The roof of the factory was deformed after the fire, and the frame was exposed.
On June 24, a fire broke out at the Aricell battery plant in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, killing 23 people and injuring eight others. Among the victims, 17 were Chinese, all temporary workers, or "day dang" in Korean, who were unfamiliar with escape routes.
When she saw the news of the explosion of the Hwaseong battery factory in South Korea, 30-year-old Peng Hui immediately recognized that this was the place where she used to work. A year ago, she just went to South Korea from Yanbian, Jilin Province, and was introduced by a friend to work in this battery factory for half a year.
She knew the job was "dangerous" because the two ends of the lithium battery "will slowly heat up and explode easily". During her work, the people in the factory told her to be careful. During her part-time job, there were two small explosions, but fortunately there were no casualties at the time.
Photos left by Peng Hui when she wiped the battery The pictures in this article are all courtesy of the interviewee
Peng Hui recalled that the liquid in the battery tasted very pungent and was not good for the body. Employees at the factory have regular check-ups every few months. The factories recruit temporary workers with legal status, mostly ethnic Koreans from northeastern China, and mostly people between the ages of 35 and 50.
Since the 90s of the 20th century, a large number of ethnic Koreans in China have gone to South Korea to work, making up for the labor shortage of local companies, and most of them are engaged in the "dirty, difficult, and dangerous" "3D" industries that Koreans avoid.
A number of ethnic Korean interviewees who came to South Korea from China to work told The Paper that the purpose of their visit to South Korea was to make money. No matter what type of manual work you are engaged in, as long as you are willing to accept overtime and single days off, you can earn more. They are more afraid of falling into the enduring poverty of being unable to save money than the hardships of being a stranger and a "daily worker".
For a better life
In the summer of 2018, Zhang Shan, then 31, traveled from Shenyang, Liaoning Province to South Korea with two other female friends to look for work. She is ethnic Korean, but she "doesn't know anything" about South Korea, and one of her friends spent some time in South Korea and took her around looking for work.
On their first stop, they went to Gwangju, but there were "not many job opportunities." Zhang Shan rented a house there and paid a deposit of more than 5,000 yuan. But after half a month, I still haven't found a job.
They contacted their former colleagues in China, who worked at a construction site in South Korea, working 8 hours a day, earning more than 400 yuan, including food and lodging. Zhang Shan went to "take refuge" with this colleague and began to work on the construction site.
She recalls that the construction site was far away from where she lived, so she had to get up at four or five o'clock every morning. When I came back from work, fourteen or fifteen hours had passed in the day.
Her job is to install the baffle under the cabinet, to run upstairs and downstairs, work for more than ten days, and change the construction site, after an installation error, the boss fired her in a fit of anger.
Zhang Shan can only find another job. During this period, she met a male labor agency of Korean nationality, who said that he could arrange for her to work in a hotel, but she and her friend had to pay a total of 300,000 won (about 1,600 yuan) in intermediary fees. But after paying the money, the agent quickly disappeared, and she realized that she had been scammed.
After being deceived that time, Zhang Shan quickly contacted another agent. After paying the agency fee, the other party arranged for her to live in a small apartment. Usually there are three or four people there, but one night there were more than a dozen people in the room, and even the toilet door slept with people.
At first, the agent helped her find a cosmetics company. She went to wring the cap of the bottle for a day, and when she got off work, she had two translucent blisters bulging out of her hands. When I went back the next day, people didn't need her anymore. Then she went to the Shallot Club, picking green onions and tying green onions every day, eating and living, and earning 360 yuan a day. After that, Zhang Shan changed to work in an ice cream factory and has stayed until now.
On October 27, 2014, Langwei flew from Yanbian to South Korea. After getting off the plane, she took the subway for more than an hour, dragging a suitcase weighing eight or ninety pounds to Seoul Station. Her uncle, who lives near the Namsan Tower, was shaking her hands and legs after climbing the long, steep hill with her uncle who had come to the subway station to pick her up.
Longway was 25 years old that year. Her uncle and aunt moved to South Korea in 2000 to work and later settled there. On her days off after arriving in South Korea, she would occasionally meet up with relatives, but sometimes she would not see each other for a year or two, and "she was busy with her own work."
Lang Wei, whose hometown is in the countryside of Hunchun City, Yanbian, Jilin Province, is ethnic Korean, but she does not speak Korean. She studied at a Chinese language school since she was a child. In her hometown, her parents' generation continued to speak Korean, but by the time Longway came the generation, many young people no longer knew Korean.
However, she can still travel to South Korea on an employment visa and become a member of the migrant population. According to the December 2023 Monthly Statistical Report released by the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Korea, as of the end of December 2023, there were 2.508 million foreigners residing in South Korea, an increase of 11.7% year-on-year and the highest value since 2019. Among them, the number of Chinese is the largest, accounting for 37.6%.
Chinese ethnic Koreans who go to work in South Korea will enjoy some policy conveniences. In 2007, when Roh Moo-hyun was the president of South Korea, he established an H-2 visa system for non-Korean compatriots to visit employment, technical education, and a "foreigner employment permit system", which broadened the channels for Chinese Koreans to legally work in South Korea.
In the same year, the Republic of Korea further improved the employment of foreign workers and established the "Visiting Employment System". It stipulates that foreign workers who have passed the Korean language test can be given priority in employment, and Koreans have an inherent advantage.
Lang Wei was one of the first people to get an H-2 visa. Before going abroad, her marriage was in trouble and she had a 4-year-old daughter. Because she only has a high degree of Chinese, she can only earn 1,000 yuan a month in China. "In order to give her children a better life", she decided to look for a job in South Korea, and according to the exchange rate at the time, she needed to work in Korea for 11 months at the same time.
For Koreans in China, passing the corresponding language test, or obtaining various professional qualifications, such as carpentry and baking, is conducive to upgrading the H-2 visa to a foreign compatriot visa (F4); You can apply for a permanent residence visa (F5) if you have lived in the F4 for more than two years, meet the tax criteria, or have a parent who is a Korean citizen.
"Day Worker"
Because of his Korean identity, 29-year-old Wu Peng successfully obtained an F4 visa, and within a year he did more than 100 kinds of manual labor in South Korea. "No matter how small the construction site is, there are dozens of different types of work, and there are hundreds of different types of work on the big site."
The most direct reason for him to go to South Korea was to make money. He wants to work on Korean novels in the future without being bothered by money.
When he was in China, Wu Peng was a contracted writer in a text studio. The studio allocates continuation tasks with different unit prices according to the needs and the level of the writer himself, and the unit price is basically between 12-25 yuan per thousand words.
Later, Wu Peng gradually couldn't write. He had problems with his fingers, wrists, cervical spine and lumbar spine one after another. "In addition, the market has changed drastically in those two years, the difficulty of continuing has increased, the unit price has become lower, and sometimes even eating is a problem."
So, he communicated with his parents, who have been working in South Korea for nearly 30 years, for a long time, and finally decided to go to South Korea from his hometown Heilongjiang in August 2022.
Many Chinese labor agencies post job postings on social media platforms for South Korean job posters, mainly for manufacturing workers and food and beverage waiters, with an age limit of 18-39 years old, male and female.
A job advertisement clearly lists the "salary analysis of manufacturing workers with one day off per week": they can get 220,000 won for working 8 hours a week, they can get an extra 630,000 won for an average of 2 hours of overtime a day, and they can get an extra 460,000 won for 6 hours of overtime on Saturdays. In this way, the worker can earn 590,000 yuan a year, and if you add the "retirement pay" at the end of the contract, the total income in three years can reach 640,000 yuan.
Job posting
The salary of the waiter is slightly lower, according to the accumulated annual income and retirement pay, you can earn at least 467,000 yuan after three years of work. At the same time, you can also enjoy benefits such as insurance.
In another job posting for farm workers and manufacturing workers in South Korea, farm workers, plumbers, drivers, and electronics factory workers can all receive a monthly salary of more than 20,000 yuan. According to the recruitment information of the intermediary, workers work 8 hours a day, with a monthly income ranging from 10,000 to 30,000 yuan, and can get 1.5 times the salary for overtime.
Last year, Mr. Wu waited in his office at the Manpower Office in Namyangju, Gyeonggi Province, which resembles an employment agency in China.
Every morning at five o'clock, dozens of workers in the institute will gather around and wait for the director in charge to assign work to everyone. After the work is done, the money is credited to the account on the same day, "also called the day dang". Mr. Wu said that the hours of work were basically eight hours. Civil engineering workers who do road construction often work overtime until the early hours of the morning, and the salary is doubled.
"There are all kinds of jobs". Wu Peng has done work such as helping people move, cutting cacti in a cosmetics factory, working as a signalman behind an excavator, building a cat house and digging a small pond for a university professor, and moving bronze statues and other works of art to the vice president of a pizza chain, that is, "the kind of chaebol in TV dramas".
The daily work is like a random lottery, and when you are unlucky, you can only move bricks and cement. After working for a day, "I went home and lay down, and I couldn't get up". Wu Peng said that unless he is very tired, he usually works seven days a week.
The minimum salary is 160,000 won, and there is no upper limit, so you get more when you work overtime. Once, he followed the delivery and installation of a second-hand home appliance factory, and was busy until 1 o'clock in the morning, and received a daily salary of 160,000 won (equivalent to about 800 yuan) on the same day, and 210,000 won (equivalent to about 1,100 yuan) in overtime pay. Daily workers need to pay their own medical insurance fees, but the director of the human resources office will buy life insurance for the workers.
After a long period of contact with laborers, Wu Peng found that they were "very careful about money and accustomed to it." For example, if everyone gets together to chat in the morning, if he smokes someone else's cigarette or drinks someone else's cup of coffee and doesn't return it, the other party will be unhappy; When he borrowed a pair of gloves from someone else at work and didn't return them, the other party would also point it out bluntly.
However, he also understands that everyone earns about the same amount of money, and more is equal to less.
The dirtiest, most tiring and most dangerous job
At the beginning of June this year, Wu Peng began to work as a "spider man" on the construction site as a junior technician. In his experience, the more workers on the construction site, except for the management, earn more, the harder or more dangerous it becomes.
His specific job is to paint the facades, 20 to 25 days a month. He has a photo taken by a colleague on his phone, hanging from the façade of a 25-story, about eighty or ninety meters tall building.
Wu Peng at work
During the apprenticeship phase, he first had to overcome his fear, "just have a sense of trust in the rope, which is the kind of rope used when fishing boats, and it will never break". The length of the apprenticeship period varies from person to person, from two or three months to two or three years. There are many Chinese Koreans in the team, and Wu Peng and the captain are Harbin natives, and the captain always teaches him by hand.
When she first arrived in Korea, she first had to overcome the language barrier. She won't take the bus and subway. When she first took the subway, she followed the subway map to see where she was going one by one. She doesn't know how to transfer, and many times she will sit in the opposite direction, then go to the next station and come down, go back to the original point, and change again. Because she couldn't understand the location by bus and didn't know how many lines she could take, she could only walk to the subway station.
Can't speak Korean, Longway can only find the dirtiest and most tiring job. Her first job in Seoul was through an agent, cooking for workers in a canteen at a construction site. Six or seven hundred catties of rice should be washed every day.
At first, she couldn't speak Korean, so she had to look at her boss's eyes. After a long time, she could understand one or two sentences in a paragraph, and the rest could only be gestured or guessed by the other party's eyes. Because of this, she is more likely to make small mistakes.
For her first job, Longway only worked for a month. She felt that she was doing something wrong, and she was always blamed by her boss. "Sometimes she was bullied and ostracized", so she chose not to do it. After that, she worked in a rotisserie for 5 years. In the beginning, her job was to wash the dishes, and all 10 fingers were broken. The first night it was swollen, and the next day the skin burst open along the cracks.
One day, she brushed the bowl for 14 hours in a row, and the hotel received a tour group of more than 200 people that day. Later, the hotel also took over the group of 2,000 people, and she felt that there were endless bowls. Sometimes she was provoked, and she chose to swallow her anger.
The boss liked her hard work and asked her to be a receptionist at the front desk. There is no language requirement at the front desk, because the hotel mainly accepts group meals, just say a few words to the Chinese tour guide, if the reception tour group is Southeast Asian, you only need to ask a few tables and a few people, and arrange the table.
The salary of this hotel is five or six hundred yuan more than that of other hotels. Longway has a legal visa, and the hotel will sign a labor contract with her and buy her four major insurances, including retirement pay, accident insurance, health insurance and unemployment insurance. The hotel pays half of the monthly insurance premium, and she pays half of it.
Later, she went to Daejeon, 160 kilometers away from Seoul, to work in a restaurant, while she rented an apartment of more than 10 square meters with a small kitchen at the door, and the rent was 1,300 yuan a month. The money earned each month is only enough to support the children and pay for the domestic mortgage.
Three years later, she tried her hand at construction sites and cement, earning 500 yuan a day. She also worked in a mask factory, but because of her poor health, she no longer continued to sign contracts and work long hours.
When she was in Korea, Lang Wei had an optimistic personality, and she thought that if she worked hard and gave a little more, she would be rewarded. When she encounters unhappiness and homesickness and misses her children, no matter how difficult it is, she will hold it in her heart, and she will not cry, and she will report good news to her family but not bad news.
After staying in Korea for a long time, Longway will take a car and go to many places. Every stop she sits, wherever she walks, she remembers, "I can find the original point, so I won't get lost." But she always felt like a foreigner, and every day, she wondered when she would be able to go home.
Outlander
Wu Peng's entire family is of Korean ethnicity and speaks Korean. Back in the day, his grandfather followed his great-grandmother to China.
The elders want him to live a decent life. "Just as most parents want their children to become civil servants, or to go to work in a suit in a big company, but they don't know me very well, and their hopes are too vague and superficial."
Wu Peng repeated the trajectory of the elders in the family. When his grandfather was in his 50s, he went to the construction site to move steel bars, slept in a gas station in his 60s, and used the hard-earned money to send his three children to South Korea to work. "My parents and my mother's generation also suffered a lot of grievances when they came to South Korea." Wu Peng said that they have suffered in South Korea for half their lives, and as a result, their children will eventually have to suffer in South Korea, "which makes them very devastated." ”
In fact, the family did not want Wu Peng to work in South Korea, for fear that he would be bullied by Koreans who had never suffered before.
"In Korea, my parents helped me a lot. In fact, what they have worked hard for is much stronger and more reliable than they imagined. Wu Peng said, "They all started from grassroots workers step by step, and they have been boiled up for a long time." ”
Wu Peng's father is now the section chief of a logistics company, and his mother is the team leader of a medical device factory. More than 10 years ago, while working in a restaurant, his mother kicked a little girl when she saw her being sexually harassed.
Today, Wu Peng's grandfather lives in a nursing home in South Korea. The last time we met, my grandfather touched his head and knew that my grandson was working on the construction site, and he told him to pay attention to safety, safety first.
At the beginning of next year, Wu Peng's visa will be changed to F5, and his annual income can reach 45 million won (equivalent to 237,000 yuan).
Lang Wei thinks differently, she just wants to go home, "my dearest people are in my hometown." When she was working in Seoul, Lang Wei was happiest every day when she got off work, and the happiest day every month was the day she was paid.
In addition to the three or four thousand yuan per month for subway and bus fares, telephone bills, room bills, and water and electricity bills, she will call the rest of the money to her children. Prices in Seoul are high, and there is not much left after the expenses. Sometimes she wonders, "Why do I work so hard and still don't have any money?" ”
In Longwei's hometown, there are many people who go to South Korea to work like her, "all of whom have endured a lot of hardships." She had a friend who worked in a fabric factory, and in order to earn more overtime pay, she once didn't sleep for two days and two nights.
As far as she knows, "there are also many shortcuts", and many women who work in South Korea will find a rich local man to rely on.
Although she has been in South Korea for five or six years, Zhang Shan has not saved any money. She has been working as a temporary worker, and her income is not stable.
Ms. Zhang has no plans to stay in South Korea forever. She wants to save some savings while she is still young, and then return to China to do something she loves, "although this day may still be far away".
The paper "Social Adaptation and Obstacle Factors of Korean Migrant Groups in South Korea" points out that for Koreans working in South Korea, because their bodies are often placed in the service scene at the bottom of the traditional concept, the physical experience in the process of part-time work, whether physical or psychological, reminds them of the "other" at the bottom of Korean society.
While in Korea, Longway suffered from severe depression. Since 2019, the condition has become serious. You need to take sleeping pills every day to fall asleep. For three or four years, she cut off contact with the outside world.
Until one day in June 2023, she returned to China for a vacation, and she wanted to rest for 10 days before going to South Korea, but during these 10 days, she was able to fall asleep without taking medicine, and the pain in her body disappeared. She felt like she was getting happier, and she decided not to leave.
In the nine years she used to work in South Korea, she only returned to China once a year during the Spring Festival. On weekdays, when she heard that her father or daughter was sick and cold, Lang Wei was in a low mood and washed her face with tears for several days, and when they were well, she could feel better. Now that she misses her father, she can drive back to visit.
Now, Longway has opened a barbecue restaurant in Yanbian, specializing in local specialties such as Hunchun skewers, with pickles and Yanbian bibidone, wrapped in perilla leaves and lettuce.
Every morning, she gets up early in the morning and goes to the market to buy ingredients for the day, and although it is hard to work from morning to evening, she feels much more relaxed than the days when she works in Korea.
On May Day this year, the business of the store suddenly improved, and Lang Wei ran to the nearby mountain alone and cried for a long time. "More than a decade of hard work has finally paid off."
Longview's daughter is now 14 years old and spends most of her time boarding at Longview's sister's house.
The night before yesterday, when Longway got off work late, her daughter kept asking her aunt, "Where did my mother go?" Did my mom get home safely? ”
When she heard her sister relay these words, Longway felt full of energy.
(In order to protect the privacy of the interviewees, Peng Hui, Wu Peng, and Zhang Shan are pseudonyms.) ）