The Gold Rings of 1998

A wedding ring drops onto a metal tray set on a counter. It makes a very small sound, short and clear, then rolls half a turn and lies still.

The ring is not big. It is a plain band of gold with no pattern, worn smooth on the inside from rubbing against skin for many years. Seen up close, it is no longer quite round. It has flattened a little, into the exact shape of the finger that wore it.

Beyond the glass door is a winter morning. A line of people stretches along the sidewalk, hands deep in their coat pockets, their breath white in the air. Almost everyone holds something small. A velvet box. A twist of newspaper, wrapped tight. Some people simply keep a fist closed, so no one can see what is inside.

It is early 1998, in South Korea.

It all began late the year before. The country fell into very serious trouble over money, so serious that it had to borrow an enormous sum from abroad. A nation's money troubles are tangled, long and tiring to follow. But the part that everyone understood at once was very simple. The country was like a household in debt, and the debt was heavy.

On January 5, 1998, the national television broadcaster sent out a message. It was surprisingly simple: anyone with gold at home, please bring it out.

And people really did.

What came in most of all was rings.

There were wedding rings from couples who had only just married, the gold still new and bright, not yet warm from the hand. There were wedding rings worn for decades. When those came off, the finger still carried a ring of skin paler than the skin around it. That pale band took weeks to fade.

Then came something even harder to part with than a wedding ring. It was the first-birthday ring. Koreans have a custom of giving a baby a tiny gold ring on the day the child turns one. The ring is so small that it fits only a young child's little finger. Families usually put it away with care, as a small store of savings for the child's future. A great many parents opened a drawer, took that ring out, wrapped it up, and carried it off.

Nearly every family kept something like that. A small thing made of gold, put away carefully, almost never brought out or used. People kept it, and not for what it was worth in money.

It was not only rings. Athletes brought in the gold medals they had received on the top step of the podium. Old soldiers brought in their gold insignia. There was even a gold cross that belonged to Cardinal Kim Sou-hwan.

Bank counters opened to receive it all. They weighed each piece, wrote it in a ledger, issued a receipt, then called the next person in line.

One detail here must be told correctly, or the story comes out wrong. The people who brought gold did not give it away for nothing. Each piece was weighed and valued, and its owner was paid at a rate agreed in advance. The gold collected was then sold abroad, in exchange for money to pay off part of the loan.

So on paper, this was an ordinary sale. But no one looking at the line of people on the sidewalk that morning could call it a sale. Nobody sells their own wedding ring. And nobody at all sells their child's first-birthday ring. Those things were always beyond any price.

The gold collection ran from January 5 to April 30, 1998. Four months, across one winter and one spring. When it was all counted, about three and a half million people had stood in line. The gold gathered came to about 227 tons.

The mind cannot picture 227 tons. It is easier to think about it the other way around. That gold was not big bars, cast ready and sitting in a vault. It was rings. Rings, chains, medals, insignia, and children's rings no bigger than a bean. To gather 227 tons from things that small, a great many drawers had to be pulled open.

Now comes the most honest part of the story.

When that gold was turned into money, it came to only about one tenth of what the country had borrowed. One tenth. It did not pay off the debt. Nor did it make the hard times disappear. Anyone who says those rings cleared the debt of a whole country is telling it wrong.

The true weight of those 227 tons of gold does not lie in how much money it repaid.

It lies somewhere else. About three and a half million people, with no one forcing them and no one pushing them, all had exactly the same thought in the same winter: our home is struggling, I have this, I will bring it out.

That leaves the wedding ring from the start of the story.

It was weighed and written in the ledger. Then it left that counter and went out of the country with tons of other gold. It never went back to the finger it came from. That finger kept its pale band of skin for a while longer. Then the pale band faded too, like every other mark left on human skin.

The figure of 227 tons may slip from memory. Big numbers drift away fast. But the sound of a ring touching a metal tray is much easier to remember. A very small sound, short and clear. For four months that year, at bank counters all across South Korea, that small sound rang out again and again, one turn after another, enough for three and a half million people.