The Paper Mill - 5
"You wish for us to take to the streets?"
A strike by foreign laborers gathered outside some out-of-the-way factory never makes the news. You'd have to drive a convoy of trucks into the middle of Gwanghwamun in Seoul with loudspeakers roaring just to squeeze a brief item onto the evening bulletin.
"We cannot give up the occupation of the mill, so we leave behind only the essential crew — and the rest of you go out with the workers from the other mills and take to the streets."
I nodded to the paper mill workers' representative, who had asked in astonishment.
"……"
"Is something the matter, everyone? Why the long faces?"
When I asked, the workers' representative ventured his opinion with great care.
"If they were to take the mill back from us, wouldn't everything we've done turn to nothing?"
"And have I not been laying the stage for you? The mill director is held hostage, and the deputy director is too terrified that the workers might set a fire to try anything. Now is precisely the moment to step into the streets and proclaim your will to the world."
When your opponent's judgment grows clouded, you strike quickly. Now was the time to go out and announce the strike to all the world.
"……"
"You're all afraid, it seems."
At my words, every man averted his eyes.
"Would it not be better to stay quietly inside than to go out and be denounced as rebels and insurgents for nothing?"
A street march could be crushed for nothing at all. Fear was written across every face of the workers gathered in the mill.
No doubt the memory of how they had nearly been put down by the constables before I intervened had landed on them as a great terror.
Troubling.
I told them I would take responsibility to the very end — that the Imperial Inspector stood behind us, that they needn't worry. But coaxing and coddling clearly wasn't going to win a single nod from this crowd.
We cannot keep this strike going for long.
Pressure would come, one form or another. Setting aside even my private interests, this business demanded a swift conclusion.
No help for it, then. I'll have to set the fire myself.
I had no intention of soothing them with warm words. Men standing on a griddle, wanting to rest? Then I would stoke the flames and hurry their feet along.
"How many years have you been at it?"
I walked toward a young worker who had been listening blankly to our exchange from a corner.
"Pardon? What do you mean?"
"I asked how many years you have worked at this mill."
"Oh, oh — this is my first year."
"And you?"
I turned my head to a worker who was unmistakably older than the first-year.
"Five years."
"Five years? Good. First-year — take a good look at the face of this five-year man beside you."
"Pardon?"
"Look at him properly."
Why does he want me to look at his face? What is Constable Kang getting at? Every worker nearby fixed him with curious eyes.
"Y-yes."
His face frozen stiff, the first-year worker studied the five-year's face intently.
The face of a man wrung by more than five years of grinding toil.
Sun-scorched and steam-scorched, he looked a good five years older than the others — and once the crowd had been given ample time to appreciate that face, I opened my mouth with grave solemnity.
"That man is your life four years from now."
"……!"
"Five-year man."
This time I stepped up to the five-year worker.
"Yes."
"Turn and look over there. That man — ten years in. Your representative stands there. That man is your life five years from now."
Standing there was the workers' representative — a ten-year veteran who had endured the mill through sheer grit, grown old before his time from saying everything that could and could not be said to the managers on behalf of his fellow Joseon workers.
"Constable Kang……"
Gazing across the faces of the workers, I carried on.
"Everyone, look at one another. Look at the faces of men too afraid to step out into the street."
To move these men, I could not let them sit still.
To workers whose wretchedness, grief, and despair had mixed with the passing years and hardened solid, I said: face one another's reality.
"If you keep living like this — one year from now, five years, ten years — do you truly believe anything will be different?"
What visits a life with no exit, a life without progress, is not light but only the years. Age, and nothing more. I drove my point without mercy into the places where pain had hardened into armor.
"But will going out there truly change anything?"
The first-year asked me, his face twisted with courage wrung out by force. Yes. It can change. But I must not be the one to guarantee that to them.
They had to be made to stand. Even if nothing would change, they had to be made to want it to change.
"Why are we living like this? Why on earth are we living without any future at all?"
With questions instead of answers, I threw more kindling onto the great fire.
"It's because we're barbarians……"
"Barbarians, you say? Then what do we call the blue-haired man sitting over there? The green hair? The orange? Are they Joseon men too?"
A good answer — just not the one I wanted.
"We've all nowhere else to go, that's why……"
I strode up to the first-year. As if utterly furious, as if stifled past all bearing, I clenched both fists and let the anger out.
"No……! That is not it! That attitude is the very first thing you must throw away! Stop laying the blame on yourselves — that is what I'm telling you!"
"Then are you saying there is another reason?"
Every matter under heaven carries a hundred reasons, but I had to narrow them to one.
Focus the lens. To guide these men to the destination I wanted, I had to give their suffering a concrete cause.
"It is because they own the means of production."
I offered the reason in its simplest form, and turned their eyes outward, away from themselves.
"Means of production? What do you mean?"
"The asset called the paper mill! It is because they own the means to produce paper! That is why they grow rich without shedding a single bead of sweat, while we work from dawn to dusk and carry home a pittance worth less than the very paper we made!"
Keep the explanation short. Divide the world into two classes on the spot, and drive home our suffering. I clutched my chest as though the injustice itself were suffocating me.
"Well, it belongs to the Prefectural Magistrate, doesn't it? Of course it's only natural."
There was no need to deny it. I applauded the remark. Clap, clap, clap. The sound rolled through the silent mill.
Every gaze swung back to me. Now — now I had to accept the prevailing view and bend it into mine.
Clenching both fists, I forced the words out as if spitting up something lodged deep in my chest.
"Exactly! Of course it is natural! That is just what I wanted to say! Now look around you all. Mortars, blades, tree bark, rice straw, hammers, paper. Is this place not overflowing with perfectly natural things? And yet……"
"Constable Kang?"
I planted myself in the very center of the workers. Every gaze upon me — and I met every one. And then I asked them.
"Since when did you become the Prefectural Magistrate's property?"
"……!"
"The sickles and hammers were bought with money, so those are natural enough. But you were never bought with money — so how did you come to be called 'natural'? Why did you volunteer to become slaves? That is what I am asking!"
I hammered the words home. Angry — I demanded of them why they had never once seen this truth before.
"We're… slaves?"
I had no intention of leaving them time to digest the shock. Legs that have buckled must be shaken without pause if they are to stand again.
"Do you know what a first-year slave, a five-year slave, and a ten-year slave have in common?"
I returned to the first-year and asked.
"I… I don't know."
"They spend their days waiting only for the day they die. Just as it is now."
"……"
Not a soul inside the mill could deny my words.
The mill the workers had occupied — a refuge that kept them hidden from bailiffs and yamen runners, a stronghold from which they could resist the deputy director's assaults.
I would turn this space that had grown comfortable through stillness into a rotting coffin. With a few words, I would make it a place where doing nothing meant waiting for defeat.
"You bleed, sweat, and weep all day over paper — and you carry home less money than a few sheets of it are worth. Why? Because you accepted being assets! Because you resolved to be slaves who labor under the whip!"
"What choice do we have!"
A scream half-buried in a wail rose up against me.
Right. I was not telling them to turn the world upside down. I had no intention of contending for two high-treason titles. But still.
"Yes. And sadly, there is nothing we can do about their means of production. They own it! But the blood, the sweat, and the tears that we shed — that, we can keep out of their hands!"
You who had grown complacent in this little stalemate — I could make you rise again. And you, who would rise up again given only a spark — I could pile the kindling high for you.
"What do you mean?"
In the dazed first-year's eyes, a certain fervor had kindled. Facing that barely-lit flame squarely, I asked him.
"But first, answer me this. Are you a slave?"
"No."
"Then will you stand by and watch them claim to own you!"
"No!"
"Whose are the blood, the sweat, and the tears we shed?!!!"
"Ours!!!"
"Then rise! Show them!"
The young man did not refuse my outstretched hand.
"Everyone, let us rise!"
Even those who had sat in silence rose from their places.
"Rise and stand in solidarity! Band together! Unite! Every man wears the red headband! Let the world know we are workers who bleed!"
I tied the red headband around the first-year's head. Upon it were written two words: SOLIDARITY and STRUGGLE.
"We will let them all know!"
"In solidarity! Cry out our demands at the top of your lungs!"
"Solidarity!!! Struggle!!!"
The slogan written across their red headbands rang out from every throat in the mill.
To the workers whose fire had at last caught hold again, I had only one piece of counsel left to give.
"Yes. And now — go, and prove that you are people, not means."
BOOM!
BOOM!
"Wh-what in the world?!"
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The next morning, to the beat of inexplicable drums, the merchants of Wuhan's market found themselves face to face with a wave of red.
"Wh-what is that?! Is it a revolt?!"
"Shouldn't we fold up our stalls and run?!"
Every face in the market was taut with alarm as they stared at the crowd — but what the marchers carried were drums and other instruments, banners and flags. Nothing that looked like a weapon.
"Paper mill workers! We cannot go on living like this!"
"We can't go on! We can't go on!"
Even the slogans they shouted were foreign to the merchants' ears.
"Huh? What's going on?!"
"It's dangerous — don't you go joining in with that march!"
"The constables are holding them back? What is this about?"
The constables had even stepped forward, throwing a line between the passersby and the demonstrators.
"On wages less than half of any other trade!!!"
"We can't go on! We can't go on!"
"Don't cast off the sick! Guarantee sick leave! Guarantee it!"
Only once the crowd understood that the demonstrators meant no harm did they finally begin piecing the situation together.
"So the paper mill workers are out protesting en masse."
"I heard they make less than half of what the wharf porters earn?"
"Tsk, tsk. Barbarians or no, that's cruel treatment by any measure."
"There are other hair colors in that crowd too. Life must be unbearable for workers everywhere — seems they've all come together, staking their very lives on it."
Overnight, the protest became the talk of all Wuhan.
"Who on earth could have treated them so cruelly, you ask? Do you know whose employ those paper mill workers toil under?"
"Whose?"
"The Prefectural Magistrate. Gu Juk."
"What? The Prefectural Magistrate treated his workers that brutally?"
"He's a magistrate with no shortage of rumors to his name — felt to me like what was coming had finally come."
"Good heavens."
And so, inevitably, the name of the Prefectural Magistrate — the mill's owner — was bandied about from mouth to mouth.
Good thing I lit that fire.
Protests belong where the foot traffic is heaviest — that's how you get on every tongue in town in a single stroke.
"It burns beautifully. Better even than the flames of the Yiling forest……"
"Pardon?"
"Ah — nothing at all! Jeon Gilsan, what are you up to?"
At Lady Zhuge's flustered voice, I hastily covered myself.
A famous line from Marquis Wu of the Zhuge clan, granted — but there was no call to dredge up painful history on top of it. Hurrying to change the subject, I looked to Gilsan.
And why was he eyeing me with that suspicious look again?
"Hey. You."
"What?"
"You didn't used to lead rebellions or run with bands of traitors back in Joseon, by any chance?"
"What kind of thing is that to say?"
"The way you handled it — that was no first-timer's work, no matter how I look at it……"
Maybe dragging him to the paper mill had been a mistake. I'd only brought him along because he threw a fit about being left behind — but somewhere along the way, watching me in action, he had gone quiet.
"Say one more weird thing and you're not coming with me anywhere, ever again."
"Brother-in-law! It was a joke! You were just so damn good at it, I had to say something for a laugh!"
There are things a man simply ought not to say. How was it fair to state the plain, exact truth to someone who had once faked a corpse and slammed the emergency escape button?
I gave the mortified, flailing Jeon Gilsan a thump on the back, then turned to Lady Zhuge.
"Lady Zhuge, what do you suppose happens now?"
The Zhuge clan's ties to officialdom ran deep, and Lady Zhuge knew the machinery inside and out — she had been an enormous help.
"Just as you planned, Young Master Kang, the Prefectural Magistrate will soon grow desperate. N-not an outright revolt, of course, but once the rumors spread through Wuhan, even the Prefectural Magistrate cannot sit still any longer."
"If he does not hurry to put out the fire, the Prefectural Magistrate will be bleeding soon enough."
Not a full revolt — but a scandal that ranked alongside one, and the Prefectural Magistrate would find himself in an impossible position.
"Yes. Most likely. Won't he send someone to you, Young Master Kang?"
"Then he will send someone with ties to the Prefectural Magistrate."
Someone who could apply pressure on me in just the right measure — and who also carried a thread connecting him to the Prefectural Magistrate.
"Yes. From what I have investigated, it will most likely be the yamen's Wu Po—"
"Young Master Kang. Wu Podu has come from the yamen."
"Hehehe."
Perhaps because Wu Podu had arrived exactly as she foretold — before her own words had even finished — Lady Zhuge laughed in pure delight.
"Haha. It seems the Prefectural Magistrate has finally been driven to desperation."
Shall we hear, then, what message he has come to deliver?