The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  I asked the old hands at the taverns and stalls whether there had been any labor disputes in the past. They told me there’d been a big one at a famous sewing factory. The workers had sealed off the building and managed to hold off the authorities for a while but were eventually chased out. They took refuge up a nearby hill, where they continued their protest for two more days before it was suppressed. There had also been short-lived conflicts in electronics and food-packaging factories. But these old hands, despite the disputes unfolding in plain sight, had only gazed blankly at them or went to play volleyball during lunch. And even these stories were whispered to me in a park near where I worked, not talked about openly.

  There’s one particular man I befriended who sticks in my memory. His nickname was Madoros. He used to work at corporate before being sent down for some mistake or other, and he was now fitting lenses onto molds. I envied his easy job at first but, apparently, this was the work of a master. It was that difficult to attach the lenses to the round molds without an iota of tilt. I’ve forgotten his real name because we used his nickname so much. A navy man, all he talked of was the sea. And because his military affiliation had been so close to mine, we had a lot to talk about.

  Madoros told me a little bit about himself once over drinks. He’d worked in a company before joining the navy. After he was discharged, he hoped to join a ship’s crew and scoured the ports of Incheon and Busan, but no one wanted to hire him. There were too many men like him who’d been in the navy and were looking for the same work. But then his father, who ran a bicycle store in a small town, was hit by a truck and lost the use of his legs, and Madoros could no longer afford to be choosy. As eldest son, he had to get any job he could and at least contribute to the monthly pharmacy bills. He ended up asking for a job at the same company he’d started out in.

  He told me that the current division leader at corporate had been his foreman when he first entered the company, and they had been at odds from the start. The man had pretended to be drunk during a company drinking session and beat him up. Also, just two months after he began work, he was sent down from corporate to the complex for being one of five workers involved in instigating a labor dispute. “We were too hasty, and few of the others joined us.”

  It was he who told me about the social groups the employees had formed. At work, if you so much as mentioned labor unions, your coworkers, whom you knew next to nothing about anyway, would instantly clam up and avoid you. So, getting people together to socialize outside of work wasn’t easy. Whoever put a group together had to have a reputation for being a responsible worker. No one trusted a worker who acted like a gangster. It helped, too, if they were skilled at their job. Some companies had been extending overtime into Sundays and holidays, but churches and religious groups began to object, which meant laborers could use Sundays to meet up. The social groups tended to divide along gender lines, with women getting together for church, books, or music appreciation, and men getting together to hike, fish, or play soccer or volleyball.

  Sundays at the Guro-dong workers’ residential area usually involved napping until lunch, doing the laundry, watching baseball, or going to the theater with a date. Some people belonged to social groups with their coworkers, but I didn’t see too many of these.

  One weekend, I suggested to Madoros and my master engineer that we go see a show. I wanted to check out the culture in these parts. Madoros was reluctant. “We’re a little too old …” But the master engineer said he had been meaning to go but didn’t want to go alone. He invited the factory women as well and found out what was playing: the Ha Chun-hwa show was in town at the Guro Theater.

  The next day at our meeting site near the tram station, the engineer showed up in a tan suit, complete with necktie, while the other three or four factory men and women in their twenties also came in smart suits and dresses, waving their hands as they crossed the street toward us. The show was on in several theaters at once, and performers had to rush between different venues in central Yeongdeungpo, Guro, Siheung, and the outskirts of Anyang. As a result, the order of appearance was always being switched around, depending on who showed up when. Sometimes you’d be treated to a nice, long performance from one of the headliners, whereas other times you’d be stuck with an intermission because they couldn’t make it on time. In any case, the inside of the theater was filled to the rafters, almost all young factory workers. They whistled, sighed, applauded, and cried their eyes out.

  When we came out into the dark street after the show, the young workers disappeared into the market alley, saying they were going to have a few beers and shake their bodies to the earsplitting disco at the music teahouse. Madoros said, “It’s the only way they can endure another week of overtime.”

  The young factory workers were either scattered and lonely individuals or stranded outside of the consumer market without a penny to their names. I reckoned that cultural communication made it possible for individual laborers to raise their consciousness and gather together to enact change; political communication could come after. During this period, thoughtful people in the organized religions began proselytizing in industrial areas; in time, night classes were opened for laborers. It was around then that the idea of on-site cultural activism was born.

  Foreman Lee, who had introduced me to my job, was in a different workplace and somewhat hard to get hold of; I had the feeling he was keeping me at a distance. Instead, I became friendly with Foreman Hong, who oversaw all three grinding divisions. We bumped into each other a few times during meals and sat together. Normally we would pay for our own lunch in the factory cafeterias, but on overtime days dinner was on the house, including a midnight snack.

  “Read any good books lately?” Foreman Hong said out of the blue.

  I was perplexed. “Do I look like someone who reads books?”

  Hong smiled. “Hey, give me a break here. I’m as tired of living in this world as you are. Even if I am a bit too quirky for the independence movement. But you’ve been to college, right?”

  He asked so bluntly, I had to reply. “I had no money … I gave up trying to go back after military service.”

  “That guy over there says you want to create some kind of social club?” Hong pointed his chopsticks at Madoros. I was glad there were only two of us at the table, but I was still anxious because I didn’t know what Hong’s intention was. Ah well, whatever, I thought, and decided to trust his kind smile. “Let’s form a union. How else are we going to make a dignified living?”

  He grinned. “You’re just going to stir the pot and leave us to deal with all the work?” He stood up with his cafeteria tray. “What are you doing on Sunday? Come join us at the teahouse in the corner of the Guro intersection.”

  When I went there on Sunday, he was wearing hiking clothes and a backpack instead of his navy jacket with the company logo. He was with two other men in their thirties. As I approached, they all got up, and we moved the party to a pork rib place nearby. I learned over soju that they were foremen from other factories. Theirs was a hiking club, with twenty members, that met every Sunday to climb Mount Gwanak. “If we’re in a group like this, higher-ups pay more attention, and our voices count for more,” Hong said. “No one needs to break the law, but it’s a good way to talk about our companies … Who knows? If we include people like you, then you can take the blame for some of the stuff we do. Doesn’t that sound good?”

  Over the next two months, I went on hikes with Foreman Hong and learned a lot from him. “I’ve seen many people older than me who’ve worked in the labor movement all their lives. Change doesn’t happen overnight. You have to sacrifice your whole life to it. There are people who have staked their entire families on their company, but when people like you leave here, they just go back to where they were and that’s that.”

  I moved out of Geun-ho’s room and became roommates with Madoros, living in a laborer’s hive house for about two months before getting a room of my own. I reconnected with Sohn Hak-kyu at this time
, a college activist whom I had met earlier through my political writer friends. At the time he was attending Jeil Church, frequented by industrial evangelists and the first generation of cultural activists like Hong Sehwa, Kim Min-ki, and Im Jin-taek, and wanted to work among the people with me.

  I asked Geun-ho to find out which factory in the complex had the worst, most problematic working conditions and where the laborers were most concentrated. We researched an electronics factory subcontracting for the Japanese and decided to get jobs there. Sohn Hak-kyu didn’t tell me this at first, but he and a few of his college club friends were likewise trying to spread themselves out to infiltrate different workplaces.

  Sohn Hak-kyu and I rented a room in the neighborhood across from Guro Market. It was too hard to predict who we might run into in the crowded hive houses and how much attention we might draw. Our new place was further down an alley with a private entrance, an agungi burner next to the door, a kitchenette, and some utensils the previous tenant had left behind.

  Lodgings secured, we sent our CVs and graduation certifications to the electronics factory during the end-of-the-month hiring period. On interview day, we joined the sea of waiting candidates. We were on the older side, with everyone else, men and women alike, being in their teens or early twenties. Again, my Vietnam experience and night school diploma from an industrial high school made me stand out. The problem was Sohn Hak-kyu’s educational background. The world knows him now as being part of the Kyunggi High School Three Musketeers, along with Kim Geun-tae and Cho Young-rae, who protested the ongoing Korea–Japan talks and whom everyone knew to be anti-dictatorship activists. Sohn was also a Seoul National University graduate, which flagged him as a labor activist infiltrator from the start. He later made his credentials even worse by studying at Oxford. To avoid detection, he had no choice but to submit only his Kyunggi Middle School diploma.

  The interviewer didn’t say anything to me, but when he saw Sohn’s CV, he gave him a hard look. “Do you really want to work here? If you went to Kyunggi Middle, then you must have also gone to Kyunggi High, and that means you ended up at Seoul National University, no? What’s your real reason for being here?”

  Sohn was branded a person of suspicion right then and there, his application rejected. On the way back, my dispirited friend joked, “Those crappy schools I went to can’t even get me a job!”

  This joke continued to perpetuate itself among our friends and was the basis of Sohn’s “Kyunggi Night School” routine, about how all the activists with prestigious educations who were working on-site were dubbed “the night schoolers.”

  I couldn’t face working in that factory on my own, so we decided to look for something else. Park Yoon-bae, who would do anything for a friend, got us fake diplomas from Dogye Middle School near the Dogye Mines. He also strongly advised us to wear tattered work clothes to interviews. The fake diplomas seemed to do the trick, as we were accepted right away and began work in the carpentry team.

  At the time, record players and televisions were treated like high-end furniture. The console the record player was housed in received more attention than the machine itself. The material ranged from the best-quality mahogany to plywood, and decorative flourishes, like leaves or stripes, were added. Television boxes were also made of high-quality wood, with doors that closed across the screen. Newbies like us were not put in the decorative carpentry line but in simple and repetitive tasks. I was, once again, an apprentice, as in the last factory. My work involved trimming legs down to the correct lengths or cutting plywood for the backs of the consoles. The foremen responsible for each line called us together before we were sorted.

  “Your daily tasks must be completed, even if it means staying late. The slightest deviation in working the material means the entire product must be discarded, and the worker responsible must pay for it. Negligence on the job leads to industrial accidents. You must turn off the machine in between pieces by stepping on the switch. The saws can take out a finger, which is also the responsibility of the worker and not the company, who has already provided safety equipment and training. You have already sealed your contract with your thumbprint, meaning you accept these terms.”

  To put it another way, industrial accidents were bound to happen, and they were always already our fault. At least our division only had to cut wood and plywood; the factory women’s work applying glue to the boards, hammering, or boring holes was extremely monotonous, and their pay was accordingly very low. The part of the company dealing with machine assembly was on the other side of the factory building.

  In the mornings, we began work right after the master carpenter retrieved the day’s supply of plywood and planks from the materials division, along with the necessary measurements written on a piece of paper.

  To create console legs, I cut the wood to size and the master carpenter tapered them. They were then sent to the next division to be smoothed with sandpaper or an electric planer.

  The apprentice measures a piece of wood and marks it with a pencil, prepares a sample, and places it above his workstation. At first he’s nervous and awkward, turning the saw off for safety after each piece, but later he keeps it spinning. At some point, his mind moves from the monotony of work to thoughts of that girl he met last weekend, the show they saw at Guro Theater, or his little brother’s letter from the countryside. He might briefly look up to see the foreman coming or have his thoughts clouded by the memory of another pretty factory girl, which brings his hand too close to the blade. The blood splatters, the pain is like a hammer coming down, and the severed finger wriggles a bit before it stills. They said it was the same for lathe or casting workers. Geun-ho lost three fingers during his apprenticeship.

  Pay was calculated once a week, based on your time card. You had to punch in on the machine next to the security guard when you arrived and punch out when you left.

  Sohn Hak-kyu worked hard at his assigned station. Although the work itself was tolerable for us, making friends with the other workers and earning their trust to organize them into unions seemed impossible. Sohn and I were in different divisions, meaning that while normally we worked at the same times and cooked dinner and cleaned our room together, sometimes when production deadlines loomed and we had to do overtime, our hours did not coincide. Just like any other people living together, I began seeing the good and the bad in my roommate; one of the bad things was that Sohn was no good at replacing the coal briquettes, so the heat would often go out. I would come back from overtime at 9 p.m. to find our room freezing cold. Opening the agungi would reveal the spent briquette, the embers on their last glow. Of course, I was tired enough that I could have just given up at that point and dozed off, but I had to eat something, and since we didn’t have portable gas burners back then, even a simple bowl of instant noodles required fire.

  In most ordinary neighborhoods, one could ask a neighbor to borrow a spark of fire to start cold briquettes with, but there was no concept of neighbor in that place. Everyone was a vagabond in the same boat. This was probably why a little store nearby would sell lit briquettes at three times the price of unlit briquettes. I remember it being even more expensive in the winter.

  I would grumble at Sohn for forgetting and buy a lit briquette to restore the fire. Another problem was that while I was a night owl myself, Sohn was even worse and would read his goddamn books until dawn, even when we had to work early the next day. On Sunday mornings when I was doing the laundry and cleaning up, he’d be lying in bed reading a book. I made endless fun of him for being a hopeless nerd.

  We shared a wall with the next-door room, occupied by two women who worked at bars. They would come home even later than we did and blast the radio or have loud shouting matches with their pimps. We’d put up with it for a while before banging on the wall, which quieted them only briefly. They were always fighting about money—how much their cut was, how much they’d taken last time. It had been the same when I lived with Madoros in the hive house: the driver couple next door w
ould argue almost all day about money. If the wife made some spare cash from hand-beading bags for days, the husband would take it from her and spend it on booze.

  “Damn them, why don’t we just take over a bank and print some money and throw it at them. They never let up!”

  At least the weekend meetups with the keener laborers let us feel some hope for the future. However, the prospect of an alliance of trade unions across the entire complex seemed like a distant dream. I now understood why Jeon Tae-il had resorted to using his own body to light the way.

  One morning after a night shift, I found Sohn waiting for me instead of leaving for work. He looked anxious. “Something happened to someone I know around here, and we’ve all decided to retreat. You might get mixed up in it, so you ought to split right now.”

  “What happened, what did they do?”

  “Got caught at a book club session.”

  I sent him away first and, seeing as we’d already paid rent for that month, decided to simply disappear. The landlord would see for himself eventually that we had left. I packed my things. All the little objects I’d accumulated during my sojourn amounted to two large bags.

  ~

  When I got home again, Hee-yun was about to go out of business and, to make matters worse, her landlord wanted to redecorate and was hassling her to move out. The little courtyard bustled with the cooking and washing of people who owned small shops in the building. I had to make some money somehow, to contribute to expenses, so I pulled out the manuscripts I’d started while hiding in Masan for the Guro Complex incident to blow over. I was even able to get a makeshift writing studio to work in, albeit just a tiny, cramped shelter cobbled together from cinder blocks in the corner of a courtyard normally reserved for food storage. My wife and son lived in a room across from that. Since there was no kitchen, we would cook outdoors in the courtyard under a plastic tarp next to the cement steps. I wrote “The Road to Sampo” there. Shindonga had commissioned a manuscript, but I had procrastinated until the day before the deadline, when the editor finally issued an ultimatum. I got to work at seven that evening. Twelve hours later, as the sun rose, I wrote the final line: “The train raced toward the darkened fields where the snow flew in thick flurries.” It felt like I’d written the whole thing in a single breath.