A Sentimental Blues For The Itinerant Workers > IDEAS & IDEALS

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Weeks ago, as usual, I drove to my office in the morning, did my work, and back home in the afternoon, but I felt something unusual about the road I used to drive almost everyday. I felt as if I had been driving a strange road in a foreign city for the first time in my life. The road has become overnight so clean, broad, and straight with the bright yellow and white traffic lines and with the smell and color of the newly-spread asphalt. With my hands at the wheel I felt a little bit uneasy and even mystified before the birth of a new road. I came to learn later from the evening news on TV that this unbelievable phenomenon was a result of the completion of the 7th subway line in Seoul.

      For the most drivers and pedestrians the subway construction works taking place here and there in Seoul are a necessary evil to curse, to endure, to come to terms with, and finally to live up with. We are all convinced of the great benefit the subway brings to all, but the long construction period it requires is always the problem. Some part of the road must be dug up and covered over with the iron-panels for a makeshift passage of cars and people, and some area around it must be enclosed with fences for workers, the materials, machines and tools necessary for the work. The work demands and also tests our patience by causing the bottle-neck phenomena and traffic jams inevitably. It not only blocks and hinders the smooth flow of the cars and men. It mars, more than anything else, the beauty and dignity of the roads. Seeing the road dug up is like seeing the intestines of human body revealed by the surgeon's knife. It is ugly to look at.

      Only less than 2 weeks have passed since the long and arduous construction work of the 7th subway line came to an end, and with it all the ugly and cumbersome things that had troubled us have also disappeared leaving not a vestige of them behind. It is as if peace has come to the war-torn area, where dusts, noises, sparks, cries had prevailed for so long. A new atmosphere of prosperity has set in on the newly-paved streets along the newly-born road. Shops, restaurants, office-rooms, and buildings are resuming their vitality by putting out newly-decorated signs. Already no one seems to remember anything about the tedious construction work at all. It seems as if nothing had happened during the time. This morning I passed without any difficulty the crossroads that used to have caused the worst traffic jam and consequently achieved some notoriety from the drivers in Seoul, and felt as if I had passed a historical place where once a great battle was fought and thousands of people had perished, but now too peaceful and silent to be such.

      For the past 3 years I have been a witness to this construction work almost every day on my way to my office and back home. I usually drove past the scene as quickly as possible, but more often than not I had to stop my car waiting for the signal to change. Sometimes I had to wait even when the signal changed into green, because the lines of the waiting cars were so long, fat and thick that one green signal could not digest them all within the limited time. Sitting behind the wheel I could observe through the window of my car the work being done bit by bit everyday. What made me suspicious and curious was the fact that always there were only a few of workers to be seen in the construction site doing that big work. Each of them was wearing a helmet on his head and working clothes inevitably dirtied by his work. Often none of them was to be seen around. I craned my neck only to find out one or two at the bottom of the pit digging, or moving something with their hands, carrying something on their back. Others were just sitting or walking on the iron-beams with no hurry. Like ants crawling under your feet, or cicadas on the trees, they were there but were so unobtrusive.  

      What was certain was that they were not engineers nor operators of sophisticated machines or tools, nor were they men of any particular skills indispensable for the construction work. They seemed to come below or behind the carpenters or welders. They were simply workers, physical laborers, underpaid daily-wage-earners whose only assets were their hands, legs, backs, sinews and muscles. There seemed to be no particular kind of work assigned to them. Anything that was left by the machines and by the skilled workers was their lot. But it seemed to me that all that great work was being done by these few, inconspicuous, seemingly unimportant and nondescript workers. They were out there, day in, day out, no matter what the weather was like. I felt sorry for them, sitting comfortably in my well air-conditioned car, especially when I saw them working under the sweltering sun in summer and freezing temperature in winter.

      Now I realize that a sense of vague closeness towards them had been slowly formed in my mind during my frequent stops close by them at least once a day for the past 3 years. Of course they didn't know anything of my mind and my memory of them. They were not and could not afford to be so fine and sentimental about themselves and their existence. This summer once or twice I was tempted to wind down the window of my car and say something to them or for them who happened to come right by or in front of my car, but I could not. I dared not. I could not think of any good and proper words or phrases that would convey my sympathy for them without offending them. If I had really said something for them, most probably they could not have deciphered my message and would have thought that the hot sun had made another good man go insane. I found the channel of communication between me and them were shut fast, although they were Koreans speaking the same language with me.

      I wonder what the completion of the 7th subway line meant to them. Did they have time to feel, even for a moment, a sense of achievement, pride, or satisfaction in the fact that they had participated in that great construction work, that they were a part of it, and did all the works that could not be done by machines and avoided by the skilled workers? Will they remember the fact at all? No. Definitely not. For them the end of the long construction work means only another loss of their wonted working place. Now like the migrating birds, they have to leave their place. They have already left it. They have already all gone. Like the autumn leaves adrift in the wind, they have drifted away to somewhere.
                                                                                                   (August 21, 2000)