by Cho Se-hui
Father gave me the foundation that is love. And I, like Father, held out hope for love. But this city of Ŭngang, where our family of four had moved, was nothing like the ideal city of my mind. There we endured. We hadn’t gone to Ŭngang seeking a pleasant living environment. With my own eyes I could see that living things near the factories of Ŭngang were slowly dying. When I passed by Ŭngang Manufacturing and the synthetic-rubber plant I kept my eyes to the ground. When I crossed the small stream that hugged the factory I held my breath. There in plain sight was black wastewater and sludge. The laborers walked to the plant early in the morning. Out they trudged in the evening. Sleep is plastered to the faces of those who work the graveyard shift at factories that operate round the clock. To stay awake, those workers take stimulants. In England the situation seems to have been horrid. I read once that children who worked in the Rotherham factory were whipped so they would stay awake. I also read that this Rotherham factory was actually one of the more humane ones. At the Leighton factory the children would fight one another for a bowl of porridge. And there were sexual assaults. The foreman was terrible. He tied workers by the wrist to their machine. There were instances where he took a file to a worker’s teeth. Workers at the Leighton factory worked almost naked, even in winter. Fourteen hours of work a day was the norm. The factory owner prohibited workers from having watches. The single clock at the factory kept the workers going till late at night. Those workers and their families lived in slums near the factory. The workers drank cheap but potent alcohol. Their only source of comfort was the Gospel, which told them they would go to heaven when they died. And there were those who used opium to escape the wretchedness of their lives—used it even with their children. Meanwhile the factory owner and his family lived in a clean house on a clean street with shops. They wore nice clothes and ate tasty food. They had a villa outside the city. The holy father prayed for them. When the workers of England could be patient no more they attacked the factories. The first things they destroyed were the machines. In the ironworks of France the workers sang to the pounding of their hammers. The songs were cries of despair.
In comparison with such conditions, those of us at Ŭngang worked in an ideal environment. There was no factory owner who beat the workers, no foreman to file down our teeth. There was no need for us workers to fight over a bowl of gruel. And none of us injected opium. I suffered on account of my love. Father too must have suffered because of that love. The factory owners in England and France had never suffered. But to think now of the events of a hundred and sixty years earlier in those two countries was laughable.
“The important thing is the present.” This was Yŏng-ho speaking.
“Eldest Brother,” Yŏng-hŭi asked, “which side are we closer to?”
“What?”
“Are we closer to the situation a hundred and sixty years ago or the situation today?”
What could I say? Yŏng-hŭi knew nothing about the history of machine technology.
“Brother,” Yŏng-ho once said when he was little. “Yŏng-hŭi doesn’t know a thing.”
“What about you, Big Brother?” she asked him.
“I know.”
“I’ll learn too when I go to middle school.”
“You can learn now—the Industrial Revolution’s in the fifth grade book.”
“There’s going to be compulsory schooling through ninth grade.”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Father had said. “But even if there isn’t, we’ll work it out for you to go to middle school.”
“Really, Dad?”
“Really. I promise.”
“The wind is doing strange things today,” Mother said. “The smoke from the factory’s giving me a headache.”
“Better run the laundry through again,” said Yŏng-hŭi. “The kids who work in that factory are in terrible health.”
“Yŏng-hŭi, will you please not waste that pencil?” Mother had said. “Then we can send you to middle school.”
“I’m only using the one that Big Brother threw away.”
“Use it down to the point. We’re not rich, you know.”
The rain was over. It was evening, and the cicadas sang in the acacia bushes. Father was coming up to the yard, dragging the boat he had tethered to the bank of the sewer creek.
Yŏng-hŭi, who now worked the night shift, waited for my answer.
“Don’t you have a ruler?” I said with a smile.
“Nope, so I can’t measure.”
“Wild horses are running away with the world,” said Yŏng-ho. “So no one can say for sure.”
“Right now their descendants drive to work at their factories,” said Yŏng-hŭi. “In those countries the union people and the managers meet on equal terms for talks on labor/management issues.”
“What happened to the steward of your local?”
“I don’t know,” said Yŏng-hŭi. “I think the company people dragged him off somewhere.”
“You’re going to be late,” Mother said. “I wish you wouldn’t take those pills that keep you awake. And don’t even think about getting Eldest Brother mixed up in your union business. Just let him do his job.”
“All right.”
But at Ŭngang I couldn’t just “do my job.” My brother, sister, and I worked ourselves to the bone in the factories, but after we paid our room rent, ate our food, nothing was left. Once again the money we had sweated to earn had all gone to subsistence expenses. And we weren’t the only ones. All the workers of Ŭngang lived the same way. We ate poor food, wore poor clothing, and lived in poor health in a dirty home in a dirty neighborhood in a polluted environment. The neighborhood children dressed in dirty clothes and played in dirty alleys. They were abandoned children. I thought about the symptoms of disease that would appear in the children living near the factories as they grew up. When the Ŭngang industrial zone came under a trough of low pressure, the toxic gases spewed out by the various factories hung over the ground, polluting the air.
After arriving in Ŭngang Mother had constant headaches. She also had frequent breathing difficulties, coughing, and nausea. Yŏng-hŭi had hearing problems. The noise in the Weaving Section and the work site was torture for her. At the time, I was working as an assistant mechanic in the Maintenance Department. The instant I first saw Yŏng-hŭi on the night shift I wanted to die. She couldn’t keep her eyes open. Eyes shut, she was walking backward among the weaving machines. The temperature inside the workplace at night was a hundred and two. The Ŭngang Textile machines never stopped. Yŏng-hŭi’s blue work smock was soaked through with sweat. While Yŏng-hŭi was dozing several looms came to a complete stop. The foreman came up to Yŏng-hŭi and jabbed her in the arm. She snapped to and revived the looms. A spot of crimson blood appeared on the arm of her smock. It was three in the morning. The hardest time was from two until five in the morning, Yŏng-hŭi had said, averting her round, teary eyes. At the far end of her field of vision her oldest brother was working as an assistant mechanic. I oiled the machines that the mechanics serviced and I kept track of the tools. My work uniform was stained with sweat and oil.
I had a desire to effect a revolution—starting in the minds of the people who worked in Ŭngang. I wanted them to long for the same joys, the peace, the justice, the happiness that other people enjoyed. I wanted them to understand that they were not the ones who ought to feel intimidated. Yŏng-hŭi spent many hours observing me. Every day I stood before the office bulletin board. Posted there was the list of those who had retired or been fired or suspended. I would stand in front of the bulletin board feeling smaller than Father. “Look at the midget,” people had said. When Father crossed the street, cars would honk. People laughed at the sight of Father. Yŏng-ho had said he would make a land mine and bury it in the path of those people. “Eldest Brother,” Yŏng-hŭi had said, “I want you to kill those devils who call Father a midget.” Her lips quivered with the vast hatred that lay inside her. In my dreams I used to hear the explosions of mines Yŏng-ho
had buried. The cars of those people were swept up in flames. Inside the burning cars they screamed. At Ŭngang I heard the same screaming I had heard in my dreams. This was when the tempering tank at the aluminum electrode factory blew up. The tank was connected with the blast furnace of the casting factory, and the instant it blew up, pillars of deep-red flame shot far into the sky. Quenching water, metal chunks, bricks, fragments of slate collected and then dropped from the sky. The nearby factories sustained damage, too, their roofs flying off or their walls collapsing. We ran over to find the body parts of workers flung every which way in the vicinity of the factory. It was a small factory, but for one instant it produced the loudest noise in Ŭngang. The workers who had managed to survive slumped onto the shoulders of their co-workers and screamed.
I attended the memorial service for the victims at the workers’ church in the northern part of the factory zone. Yŏng-hŭi was packed among the laborers, praying. The minister, severely nearsighted, saw these young people through fish-eye lenses. The minister removed his glasses and closed his eyes. I saw the minister and the young people praying. Saw the tears streaming from their closed eyes. And from Mother’s eyes as well. Mother lifted the hem of her soiled skirt and wiped her tears. A young man who went to work at the aluminum electrode factory lived with his young bride in rooms rented from our neighbors. He was there when the tempering tank exploded. His young body flew off without a trace. He worked for thirteen hundred wŏn a day. The young bereaved bride hanged herself. She was pregnant, Mother said. Curled up in her stomach was yet one more life, one that made Mother cry. I suffered because of the love I had inherited from Father. We lived in a loveless world. Educated people made us suffer. They sat at their desks thinking only of ways to make machines operate at low cost. These people would mix sand with our food if they needed to. These were people who drilled holes in the bottom of the wastewater holding tank and let the sludge run into the ocean instead of passing through the filtration plant. Yŏng-hŭi said the company people had dragged the steward of her union local off somewhere. On one really bleak day they fired upwards of thirty people en masse.
They acted as if they were in a completely different boat from ours. They made more than ten times as much money as we did. In the evening they returned to their happy families in their clean homes far from the industrial area. They lived in warm houses. They didn’t know. Management didn’t know that the young workers, though they didn’t demonstrate when they were anxious to have something, were sprouting into something utterly new. None of the management people tried to see, so none of them knew of this change. If pressed to explain, I would call it a kind of power—a power that is completely skeptical of authority.
I went often to the workers’ church to read. The books I needed the minister located for me. The minister emphasized that fear was our greatest enemy. He needn’t have mentioned that. I already knew it. I also knew that the ministers at regular churches made use of fear. The minister at the workers’ church was different. He too was a man who had suffered on account of love. He took me to a meeting of the Social Studies Group. The union steward didn’t return to the plant. A copy of his letter of resignation was posted on the bulletin board, and that was that. The Ŭngang Textile labor union local was quietly foundering. I’ll bet management was satisfied. They summoned the union reps to a general meeting and had the vice-steward made steward. Inside the plant all was quiet. The machines operated nonstop, round the clock, the fired workers didn’t raise a commotion, and the workers, driven mercilessly by those responsible for production, continued to work obediently. The plant manager was a director. At the directors’ meetings at headquarters in Seoul he would thrust out his shoulders and sit down. The senior director praised him. All the shareholders praised him, and even the head of the Ŭngang Group acknowledged his ability. They still held to the illusion that they were creating a paradise. Even if they were to establish this paradise, I thought, it would be theirs and not ours. The key to the gate would never be given to us. They would abandon us beside a rotting garbage heap outside. They would leave with their families in their heated cars, their air-conditioned cars, and discover us alongside the highways leading out of the city. “How filthy!” their wives would say. “Lazy failures!” they would say. They didn’t consider the fact that they didn’t pay us a fair wage for the work we did.
Yŏng-hŭi brought the new union steward to see me. When she was vice-steward, she had worked with Yŏng-hŭi in the Weaving Department. She too had taken amphetamines on the night shift and then sleeping pills when working the day shift. I explained what we would have to do in the future and how hard it would be. She was an intelligent, pretty girl. This girl, Yŏng-i, was quick to understand what I was saying. She knew more than I did about labor law. She was just too young to organize her thoughts and feelings. All I had to do was show her the way out of that confusion. Every day I saw Yŏng-i. We gathered information, discussed it, found the right way to put it in words, made notes. Yŏng-hŭi would bring Yŏng-i to our house. Mother liked Yŏng-i. To keep our discussions private, we didn’t go to the workers’ church. When we saw each other at the plant we acted like strangers. Yŏng-hŭi reported to me something the minister had said: I would make an excellent leader. Yŏng-i believed those words. Although Mother felt uneasy, she decided that she could no longer hold me back. Item by item I wrote down what Yŏng-i, as a labor rep, would say to our employers. Yŏng-i convened a meeting of the local’s General Council and had four members elected to it. She presented the names of the council members to the company and in return received the roster of management’s members and reps. The plant manager sent a large pot of flowers to the local office. The head of the Production Department explained its significance—a wish for a conference on behalf of industrial peace and economic benefits for labor. They believed that the union had lost power. As on any other day, on the bulletin board outside the office they posted the names of those who had been fired or suspended. The young people who had finished the night shift and those on the afternoon shift gathered in front of the conference room and, all alike, waved to the union reps. The employers’ reps waved in the direction of the workers. Yŏng-i entered the conference room with the small notebook she and I had prepared in the course of our discussions and study. Yŏng-i wore a white dress and white shoes. She was pretty. Yŏng-hŭi pinned a corsage with a dark purple flower to Yŏng-i’s bosom. The young people broke into laughter. The people from management whistled. Yŏng-i didn’t laugh.
As one of the five observers on labor’s side, I entered the conference room in my oil-stained work uniform. The employers’ reps must have laughed at the sight of this incongruous assistant mechanic from Maintenance. They sat across from us, five paces away. I sat in a low chair in the corner and watched. At first the atmosphere was very cordial. The participants drank cold beverages beneath the fan. I drank as well. I was extremely careful, but in the end my glass, used for entertaining plant guests, was smeared with oil. Some twenty minutes passed, and the atmosphere changed. Employer 3: “We believe we have a good understanding of the particulars concerning improved productivity voiced by our respected assistant plant manager and Production Department head. Since the two sides are writing up the minutes of this meeting, it would be good to make them available to each and every member of the workforce.”
Laborer 3: “Here I would like to say a few words about a pin.”
Employer 2: “A pin?”
Laborer 3: “Yes, the sharp end of a bobby pin. The respected head of the Production Department will know what I’m talking about.”
Employer 4: “What’s this all about? Speak up, Yŏng-i.”
Laborer 1: “Under the circumstances I have no comment.”
Employer 4: “How come?”
Laborer 1: “We are here today as representatives of fifteen hundred laborers.”
Employer 3: “Right. And so?”
Laborer 1: “We are using polite speech but the respected assistant plant manag
er and department head are using plain speech.”
Employer 1: “Our mistake.”
Employer 3: “What about the minutes? Please correct the first part.”
Laborer 1: “Since the respected department head will know the story about the bobby pin better than I, I would like to hear it directly from him.”
Employer 4: “I tell you, this is news to me.”
Employer 3: “Once more, please—polite speech this time.”
Employer 4: “All right. With all due respect, I have absolutely no idea what this bobby pin business is all about.”
Employer 2: “Bobby pin?”
Mother: Don’t forget a bobby pin, Yŏng-hŭi.
Yŏng-hŭi: Why, Mom?
Mother: If one of your seams comes apart, you’ll have to fasten it with the pin.
Laborer 3: “This bobby pin is making the workers cry.”
Yŏng-hŭi: If any kid calls Dad a midget, I’ll poke him with this.
Mother: Yŏng-hŭi, please. He’ll bleed.
Yŏng-hŭi: I’ll poke him anyway.
Laborer 3: “It happens when we’re on the night shift. By two or three in the morning no one can keep their eyes open. Sometimes we’re asleep on our feet. And then the foreman pokes us in the arm with a bobby pin.”
Employer 4: “That’s nonsense.”
Laborer 4: “We’re not insects, you know.”
Employer 5: “Come on, you two.”
Laborer 5: “The foreman holds it near the end. Then he jabs the tip in our arm. It pierces the flesh and jolts us awake so maybe we can do a better job of watching our looms. But during the past month I’ve seen quite a few union members on the night shift running off between the looms crying.”
Laborer 4: “I’d like to know the relationship between bobby pins and improved productivity.”
Employer 4: “None whatsoever.”
Laborer 2: “You knew about the bobby pins, didn’t you?”