by Cho Se-hui
The peculiar thing was, I would have stopped working there sooner had I not thought about the progress, the revolutions, in technology. The first few days I was fascinated by the extraordinary technology. The foundry, the forging room, the heat treatment room, the sheet metal room, the welding room, the machine-tool room, the finishing room, the paint room—I was taken on a tour of each of these and others, then placed at my assembly line. The heat and colors of the foundry where the cylinder blocks were manufactured excited me. But the place where I really wanted to work was the machine-tool room. I wanted to learn lathe work. An automatic lathe at work seemed a very fine thing. The lathe I saw was making the screw pattern in tire valve stems. A stem spun around on an axis, and the bite cut a pretty little spiral in its surface. As I stood watching the lathe, machine oil from the shaft flowed down into an oil pan. To me it looked like perspiration. While the lathe workers monitored the speed of the bite they patted the new trainees on the shoulder. I left the machine-tool shop determined to work with a lathe myself.
Yŏng-ho’s case was similar. He wanted to do polishing work. He would talk to me about the polishing machines. Polishing was another job that demanded great precision. Yŏng-ho held his breath in the presence of mechanics who continually operated within a margin of error of five-thousandths of a millimeter. Father was powerless. He couldn’t even send his two sons to technical school. Father was tortured by his times. A dwarf father could not overcome economic torture. If we had graduated from technical school we would have done skilled work from the beginning. I was fortunate. Within a month I was given a hand drill that resembled a pistol. When I thought about the automatic lathe, I had to laugh. Mother was delighted, though. She believed that as a mechanic on an assembly line I had been given the opportunity to take part in the production of a fine automobile. I didn’t explain to her the work I did. I drilled holes in car trunks. After I drilled the holes my job was to set Phillips head screws in them. I used two tools and both were shaped like pistols. With one I drilled the holes and with the other I placed the screws and rubber washers. The workers senior to me called me the Two-Gun Kid. For the first time I felt yoked to machines. For the son of a dwarf this was an extraordinary experience. I was both driven and confined by the ceaseless work of the assembly line. Machines determined the pace of the work. Jammed from the waist up inside the trunk of a car, I had to perform my two job assignments simultaneously. When I touched the drill to the sheet of iron in the trunk my small tool recoiled with a bang. Every time I drilled a hole it shook me from the waist up. I worked with a mouthful of screws and washers. No sooner did I drill a hole than I took these parts from my mouth and positioned them.
Every day the lunchtime buzzer saved me. A moment longer, and I would have collapsed. The Two-Gun Kid wasn’t able to finish his lunch. Cold sores sprouted on my tongue; my mouth stank of rubber and metal. I rinsed my mouth out with water but the stink remained. I stood in line in the vast cafeteria and had my tray loaded, but whenever I started to eat my hands trembled. I ate about half my soup of dried radish leaves and pike mackerel. And I couldn’t eat more than half my rice. Before me sat a bowl of crumbly rice that seemed to have more barley mixed in with it by the day. To go with the soup and rice we had only a few pieces of bland, colorless kimchi. Even if a good lunch had been available I couldn’t have eaten it. The toolroom helper waited for me to finish eating. Our food ration was never enough for him. When I pushed my leftovers to him he smiled. I spent the remainder of the mealtime on the roof of the plant. From up there you could see the ocean: the filthy ocean. Ŭngang’s inner harbor is a receptacle for polluted seawater. A single small cleaning boat belonging to the Port Authority removed floating matter from the harbor waters. The plant that produced oxidized steel spewed out toxic gases. Those gases floated past where I sat. Enveloped by those gases, I calmed my trembling body’s nerves.
Also visible from the roof was the textile plant where Yŏng-hŭi worked. Yŏng-hŭi now wore a blue work smock and a white work cap. She worked in the Weaving Section of the Production Department. The trainee badge remained on her cap, but the work she did was no different from a regular worker’s. In one minute Yŏng-hŭi half-walked, half-ran a hundred and twenty paces. The noise from the weaving machines was terrible. When one of those looms broke down, it either died or worked unpredictably. If it died, Yŏng-hŭi brought it back to life; if it acted strangely, she disconnected the raw silk thread, reconnected it, and then the loom ran normally. Yŏng-hŭi was given fifteen minutes, maximum, for lunch. Those who worked in the Weaving Section took turns running one at a time for their lunch and back. Meanwhile the foreman would look after their loom. When her turn came Yŏng-hŭi too entrusted her loom to the foreman and ran down the central corridor to the cafeteria. The lunch she ate was the same as mine. Pressed by time, Yŏng-hŭi ate in a hurry. She ate in great haste, then hurried back to her work site to half-walk, half-run among the weaving machines. In one hour Yŏng-hŭi walked seven thousand two hundred paces.
The temperature in the workroom was a hundred and two degrees. The heat pouring from the weaving machines always exceeded her body temperature. The hottest temperature during Ŭngang’s humid summer is ninety-five degrees. The terrible noise of the weaving machines has no counterpart. Sound is measured in decibels. Under normal conditions the noise level is zero decibels; at fifty decibels conversation is impossible. The noise level in Yŏng-hŭi’s workroom was more than ninety decibels. The noise generated by the combined operation of the weaving machines assaulted the slight, sweat-soaked body of Yŏng-hŭi. Yŏng-hŭi woke up crying at night. She cried without Mother knowing it. But Yŏng-hŭi was still young and couldn’t think about what kept her in bondage. One day she went to her union office and obtained a copy of The Worker’s Handbook. When she finished work she went to the workers’ church. The church was in the northern part of the industrial zone. The minister wore dirty clothes. Severely nearsighted, he saw the young workers through fish-eye lenses. Yŏng-hŭi squeezed among the workers, sat down, and sang:
The rising sun, our artery,
Tolling the dawn, turning the earth.
Eternal builders, producing without rest,
Oh, we are workers.
Yŏng-hŭi sang this song at home, too, in the softest voice. Yŏng-ho and I silently observed this transformation in her.
Mother always worried that her two sons would get mixed up in something dangerous. She had undergone too much trouble when we lived in Felicity Precinct in Seoul. She couldn’t forget the suffering her two sons had experienced when they were fired from their factories. Father had been sitting on the cement bridge drinking.
“Today the boys did something the other boys couldn’t do,” Father had said while he drank. “They told the president not to force the workers to do anything he wouldn’t want forced upon himself.”
“No need to worry,” said Mother. “The boys can get a paying job at any factory they like.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Father said. “All the factories know by now. There’s no factory that will take the boys. You don’t realize what these boys did today.”
“That’s enough!” Mother said impatiently. “Did the boys do something wrong? The way you carry on, a person would think they committed treason or something. The criminals are those people.”
Mother was right. And Father was well aware of that. But the people who suffered were us. Mother hoped the same thing wouldn’t happen to us again.
Yŏng-ho and I decided to do what Mother told us. Mother didn’t worry about Yŏng-hŭi. She didn’t worry even when Yŏng-hŭi and other union members banded together after the disappearance of the steward. She didn’t worry even when Yŏng-hŭi went around with bundles of printed matter containing passages attacking management. The problem lay with me. I couldn’t keep the promise I’d made with Yŏng-ho to do what Mother said.
The day I received my second paycheck I went to my union office to see the steward. “This i
s my pay envelope,” I said.
“What about it?” the steward asked. He looked about forty.
“The last two months I’ve been working nine and a half hours a day.”
“And?”
“They didn’t pay me for the extra hour and a half.”
“Are you the only one?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s that,” the steward said as he smoked a cigarette. “Why don’t you run along now.”
“Sir,” I said. “Would you please look at the laws that govern union locals? According to article nine, section two, I have the right to request protection from unfair labor/management practices.”
“And what might these unfair management practices be?”
“Nonpayment for overtime is a violation of article forty-six of the Basic Labor Law. And article twenty-nine, in the Collective Agreement, says that according to the Basic Labor Law the base rate plus fifty percent is to be paid for anything more than eight hours of continuous work.”
“I’m so grateful to you,” said the steward. “No one has ever brought that up with me. Is that all you wanted to say?”
“I’m working as a regular now. I work with a hand drill but I’m a regular.”
“And?”
“I received a helper’s pay.”
“Anything else?”
“The company has violated article twenty-seven of the Basic Labor Law and article twenty-one of the Collective Agreement.”
“You mean firing without cause?”
“On the assembly line alone seven people were fired without good reason.”
“Impossible!” The steward drummed his fingers against the edge of his desk. “Firing without cause—it can’t be.”
“But it’s happened. And if the union fails to act, it will keep on happening.”
“We’ll get an official explanation from the company.”
“And,” I continued, “this is an article I clipped from the newspaper.”
“I saw that article too.” The steward sat up as he said this. “The one quoting the chairman as saying he’ll set aside two billion wŏn a year for social welfare, right? Every year he’ll donate a large sum of money to the unfortunate. He probably has a foundation and a management team for it already. Now that seems like a fine thing to do.”
“But there’s something you should remind the company of at the labor/management meeting.”
“And what’s that?”
“That money belongs to the union members.”
“How so?”
“None of us is paid according to his work. The pay is too low. And the money that’s been cut from the amount I deserve is included in that two billion wŏn.”
“Good point.”
“I don’t understand how he can take money that rightfully belongs to the workers and say he’s going to spend it on other people.”
“You’re right. They’re cheating us.”
“The union should keep track of that money and make sure it’s returned to the members.”
“Yes, it should,” said the steward. “And what else do you have to say?”
“That’s all.”
Three more days I worked as the Two-Gun Kid at Ŭngang Motors. During those three days I had a difficult time at work; I had nosebleeds in bed at night. Things kept happening to my small tools. The drill got stuck and the bit was chipped. I rushed to the workroom for a replacement drill but it happened again.
The workroom helper who used to smile whenever I pushed him the remains of my meal no longer smiled. My foreman loomed threateningly close. I couldn’t keep up the relentless work pace demanded by the machines. Steadying my trembling body, I stared at the machines. Work went by me untouched. Even the work I was barely able to finish was marked unsatisfactory by the head inspector. Work that had gone well suddenly became too much for me. During those three days I came to realize the intrigue that went on in this society. Those who were well off tried to undermine the efforts of poor people to combine forces. The union steward was a company man. He did nothing for the workers.
I left Ŭngang Motors just before my name would have been added to the roster of fired workers. Nor did my name appear on the blacklist. I moved to Ŭngang Textile. There I did odd jobs. Mother didn’t say a word. Nor did Yŏng-ho. Yŏng-hŭi related my story to a man from the union’s General Council whom she met at the workers’ church. During this time I saw Mother’s budget book:
soybean sprouts 50 wŏn
Japanese soy sauce 120
salted mackerel 150
Unification wheat 3800
T-shirt for Yŏng-hŭi 900
visit neighbor child in auto accident 230
shrimp relish 50
room rent 15,000
retirement party for Yŏng-ho’s co-worker 500
old woman who lost her way home 140
payment for night watchman 50
subsidy rice 6100
spending money for Yŏng-su 450
aspirin 100
cabbage for making kimchi 220
potatoes and chicken gizzards 110
toothache remedy 120
pike mackerel 180
salt 100
coal briquettes 2320
wheat flour 3820
visit from Yŏng-hŭi’s friend at work 380
radio repair 500
needy neighbors 150
bean curd 80
Mother’s budget book was crammed with such items. I thought about the money we needed to survive in Ŭngang. Not our living expenses, but just the amount we needed to stay alive. My brother and sister and I were working ourselves to death in the factories. The money we got didn’t begin to match our production. That year the minimum cost of living for an urban laborer with a family of four was 83,480 wŏn. The total income from my brother and sister and me, as verified by Mother, was 80,231 wŏn. But after we took out the insurance premiums, mandatory savings, mutual-aid society payment, union dues, welfare payment, and the money we spent in the cafeteria, Mother actually ended up with no more than 62,351 wŏn. To earn this money we worked ourselves to death, and Mother was in a perpetual state of anxiety.
right-side molar 1500
left-side molar 1500
I closed the budget book. If Mother hadn’t had those two molars pulled, we might have had almost three thousand wŏn for movies and such—if we went by the budget book, that is. Ultimately I decided to pay close attention to the story Yŏng-hŭi was telling. This kind of thing couldn’t possibly happen in the town of Lilliput. And so I began to think of another Lilliput.
The Fault Lies with God as Well
I LONGED FOR A WORLD of utter simplicity. Simpler even than the world Father dreamed of. To go to the moon and work at an observatory—that was Father’s dream. If he had realized that dream he would have been able to see Coma Berenices, a constellation five billion light-years away. But poor Father passed on without achieving anything. His body was reduced to half a handful of ash in the crematorium, and Yŏng-ho and I, standing beside the water, wept at the sight of Mother scattering it. That was the instant when our dwarf father disappeared into something inanimate. He began suffering the instant he was born. Just because Father was small was no reason for the life allotted him to have been so small. Through death Father had rid himself of the suffering that was larger than his body. Father could not feed his children well. And he couldn’t send us all the way through school. There was nothing in our home that could be called new. We never got enough nourishment. We experienced symptoms of abnormality arising from malnutrition. Protein deficiency gave us anemia, edema, diarrhea. Father worked hard. He worked hard but forfeited a life of human decency. And so in his last years Father harbored a grudge against his times. Among the various characteristics of Father’s times was this one: Rights were not acknowledged; duties alone were enforced. Father sought economic and social rights, his injuries didn’t heal, and he fell into the smokestack of a brick factory.
Father was a warm man,
though. He held out hope for love. The world Father dreamed of was a world that provided work for all—a world where people were fed and clothed in return for their work, where everyone sent all their children through school and loved their neighbor. The ruling class in that world would not lead extravagant lives, Father had said. Because they would have the right to learn about human suffering. No one would lead a life of extravagance. Those who accumulated excessive wealth would be officially recognized as having lost their love for others, and the homes of these loveless families would be screened off from sunshine, blocked from breezes, cut off from electricity, and disconnected from water lines. Flowers and trees do not grow in the yards of such homes. Neither bees nor butterflies fly there. In the world of Father’s dreams the only thing that was enforced was love. People would work with love, raise their children with love. Love would make the rain fall, love would lead to equilibrium, love would make the wind blow and make it come to rest, even on the small stems of buttercups. But not even the world Father longed for was an ideal society. The problem lay in having to pass laws for punishing the loveless. If such a world had to have laws, then it was no different from this world. In the world I longed for, everyone would be able to live according to the free exercise of reason. In the world of Father’s dreams, they passed laws. I did away with those laws. My idea was to use education as a means for everyone to possess a noble love.