bankruptcy protection in 2009.

After years of protests, court battles and government intervention, Lee and hundreds of other Ssangyong workers returned to work in recent years. But not before a spate of suicides among coworkers and family members who were plunged into financial misery.

“In ‘Squid Game,’ you see characters scrambling to survive after being laid off at work, struggling to operate fried chicken diners or working as ‘daeri’ drivers,” who get paid for driving drunk people home in their own cars, Lee said. “That reminded me of my co-workers who died.”

Lee said he and his colleagues struggled to find work and were backlisted by other auto companies that considered them militant labor activists.

A 2016 report by Korea University medical researchers said at least 28 laid-off Ssangyong workers or their relatives died of suicide or severe health problems, including those linked to post-traumatic stress disorder.