by Cho Se-hui
Employer 4: “Really, now, this is absurd. Do you think we would simply stand by and allow something like that to happen? If some foreman is using a bobby pin, it’s his own sadistic nature—the company has nothing to do with it.”
Laborer 1: “In any event, please conduct an investigation.”
Employer 1: “Department head, please conduct an investigation. If the allegations are true, please take the necessary corrective measures.”
Laborer 1: “This is the bobby pin that was used in the Weaving Section. I know production is important. But I can’t have our union members crying and running off between the looms at a time of night when everyone else is asleep in bed.”
Employer 1: “The union steward is right. We are civilized people living in a civilized society. If you find something backward happening here, it would be a shameful affair.”
Employer 2: “As all of you will know by now, we at this plant do not force you laborers—either through violence, threats, imprisonment, et cetera, or through illegal restrictions on your physical or intellectual freedom—to perform work against your own free will. Even if you create an incident during the course of your work, we do not engage in aggressive behavior.”
Laborer 1: “I should offer a dissenting opinion. But since there are other items on our agenda I’ll let that pass.”
Employer 2: “No, no. Speak up.”
Laborer 1: “With all due respect, you said you don’t do those things. But they’re prohibited to begin with. We have other matters to discuss, so I won’t offer my opinion now. There are many instances, though, where prohibitions are no longer being observed.”
Employer 5: “If we’re going to do everything according to the letter of the law, then most of the machines in Ŭngang will have to shut down.”
Employer 4: “And if the machines are shut down they get rusty. And the plants will have to close down. And if that happens, all of you lose your jobs.”
Employer 1: “That’s a little far-fetched. There are some problems with what you two gentlemen are saying.”
Employer 2: “Perhaps we should strike the two gentlemen’s remarks from the minutes.”
Employer 1: “Yes, please strike them out.”
Boy 1: Leave them out.
Boy 2: How come?
Boy 1: We don’t play with the midget’s boys.
Yŏng-ho: Big Brother.
Me: Easy, Yŏng-ho.
Yŏng-ho: Don’t say no to me. I’m going to kill this asshole.
Boy 1: Hey! This guy hit me!
Yŏng-ho: I’m going to kill you! I’m going to kill you!
Me: Leave him alone, Yŏng-ho. Yŏng-ho! Yŏng-ho!
Boy 3: Here comes the midget!
Boy 4: Here comes the midget!
Laborer 2: “What about our plant?”
Employer 2: “What do you mean?”
Employer 1: “For our part, labor/management harmony and industrial peace are necessary. We can’t have our talks going off on a tangent.”
Laborer 1: “We work hard. We even try to make the machines run faster. But we laborers cannot live a life worthy of human beings. We’ve been thinking about the work we do in the plants, our cost of living, and our pay. Contrary to the remarks offered by the respected assistant plant manager, we’ve come to the conclusion that we are backward people living in a backward society. We think that if we are to make the machines run any faster, then we should live a life worthy of human beings.”
Employer 1: “This is so far-fetched it’s frightening. If you think about it, we’re laborers like you. We work and earn money too.”
Laborer 1: “We’re only the same in the sense that we both receive a pay envelope. But the envelope we receive isn’t thick like the one you get. The one we get is absurdly thin. We are here today to let you know we cannot accept that thin envelope indefinitely.”
Employer 2: “You put it so well, it all sounds convincing. But may I ask one thing?”
Laborer 1: “Yes.”
Employer 2: “Where did you get the money to dress yourself up so nicely? If the envelope is so thin, then where do you get the money to eat and buy clothing and shoes?”
Laborer 1: “I live alone. My parents are no longer alive and I have no younger brothers or sisters to pay tuition for. I don’t eat a lot and I’m not in the habit of snacking. When I’m not working I’m tired and all I do is sleep. And I always remind myself to keep my clothes clean so I can wear them for a long time. I bought these clothes and shoes with money I saved up. Because I’m now representing the employees I wanted to look neat. In order to dress up like this I spent more money than a grade three laborer is paid in a month.”
Employer 1: “Anyway, what are your demands?”
Laborer 1: “A twenty-five percent pay raise, a two hundred percent bonus, and unconditional rehiring of workers fired without cause—that’s all.”
Employer 5: “Listen to these kids!”
Employer 4: “There’s no need to talk further. Behind the scenes there are subversive elements manipulating these kids.”
Yŏng-hŭi: Mom, Eldest Brother broke a window in the big house down there.
Mother: I know. Father went over.
Yŏng-hŭi: The boy who lives there was teasing Father, calling him a midget. So why did Father go over?
Mother: When you children do something wrong, Father has to take responsibility.
Yŏng-hŭi: Until when?
Mother: Until you children are grown-up.
Employer 1: “In the future, if there’s some incident, all of you will have to take responsibility.”
Mother: And when you’re grown-up you’ll have to take responsibility yourselves for what you do.
Employer 2: “Your pay was increased last February and we are paying you according to that adjustment. As for a bonus, we paid one at the end of last year.”
Laborer 1: “That was a unilateral increase on your part. And the ‘bonus’ that was paid, you can’t attach the name bonus to it, it was so small. It was no more than a month’s overtime pay.”
Employer 2: “You get paid for overtime, don’t you? Go see the people at headquarters—they work overtime until nine or ten at night and you don’t hear a peep out of them.”
Laborer 1: “They’re educated people. You can’t compare them with us. We have completely different expectations. They don’t stand in line to receive a thin envelope like we do. And they also get a six hundred percent yearly bonus. It’s their problem if they don’t get the overtime pay they’re entitled to. It’s not up to us to correct their mistakes.”
Employer 5: “This won’t do.”
Employer 1: “Union Steward, I’ll bet you believe the relationship between employers and laborers is completely adversarial.”
Laborer 1: “Here at Ŭngang, now, yes.”
Employer 1: “That’s a mistaken perception. If business goes well, then the people who benefit are you laborers.”
Laborer 1: “It shouldn’t be a matter of benefits just for the workers. Both labor and management should benefit. This is our goal. Now the situation is too unfair. When it’s fair, then we can achieve industrial peace.”
Employer 5: “Now cut that out!”
Employer 3: “Calm down now.”
Employer 5: “What does that girl know?”
Employer 1: “Please sit down.”
Employer 5: “I don’t understand why you let that girl ramble on about industrial peace and all.”
Employer 3: “Please sit down.”
Employer 1: “Let me repeat: You all have the wrong idea. You think that when the company profits, the entire profit is divided among a few people—that’s a very dangerous idea. Business profits are returned to society. They’re distributed fairly for employee wages, shareholder dividends, and reinvestment in the business itself.”
Laborer 1: “With all respect, I knew you’d say something like that.”
Employer 1: “If you’ve got something to say, then speak right up.”
Laborer 1: “How is it possible to pile up shameful profits by not paying employees a fair wage—and then returning those profits to society? And what’s the use of sharing those profits with shareholders? And what’s the use of accumulating those bloody profits? We believe that such a business should not be allowed to expand. To be precise, as long as you run the machines without paying us a wage that enables us to live like human beings, it’s not a profit. It should be called something else. I just read in the newspaper that our respected CEO plans to donate two billion wŏn a year for the needy. And I saw a photo of our respected CEO smiling for the reporters. This would never have happened if the profits had been fairly distributed in the first place. It’s deceitful for a business to demand a one-way sacrifice from the laborers at several factories—eat, sleep, work, and nothing else, then leave when you get a dismissal notice—and then suddenly offer to donate something to society. It’s nothing but a smokescreen to avoid public criticism. We’ve got a list of the directors of the social welfare foundation established by our respected CEO. We held out hope for those gentlemen. But our expectations were shattered. Those gentlemen have absolutely no idea of our physical, economic, and mental suffering. If those gentlemen were truly fine individuals, they would have said that the money to be donated by our respected chairman should first be divided among poor laborers and that other funds would be donated to society.”
Employer 5: “Listen to her. I’ll never forgive her for this.”
Employer 3: “Will you please settle down?”
Employer 1: “Union Steward, give us that notebook. And let’s adjourn.”
Laborer 1: “When will you give us the company’s response to our demands?”
Employer 1: “You can forget about that. We have nothing to give to people who look at everything so pessimistically. I don’t understand how you can deny the progress we’ve made.”
Laborer 1: “That’s not the case. We’re the ones who work on the front lines of industry. All we’re saying is that the benefits should be returned to us as well. Why do we have to suffer on behalf of a healthy economy?”
Employer 1: “Time will solve everything.”
Laborer 1: “The laborers have already waited a long time.”
Employer 5: “These kids ought to be jailed or something.”
Employer 3: “Would you please sit down and be quiet?”
Employer 1: “No, he’s right. The kids on the night shift and afternoon shift are crowding around outside. Obviously these kids are stirring up the union members and are going to carry out some organized activities. These kids have already broken the law.”
Laborer 1: “No. They’re here because they’re wondering what’s happening. And even if there should be some incident, that’s the only thing we’ve done wrong. But the employers are different. Once in a while we make one mistake—in comparison, the employers are breaking ten articles of law a day.”
Employer 1: “Please shut the door.”
Employer 2: “If you’d be good enough to shut both doors. Don’t let these kids out.”
Father: Don’t let Yŏng-su out for the time being.
Mother: All right.
Yŏng-hŭi: What did Eldest Brother do wrong? It’s the fault of the boy in that family.
Father: What did the boy do wrong?
Yŏng-hŭi: He was making fun of you, calling you a midget.
Father: That boy didn’t throw a rock and break our window. He didn’t do anything wrong. Your father is a midget.
And so for three days I couldn’t go out and play. I took a sewing needle from Mother’s spool and made a fishhook out of it. I heated it in a flame and made the end of it curve just right. I braided two strands of thread, coated it with wax, and attached the hook to the end. The day Mother said I could go out, I ran up the hill behind our house. I broke off a long bush-clover branch and made a fishing pole out of it. Again that year we had a drought. Every day Father went out to work on pumps. The water level in the sewer creek went down noticeably. I went down the bank to the creek and fished. The small fish that I hooked flopped around in the shade of the brick factory smokestack. This, then, was the one and only time I heard from Father’s own lips that he was a dwarf. Mother went into the kitchen before she had finished washing the barley beside the pump. If something had happened to me, Mother would have died too. I returned home late that night. It was a night when a trough of low pressure had settled over all of Ŭngang and it was really hard to breathe. Mother sat completely still. First she asked me about Yŏng-i and then about Yŏng-hŭi. She wanted to talk to Yŏng-i, as she had talked to Yŏng-hŭi, about the traditional duties a woman should perform for her family and home. I didn’t know how long Yŏng-i would be in trouble. Yŏng-i’s white dress didn’t stay clean that day. All Yŏng-hŭi had to do was go on a two-day, one-night fast, chant slogans, and sing the laborers’ song. I returned home alone. I thought again that night of the world Father longed for. In the world Father longed for, those who accumulated excessive wealth would be officially recognized as having lost all their love for others, and the homes of those loveless people would be screened off from sunshine, blocked from breezes, cut off from electricity, and disconnected from water lines. The people in that world would work with love and 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 on the small stems of buttercups. Father believed that laws should be passed in order to punish loveless people. This hadn’t sat right with me. But that night I decided to revise my thinking. Father was right.
Everyone was committing sins—without exception. In Ŭngang not even God was an exception.
The Klein Bottle
THERE ARE A LOT of blind people in Ŭngang. This is one of the things that surprised me about living there. Of course I didn’t see them in the industrial zone. I learned about them during my walks about the urban district and residential area. One day I saw five blind people in the space of ten minutes. During the next ten minutes I saw three, and in the following ten minutes I saw two more, tapping the ground next to my feet. I found this surprising. There must be cities in the world where you can wander about for more than an hour without seeing a single blind person. I couldn’t understand why Ŭngang in particular should have so many blind people. The people of Ŭngang didn’t seem to know there were so many blind people all around them. And so there were times when all the people of Ŭngang seemed blind to me.
I thought there was only one way that blind people could see the world. And that was for them to have sight. Mother held to a different idea: It all depended on the eyes through which you saw the world. She knew an old man who saw well with just one eye. Every day Mother went to the lumberyard of a wood products factory that owed its existence to an exclusive license from the Ŭngang Regional Port Authority. Piled there were timber logs from Indonesia. When the tide came up to the lumberyard the logs floated. A log-picker plucked the logs from the water. The people of Liberation Precinct stripped the bark from the Indonesian logs, which had grown tall in the Indonesian sunshine. They stripped the bark and used it at home for fuel. The surplus they sold. Mother and the one-eyed old man stripped the bark together. The old man had worked at the casting plant and lost the sight of an eye. For thirty years he had seen the world through a single eye. He was different from the one-eyed king of the country of the blind. The one-eyed king was convinced that he always saw better than anyone else. But the world he saw was only half the world. He would never know the other half as long as he believed only in that one eye and didn’t try to see from a different perspective. Mother stripped the bark from the Indonesian logs and carried it home on her back up the slope of Liberation Precinct. The one-eyed old man followed her. They arrived at his home first. There was bark from the logs throughout the one-eyed old man’s small house. That day some students from a church in the residential area paid the old man a visit. One of them asked him, “Grandfather, what do you t
hink your life will be like in the future?” Another read off six answers and asked him to pick one:
■ much better
■ somewhat better
■ neither better nor worse
■ a bit worse
■ much worse
■ no answer
The old man answered simply: “Much better. Mark that one for me.”
The students stood at the bark door. Their faces indicated that this reply was unexpected.
“I’ll soon be dead,” the one-eyed old man said.
That old man, just like Father, would find peace only after he died, said Mother. When the students asked her the same question, she told them: “Our life will be much worse.” Mother was anxious on my account. She believed I had started a losing battle. It didn’t sit right with me that Mother was going to the lumberyard.
“Mother, will you please stop?” I said. “Your going to the lumberyard bothers us. How much is that bark going to help us?”
“All this is because of you.” Mother spread out the sea-soaked bark in the sun. “I’m doing this in preparation for when you aren’t here any more.”
“Am I supposed to be going somewhere?”
“You’re always having to leave home.”
“But I’m not going anywhere.”
“You’ll get run out of here.”
“By who?”
“Enough, all right?” Mother turned her back to me. “What about the eight days or so you were away from home that last time? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”
“You know—it was because of union business.”
“It’s all the same. You get beat up and you come home bloody. You’ll end up abandoning your mom and your brother and sister and continuing with those crazy activities. And then you’ll leave us with a sackful of worries.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen.” “There’s no need for you to say that.” Mother knew. “This is the start,” she said as she moved the pieces of bark and spread them out. “This is the start of whatever it is you’re up to. I have no idea what it is. What are you going to do? And who for?”