Offerings

by Michael ByungJu Kim

  I take the boxes of Choco Pie. Someone from a Hope Tent releases a plastic bag of light green balloons, which float jauntily skyward—a postcard of hope ascendant—before being swallowed up in the black smoke.

  I find the paint building, thanks to a huge banner with bloodred letters hanging from the roof: LAYOFF IS MURDER! The labor union has taken over the top floor. Union men stand on the roof wearing hard hats and holding long steel pipes, and their clang reverberates to the ground floor. I can feel the electricity crackling among them, as a fuse about to get lit. I walk up five flights of stairs to their main office.

  “Yoon buweewonjang-nim?” I say, knocking on an open door. “Yoon Jung Ha-ssi?”

  A man glares up from a small group gathered at a desk. He’s in his midthirties, the lines creasing his forehead belying his age. Behind the wire-rim glasses, there are soft eyes and a baby’s mouth, the kind of face that saw love from his family and joy in his youth. A life of daily breakfasts, dwenjang guk, ghim, and rice, some fried eggs, enjoyed with his family. But that’s long in the past. No shave or haircut, or a laugh, I’d guess, in a long time. Just a trace of white toothpaste under his nostrils, a balm for the tear gas, I learn.

  Yoon is about to ask who I am, then he sees the Choco Pie box under my arm and the leather briefcase I’m holding. “Ah, Jee Yeon’s friend,” he says. He’s neither polite nor rude. “You picked a hell of a day to visit. Wait for me outside.”

  When he comes out to see me, Yoon drags his Prospecs sneakers like slippers, his heels over the accordioned backs. He doesn’t bother with pleasantries. “We began our strike a week ago,” he says. “Militants from Daehan NoChong are pushing for all-out war. They say it’s the only way to get on the news, grab the public’s attention. I’m seeking a more peaceable compromise. Bring management to the table for discussion. Forget wage hikes. We know these are difficult times. Just job security. No layoffs. Maybe get some union representation on the board of directors, as they do in German companies.”

  He wipes the sweat off his forehead. “Jee Yeon tells me you’re with Phipps, the bank that’s helping to sell off the company. Are you part of that team?”

  “I am.”

  He sighs bitterly. “Do you have any idea what foreigners will do with this company? They’ll cut the workforce in half. At least. That’s three thousand men—three thousand families. And it’s already started . . .”

  I look down.

  “You’re an educated guy. They ever make you read John Locke? When a company hires a man, that company enters into a moral pact. If he works hard, they take care of him. Firing workers at will is a violation of that sacred pact. We used to have lifetime employment in our country. But Korean companies and management have learned from the Americans. Now we have layoffs, too. ‘Restructuring,’ they call it. The difference is, in the US, over half the workers get a new job within six months. In Korea, it’s close to zero. That’s the job market, yes, but it’s also the culture, the stigma. You get laid off, it means you must not have worked hard enough. The men are ostracized, their families get broken up . . .”

  “Yes, I realize—”

  “That’s what this work stoppage is about. It’s a preemptive protest. Sell us irresponsibly to a foreign operator, and you won’t have any workforce. No workers, no company. So promise us no layoffs.”

  “Is it working?” I say. “The strike?”

  He has a pained expression. “We’re playing right into management’s hands. They ordered us back to work, knowing we wouldn’t go back. That gave them the excuse to bring on the riot police. You ever been shot with a water cannon?”

  I can’t say that I have.

  “They shoot it at your face, you feel like you’re drowning. Shoot it at your body, knocks you off your feet, leaves bruises on your torso for days. Not as bad as tear gas, though. You see those helicopters hovering above us? They’re equipped with liquefied tear gas, much more ‘effective’ than regular gas. That’s what they’re threatening us with. And this morning, they turned off our water.

  “But I’ll tell you what’s worse. The tension between the guys laid off and the ones spared, who’re still working. Guilt, and anger and recrimination. The spared ones think, ‘There but for the grace of God.’ The others think, ‘Why me?’ Management turns them against each other. We’ve seen confrontations. It’s taking a heavy psychological toll.”

  He grimaces, as though from physical pain. “Last week, a worker, one of the spared ones . . . he committed suicide. He just couldn’t take the guilt, and the pressure.”

  He lets this sink in, and we’re silent for a while.

  “How’d you end up . . . here?” I ask, just to say something.

  “This is where they keep the paint. We have over two hundred thousand liters of flammable material. They wouldn’t dare attack us here.”

  Seeing the look on my face, he says, “I want a peaceful resolution. But I’m no Gandhi.”

  “I meant how did you end up leading the union?”

  Yoon takes off his glasses, wipes the lenses with his shirtfront. “I woke up this morning with one thought: today’s the day I make these people’s lives better. Tonight I’ll go to sleep, and in the morning, I’ll have one thought, Today I will make these people’s lives better. One goal in my life. Only thing that matters.”

  He looks at me, his soft eyes turning firm. “You can make their lives better.”

  I know better than to speak.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” he says. “Your project—”

  Just then we hear a loud bang, then a deafening roar outside. Yoon and I run to the window. A battle has broken out on the factory grounds.

  Yoon gasps, cries out, “No, no, no!” as he brushes past me and out the door.

  Below, on one side are the striking workers, all wearing white masks with goggles pulled over them. They attack, armed with stones and slingshots full of nails, then they retreat and attack again. From the far side, a force of riot police and private thugs marches in military formation, wielding full-body shields and billy clubs. They press forward, and SWAT teams flanking them pick off protesters, throw them in trucks.

  Helicopters spray streams of what looks like water but I gather, from its effects on the people below, is liquid CS gas. The workers are disoriented but throb with the desperate energy of a cornered animal. They lob green soju bottles with fiery rag tails as they retreat. A banner behind them reading, WE STAND READY TO DIE FOR OUR CAUSE, hangs crooked, half-torn.

  I see a riot policeman get hit flush with a Molotov cocktail, his back and arms catching on fire. The flames shoot up, engulf him. He throws himself off the top of a SWAT truck and rolls on the ground as his colleagues stomp his back with their boots. Tendrils of smoke rise off his still body.

  As soon as I step outside, my eyes start burning. Now I understand what the ski goggles were for. The tear gas assaults all my senses at once, and for a minute, I’m sure my eyes are bleeding and I’m going blind. I am become King Lear. Or more like the Duke of Gloucester, eyes ripped out. For some reason, I can’t hear, either. The roar of the crowd has become a dull reverberation. I cough violently. My nose runs. I can’t see, can’t hear. I can’t breathe.

  I’m enveloped in fog, a mix of smoke and tear gas and dirt kicked up by the fighting mob. For a moment, I am suspended in time, alone, in a vacuum of noise and bodies. The chaos around me recedes. There’s a long bamboo stick on the ground in front of me, left there like a gift. It feels right in my hand, the grip, the weight distribution, the supple hardness. The noise returns, and I fall in behind some protesters. I start swinging my stick like a baseball bat, though I can’t see well. I hit somebody in front of me, I’m pretty sure a policeman, with a satisfying thwack on his shoulder.

  A figure emerges from the fog. My eyes clear just enough for me to make out his SWAT uniform and a black helmet that glistens in a dagger of sunlight. He points his billy club at me, and I croak, “Darth Vader,” just before he drives his b
aton into my gut, knocking the breath out of me. I try to summon some old tae kwon do moves, but my legs won’t move. Another SWAT guy appears out of nowhere, knocks the stick out of my hand, and sweeps my feet from under me in a clean judo swipe. I fall facedown on the ground. I taste the coppery dirt.

  There’s the sound of a thick crack, and a body, a protester, falls down next to me. He’s been clubbed in the head, and a trickle of blood rolls down his forehead and into his goggles, where it forms a small red puddle. One of the SWAT guys plants a knee on my back. He spits, “Ppalgengyi,” in my ear. Dirty Communist. With the full weight of his body on me, I’m suffocating.

  Jack comes to my rescue. “Hey, hey, officer, sir,” he tells them, his palms up. “Just a case of mistaken identity. He’s not who you think he is. This guy’s with me, not one of them.” He helps me gingerly to my feet.

  I protest, say I am one of them. But they either don’t hear or choose to ignore me. They release me with a dismissive shove. I turn back to look for the man with the head wound, but Jack yanks me away. “Hey, easy there, cowboy.”

  When we’re at a safe distance from the action, he says, “You okay? For Chrissake, you could’ve been killed out there.”

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here.” Jack leads me by the elbow.

  I look around for my box of Choco Pies.

  “Lose your briefcase?” he says.

  “No. Yes. I mean, doesn’t matter. Don’t need it anymore.”

  As we hurry past the front gate, I see behind us the blackened carcass of a torched Ilsung Motors sedan in the middle of the factory yard. Dark fumes swirl from it. The roar of the mob dissipates with the smoke from the factory.

  “A fucking war zone,” Jack says, shaking his head.

  I take a bottle of water from him, pour cool water in my stinging eyes.

  “Listen, little buddy. Word gets out about this union shit-show, no one’s gonna touch T-ball. I think we should get to Daimler pronto and proactively—”

  “Tell them what?” I say. “That they’re gonna buy a workforce of happy campers?”

  “That we’ll agree to an asset sale. Forget the debt—leave it behind. Forget the contingent liabilities, for that matter. Just take what you want.”

  “Yeah? How about the workers? Forget their job security, too?”

  He sighs. “What I’m saying is, it behooves us to be reasonable here, for the firm. Under the circumstances.”

  “‘It behooves us, for the firm . . . ?”

  “Yeah, you remember, the guys who sign your paycheck every month? And give you a nice, fat bonus at year-end?”

  “Under the circumstances,” I repeat. “I suppose it would behoove us to be reasonable in price, too.”

  “We’ll signal we’ll be . . . yeah, realistic in price, too. Fuck, all right, cheap.”

  “Priced to go.”

  “Fuckin’ A, to go! Price goes down, we . . . we’ll still get our guaranteed minimum fee, right?”

  I look at him.

  “Right?”

  I can barely see out of my still-tearing eyes.

  “Christ, you look like hell,” he says. “Your eyes, all red, full of pus. Can you see?”

  “Yeah, fine,” I tell him. “I can see now.”

  27

  Mid-March 1998

  After Changwon, I can’t talk to anyone. How can anyone understand the jumble of emotions I’m feeling, the anger and frustration and guilt? I keep to myself at work, doing only what I have to, and avoid colleagues, even Jun. When I call Jee Yeon to finalize our dinner plans, I realize they’re the first full sentences I’ve exchanged with someone in two days.

  We meet after work at Tongin Sijang, a traditional street market not far from my office in the Hanguk Life Building. I wanted to take her to a proper restaurant for our first real date, but when I asked her what she wanted to eat, Japanese, French, Italian, she said whatever you like, Dae Joon-ssi. I said ttukbokki, the spicy rice cakes of my childhood. She laughed, said she knew just the place.

  The sijang is in an alleyway tucked behind skyscrapers in the central business district, a juxtaposition of the traditional with the modern that people say gives Seoul its charm. We walk down the serpentine alley, hemmed in by stalls selling dried pollack hung on a line like laundry, dried seaweed and anchovies on our left, makgulli, dried persimmon, fresh tangerines, and hallabong on our right. The brine of the sea mixes with the citrus of Jeju to produce a tangy sulfuric smell that is insistently local. The curly-permed ajummas manning the stalls, unrepentantly unmodernized in garb and manner, complete the local effect.

  As we walk, I ask Jee Yeon, as casually as possible, if I passed the test with ol’ Dragon Eyes. She just smiles, pulls my arm around her shoulders.

  We arrive at the famous ttukbokki stand, where there is not a stand, just two white plastic stools. My stool squeaks when I sit, forces me to concentrate on keeping my balance. The owner-chef, Imo to everyone, uses thick, swollen hands to stir the red rice cakes in a scarred black wok to get them good and sticky. Jee Yeon explains the ttukbokki here is special because it’s wok-fried, not braised, and, well, it’s pretty spicy.

  I take her warning as a personal challenge, and I put a heaping chopsticksful in my mouth. The ttuk sizzles on my tongue, and the taste is overwhelmed by the sensation of endorphins firing from the sharp pain. “Just as I remember it,” I say, my eyes watering. I wonder out loud if they eat ttukbokki in North Korea.

  Jee Yeon, grown accustomed to my wayward musings, says, not missing a beat, “Probably. After all, mandoo, dumplings, are from the North, and they put ttuk in their mandooguk.”

  “You think Korea will ever be reunified?” I say.

  “I used to think so, sometime in my lifetime. Now . . .”

  Abuji taught me not to talk politics on dates. “Don’t you think Koreans should laugh more?” I say.

  “I don’t think laughter equals happiness. Happiness is something attained. Not manufactured.”

  We finish our ttukbokki in silence.

  She notices the splint I have on my right forefinger, lifts it to examine. “Does it hurt?”

  Not as much as my pride. Or my conscience. Shaking my head, I say, “I’m not sure where I hurt it. At the factory somewhere. I met your old sunbei, the union guy.”

  She nods.

  “I can’t get the ringing of their chants out of my ears. The protesting laborers . . .”

  She listens, as good listeners do, without judging.

  “You should’ve seen it . . . the tear gas, the smoke, the beatings, the blood . . .” I can barely get the words out. “It was . . . obscene.”

  Jee Yeon falls into a deep quiet. “You know, in my student days, when I was doing all those protest marches, I saw it all . . . the hate, the violence.”

  My turn to be the listener, she the confider.

  “But we kept at it.” She lights a cigarette. “Because we believed in what we were fighting for. Changing society . . . It drove Appa crazy. Not just because it was against his politics, but we were demonstrating against his Military Academy sunbei, President Chun. He took it personally.”

  “Parents always take it personally.”

  “He never said so, but I think he wanted me to join the company, get groomed in the family business. He thought I had a better head for business than Oppa. But Umma would never allow it. She thinks good girls from good families should play music and get married right out of Ewha. That’s what she did.”

  “So you rebelled.”

  “I followed my heart. You know about the June Uprising of ’87? I participated in the sit-ins, the marches. It was beautiful, true, something we believed in. The demonstration at Yonsei, June 9th, when that student Lee Han Yeol was critically wounded by a tear gas grenade, I was there. You must’ve seen the photo, Han Yeol in his Yonsei T-shirt, unconscious, blood trickling down his forehead as he’s dragged off by another demonstrator. It started out as a peaceful sit-in, we sang
Yang Hee Eun songs all afternoon. You know the lyrics to “Morning Dew”?

  After the long night, on every leaf,

  Like morning dew prettier than pearls,

  The sorrow in my bosom forms in drops,

  As the sun rises red over the cemetery.

  “Pretty, sad,” I say.

  “We were singing, and then the riot police showed up and, without warning, started firing tear gas at us. Probably tear gas produced by Appa’s company. All hell broke loose. We thought it was gonna turn into another Gwangju Massacre.”

  “Yet you, the students prevailed.” I remember the pictures of long-haired students triumphantly waving Taegukgi, the Korean flag, in the streets.

  “Lee Han Yeol died in the hospital. We had a martyr. It helped, of course, that he was photogenic, in the flower of youth, and from a SKY school. His name became a rallying cry for the democracy movement. The whole country, laborers, religious groups, taxi drivers, even salarymen, rose up. All of Korea took to the streets, millions marching, demanding freedom.

  “Dictator Chun finally succumbed. His handpicked successor, General Roh Tae Woo, issued the June 29 Democratic Declaration, calling for free, direct elections and releasing dissident Kim Dae Jung. We broke the long, uninterrupted line of dictators, Park Chung Hee to Chun Doo Hwan to Roh Tae Woo.”

  “Boy, you and my abuji would have a lot to talk about.”