South Korea's Workers' Literature

According to Hagen Koo, one of the most remarkable features of South Korea's working class movement was the development of a distinct literature produced by factory workers.

Unlike its early European and American counterparts, the new South Korean proletariat was said to be a highly literate population with strong educational aspirations.

"After long hours of hard work and fatigue, many workers sacrificed sleep in order to write about their hardships, anguish, broken dreams, and relationships with fellow workers and superiors."

In his article The State, Minjung, and the Working Class in South Korea (Hagen Koo ed. State and Society in Contemporary Korea, Cornell University, 1993), Koo noted that workers' night schools played an instrumental role in encouraging workers to write essays, poems, and diaries, and small publication houses run by activist students made these writing available to a wider audience, further encouraging workers' literary efforts.

Common concerns expressed in workers' essays included physical hardships, abusive treatment by superiors, longing for their rural homes, and poor health conditions caused by poor work environments.

But probably the most cogent theme running through their works was their concern over status and their perception of society's contemptuous attitude toward factory workers. In the 1960s through the 1970s, factory workers were often called kongsuni (factory girl) or kongdoli (factory boys), insinuating an image of a housemaid or a servant working in a factory environment. The label kongsuni, in particular, had been hurtful to young female workers, many of whom left their rural homes with high aspirations for upward social mobility.

In one essay, the writer wrote that kongsunis could not hope to hide their identities.

"They showed it however hard they try to do makeup and dress up nicely. They pay more attention to clothes, hairdo and makeup in order to hide it. People fault us for spending money on appearance without making enough money, but our reason is to take off the label of kongsuni they put on us."