One night in the winter of 2016, So-hee, a vocational high school graduate, deleted all the information on her phone, leaving only one video of herself dancing. Then, step by step, she walked to the middle of the icy river until it submerged her completely......
Half a year ago, So-hee, who was about to graduate, and her classmates were assigned to an internship in the telephone customer service department of a telecommunications company. They are not to help customers solve problems, but to prevent customers from terminating or inducing them to continue to consume, almost all customers will be provoked, they can only bear the bad temper of customers without a bottom line, and scolding is a daily routine.
Even so, if he couldn't complete his performance, he would be criticized, and the team leader committed suicide by burning charcoal because he couldn't bear the high-pressure exploitation of the children, but the children were asked to sign a confidentiality letter. They work overtime, are scolded, and disciplined by KPIs for a long time, but they still can't get the salary they deserve in the contract.
Every young intern comes with optimism and hope, only to be oppressed, deceived, and humiliated and leave. So-hee wanted to leave, but was persuaded by her parents, because this is a big company that everyone envies, and it is too difficult to find a job. In this way, Su Xi walked into a dead end in her life step by step, and she finally chose to commit suicide because she was overwhelmed.
The parents didn't believe that their sunny and smiling daughter would commit suicide, so the police launched an investigation into So-hee's case, but found the suffocating truth-
First of all, what led to So-hee's death was that in a company that set unreasonable goals and constantly squeezed interns, the company's top and bottom managers were proficient in PUA, intimidation and prevarication, and a whole set of tricks that didn't leak.
Second, the school that was supposed to protect So-hee has long since been transformed into an institution for companies to deliver cheap labor. If Su Xi has the slightest idea of resigning, the school will use "you are smashing the jobs of your younger brothers and sisters" to carry out moral kidnapping. The school also has a whole set of methods of humiliating and punishing students who do not sign up successfully. Schools do this for the sake of the employment rate, which has become an important measure of school grade.
Again, Suxi's parents, who were tired of running for their lives, were limited by their vision, which affected their judgment of things and their vigilance against the crisis, so they missed the distress signal released by Suxi, and her parents persuaded her to cherish the internship opportunity in the big factory, which made Suxi have no escape.
Finally, when the Education Bureau was supposed to defend the interests of students, it quietly became invisible, because the Education Bureau also has KPIs, and the Education Bureau can only get superior resources by assessing the local employment rate. As for the exploitation of enterprises after students are employed, it is not under the control of the Education Bureau, but also to the Labor Bureau.
Ironically, even the policewoman investigating the root cause of So-hee's death is under pressure from the police department's KPIs because the police are also trapped in the data system.
Workplace horror film: "The Next So-hee"
This is the South Korean film "The Next So-hee", which is based on real events and is based on the suicide case of a high school girl in 2016, which reflects the plight of young people today, and is called a "workplace horror film".
It is a cold critical realist film, the director has the courage and conscience to delve into the structural dilemma of society, and thoroughly provokes the truth that Korean society fails to pay attention to and protect the young people at the bottom, and packs them up at once, resells them, and sends them into the cruel social meat grinder to serve as cheap labor.
So-hee's suicide tears a crack open in reality, revealing the brutal truth: the cause of So-hee's death was a toxic social system in which everyone in the system is complicit in the cold data. It's like "In an avalanche, no snowflake is innocent." "Under the joint action of the company, school, family, and society, the children lived in pain, and in the process of being forced to commit suicide, no adult helped her, and after her death, the huge system still ran non-stop.
"Volume" is a lifelong proposition: we are all Suhee
Through this movie, we can see the difficulty of survival for young Koreans - for Koreans, "volume" is a lifelong proposition. For Korean students, it is only possible to get a decent job if they first get involved in the "SKY" schools (known as "Sky City") - Seoul National University (S), Korea University (K), Yonsei University (Y). The so-called decency is synonymous with the work of chaebol enterprises or civil servants, state-owned enterprises and public institutions, but the working population that can be accommodated by such work is extremely limited.
Young people don't want to talk about getting married and having babies, but it is not easy to support themselves. 80% of South Koreans think South Korea is hell, and 75% of South Koreans want to get out of here. "Because I hate Korea, because I can't live here. "600,000 people flee South Korea every year, and if this continues, South Korea will be destroyed in another 70 years.
Coincidentally, this is not unique to the plight of young Koreans, in fact, the whole of East Asia is caught in a huge, infinite web of involution, from which it is almost impossible to get out of it.
Schools have promotion rates, employment rates, companies have growth rates, KPIs, and even the civil service system has assessment data, and everyone is dying in life.
Countless ordinary young people with no background and lack of qualifications are going forward to become the "next Suxi", such as the four young migrant workers who jumped off the cliff in Tianmen Mountain in Zhangjiajie last year.
Someone left a message on Douban: We are all Su Xi, Su Xi is braver than us, she ended everything bravely, and we can only survive in secret.