Swallow's Heart
Commentary | We are divided into three categories · Kim Hyung-jung

"The pleasure of reading a painful, beautiful, and contemporary labor novel."
Kim Hyung-jung (literary critic)

Selected as the 2021 Problem Novel of the Year
The song of the ashen heart that seeps into the ruins of labor
Kim Soom, the "Witness of Memory," publishes her new novel, "Swallow's Heart."

The full-length novel 『Swallow's Heart』 by Kim Soom, winner of the Contemporary Literature Award, Daesan Literature Award, Yi Sang Literature Award, and Kim Hyun Literature Award, has been published.
The author has focused on people who have been uprooted from their homes, from adopted children and displaced persons to victims of "comfort women" and forced migrants.
This time, we follow the life of a day laborer at a shipyard with a thoughtful yet persistent gaze.
Kim Soom began publishing her first collection of short stories, "Fighting Dogs," in 2005, and has published over twenty novels over the past 16 years.
Perhaps the reason I was able to write consistently for so long was because I couldn't easily let go of a story once I got caught up in it.
The unique history of revising and republishing two of her debut works 14 years later, or of compiling a five-volume series of novels based on testimonies of "comfort women" victims, is something only someone who still looks back and remembers stories that were thought to be over can achieve.
The stories born from the root called Kim Soom expand and deepen as they branch out again.
"Swallow's Heart" is a story about a shipyard that he wrote again 13 years after "Iron."
This is a collection of novels that were previously published in serial form in various publications, such as “Love of Iron” (Munjang Webzine, June 2020 issue) and “When Iron Sings” (Ritter, October/November 2017 issue).
The multi-tiered subcontracting structure that divides the same workers into three categories, and the emergence of foreign migrant workers and female workers, explain why he was forced to hang around the shipyard all the time.


“We experienced the Yongsan tragedy and the Ssangyong Motors incident, and we had to watch countless irregular workers die in absurd ways.
We also had to confirm that women had no place in the labor struggles of the past, and that the dangers of Korea's most dangerous workplaces were outsourced to foreign migrant workers at a low cost.
The circumstances under which Kim Soom, who wrote "Iron," had no choice but to return to the shipyard are understood in this way.
“He is a persistently ethical writer.”_Kim Hyung-jung (literary critic)

“It’s not easy to survive in a shipyard.
You might even die from working too hard.
It is a secret and truth known to every day worker in the shipyard.”

"What do you do when you become the world's number one shipyard? Who will you work with to build the world's number one ship?"
- Na Yoon-ok, a female scaffolding worker at a subcontractor of Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (〈Press conference protesting national pension arrears〉, 2021.
9. 14.)

South Korea's shipbuilding industry dominates the global shipbuilding market, ranking first through fifth globally.
This year in particular, the shipbuilding industry's bright future was predicted with flashy titles such as "Achieving the highest order volume in 13 years" and "Achieving the entire order volume of the previous year in just 5 months."
But the reality for shipyard workers is stagnant.
At Samsung Heavy Industries' Geoje Shipyard, the world's number one shipyard (based on order backlog as of July 2021), two workers died last year and another this year.
This happened at the only shipyard in Korea that received the highest grade A in risk management assessment.

The workers of 『Swallow's Heart』 get sick, are in pain, or die.
Painters' skin becomes distorted and their sense of smell is lost due to the smell of paint and thinner.
The scaffolders fall while building a castle in the air inside an iron box.
Welders have their eyesight damaged by strong sparks, and sanders breathe in iron particles and impurities.
The shipyard's hardest-working cable workers suffer from wrist ligaments torn, muscles stretched, and even death due to the weight of the cables.
No matter how careful you are about safety, some people twist their backs trying to avoid welding sparks or crack their shoulders when they are hit by a falling scaffolding.
Shipyard work sites are full of unavoidable accidents and hidden dangers.
I (Hye-sook), a fire watcher, am a worker in the material team.
Shipyard workers are divided into three categories: regular workers, subcontracted workers, and material team workers subcontracted by subcontractors.
The reason shipyards subcontract work is because they do not have to manage workers and labor costs are low.
Safety guards wearing yellow armbands instruct workers to "not mix paint and firearms," ​​but subcontractor foremen send in all the workers they hired to shorten the work period and cut labor costs.
Workers on the material handling team, who are paid daily, have a hard time getting work if they miss overtime due to illness or fail to meet deadlines and fall out of favor.
Because I am registered as a self-employed person, industrial accident insurance does not apply, so there is no one to take responsibility if I get injured or die while working.


The class leaders tell us.
“Don’t run.
“We have to finish it today.” They know better than we do that if they don’t run, they won’t be able to finish it today.
So if we fall and get hurt while running around trying to finish it by the end of the day, they jump up and say,
“I told you not to run like that.” (p.
61)

“I close my eyes and take a deep breath.
I can smell the pungent smell of blood.

weird.
“Why does the lump of iron smell like blood?”

The 'iron box', which is the main background of the work, is a piece of an iron ship made in a shipyard.
They make a bigger iron plate by joining together iron plates that weigh about 2 to 3 tons, and then fit the plates together to make an iron box.
An iron ship is created by assembling and connecting about 300 iron boxes weighing about 60 tons.
The iron box, which forms part of the iron ship but cannot be taken out of it, hints at the fate of the workers who are easily used and consumed like parts under the desire for intermediate exploitation.

The workers of 『Swallow's Heart』 are constantly lost in the iron box.
After finishing her work, 'Seonmi', who was coming out of the iron box, gets trapped inside and dies.
'I' look at 'Mr. Choi', who was Seonmi's partner at the time, and think that if he had looked back even once, Seonmi might not have been left alone in the iron box and lost.
But, as I kept asking myself, ‘Who is to blame for her death?’, I eventually came to a realization.
“I (we) are day laborers, like ghosts in the shipyard, and in reality, we are not inside the iron box.”
So, “Even if I (we) want to get lost, I cannot get lost.”

They spend their entire lives in iron boxes, but they have never seen an iron boat.
Just as I have never seen an iron ship, I have never seen a shipyard owner either.
The number 392, which represents the number of days without accidents or fatalities, is displayed on the electronic display board at the main entrance of the shipyard.
Today is 392, tomorrow is 393, and so on, with each passing day, 1 is added.
Because this number cannot return to zero, workers cannot file for industrial accident compensation even if they are injured on the job.
The irony of getting hurt and dying to build the iron boat, but ultimately finding that the iron boat doesn't exist, makes you want to know the truth hidden behind the numbers on the scoreboard.


There is no iron boat.
Since none of us saw it, it's as if there was no iron boat for us.
There is no iron boat, but there is iron to make iron boats.
We touch iron more than our flesh, more than our bones.
We cannot imagine that there is no iron belly because we live all day in the iron box that is its heart.
Because inside, they spend all day hammering iron, painting, cutting, gluing, and trimming iron.
Moreover, we become disabled, sick, and even die from making it.
(pp.
94~95)