一位韩国男子Na Hae-dong，生于1953年5月（朝鲜战争结束前两月）。辛苦一生，攒了128百万韩元（相当于10万美元），存在一家银行帐户里。可是他没有任何户籍文件证明他的身份，所以连一分钱都不能取出，只好流落街头，靠拣垃圾为生，最终身患癌症，4月28日病亡。 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/world/asia/07korea.html?_r=1&ref=asia
By CHOE SANG-HUN
Published: May 6, 2009
SEOUL — A homeless South Korean man died of cancer without being able to use a single penny of his life savings of $100,000 because he could not prove his identity to his bank, officials said Wednesday.
Residents of the Yongbong district of Gwangju, in southwestern South Korea, knew little about the quiet man who had drifted into their neighborhood in 2007. He pulled a cart during the day to collect and sell scrap metal and other junk and slept in the cart or a shipping container.
“He never begged. When people offered him help, he said he had money saved and didn’t need help,” Yoo Joon-soo, a district official in Yongbong, said by telephone. “He said he was going to buy a house.” In mid-April, he looked so fragile that Mr. Yoo and others ignored his protests and called an ambulance. He was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.
The man then told the officials that his name was Na Hae-dong and that he had been born May 23, 1953, two months before the Korean War ended.
“Other than that, he remembered nothing or would not say anything about himself — where he was born, where he came from, where he had lived, whether he had relatives,” Mr. Yoo said. “He had no official identity on the government records.”
Mr. Na had 128 million won in a bank account opened under his name decades ago. But in 1993, South Korea introduced an anti-corruption law that required an account holder to prove that the account had been opened under the holder’s real name before withdrawing money. People were given a grace period during which they could transfer their money to real-name accounts.
Apparently, Mr. Na had never heard of the law. But he had continued depositing his few earnings into the account. When he went to his bank after the cancer had been diagnosed, however, he could not take out his savings because, officially, he did not exist.
Local officials filed for court approval to give him an identity. But before the court ruled, Mr. Na died in the hospital on April 28.
His savings were expected to be donated to the state. He had no other belongings except his cart, a wristwatch and a quilt.作者: Eminem 时间: 2009-5-7 17:29
