In recent years, some Chinese Korean compatriots have thrown themselves into the wave of Korean migrant workers, and the mother-in-law on the other side of today's letter is one of them. The mother-in-law is nearly seventy years old and works as a nurse in a nursing home in South Korea. After the outbreak of the epidemic in South Korea, the mother-in-law still insisted on working. For the mother-in-law, this hard-won job is hard, but it cannot be lost.
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Korean mothers-in-law who work in South Korea have their way back stranded
Author: The other shore
The mother-in-law who works in South Korea originally planned to return in March, because the domestic epidemic delayed the date and did not want the outbreak in South Korea. I thought it was safe to wait for safety in a relatively safe place, but it became the least safe place.
One
The mother-in-law came to Seoul two months ago to work as a nurse at a place called Pazu below. This is a private nursing home, before the mother-in-law spent two years in Seoul, also as a caregiver, is a larger private nursing home, about 500 people. The mother-in-law was not happy and found another job online.
The mother-in-law took a passenger line and arrived in Pazu in more than an hour. Surrounded by mountains, there are no large factories and supermarkets, most of them are bungalows. The mother-in-law thought it was a rural area, and later heard the locals say that it was a municipal city.
A street scene taken by the mother-in-law on the fifth-floor platform
The nursing home has five floors and has 15 rooms, including single rooms and five people, about 50 elderly people, and 15 caregivers. The mother-in-law is the 84-year-old mother of the director of the nursing home, who eats and lives for 85,000 won (about 500 yuan) a day. The mother-in-law waited for her every day to feed, take medicine, and deal with the old man's defecation.
Single room care where the mother-in-law is located
Usually, the mother-in-law gets up at five o'clock every morning and walks around the yard. Now, the elevator of the nursing home is closed, the people in the hospital are not allowed to go out, the nurses take the temperature of the nurses once a day, the hospital is disinfected every day, and the people who come in have to register to measure the body temperature. Because of the remoteness, there are no confirmed cases here. The mother-in-law's nursing room is on the fifth floor, and there is an open-air platform on the top floor, and when it is suffocated, the mother-in-law goes up to breathe. The lonely streets, like the dark green mountains in the distance, asleep, are silent. In the sun, the asbestos tile roof of various colors is red, blue, blue and yellow, but it is beautiful.
At the end of January, when the epidemic broke out in China, my mother-in-law bought two packs of children's masks in the local area, each mask was 2,000 won (about 12 yuan), and the dean gave her two packs of adult masks to send us by mail. Due to the impact of the domestic epidemic, those four packs of masks are still on the road. The mother-in-law was told that there was a shortage of masks, and a mask should be worn for at least three days.
My aunt and uncle and aunt, who work in Seoul, called my mother-in-law and asked each other about it, but they didn't plan to go back. My aunt and uncle have been in Korea for two years, working in a restaurant, and she said that she didn't want to throw away the job she had found so hard.
She thinks the same way most people who come to Work in South Korea. Like the nurses in the mother-in-law's hospital, no one plans to return home. Their average age is about fifty years old, most of them come from a Korean village in Yanbian, Jilin Province, China, and unlike their mother-in-law and aunt, they have worked in South Korea for more than ten or even twenty years, and their children are thrown to the care of the elderly in the family when they are very young, and only send hard-earned maintenance every year. "I don't have the land to go back, I earn more here, I earn twice as much as working in Beijing, and I earn three times more than I earn in my hometown in Yanbian.
But there are also fears, two friends who worked in Seoul before the mother-in-law have returned to China, they have pensions in China, they themselves suffer from high blood pressure and diabetes, and they are worried about dying in a foreign country.
Two
The mother-in-law went to South Korea this time, and her lover and his brother were opposed. The mother-in-law is 69 years old this year, although her health is very good, but after all, she is old, and there is no need to work so hard. The mother-in-law said that after two more years of work, the visa expires, and the money for the pension will be returned.
This is the second time my mother-in-law has gone to South Korea to work.
The mother-in-law was born in a small Korean village under Jidong in Heilongjiang Province. The father-in-law's father, the lover's grandfather, was the first generation of Korean immigrants to enter China from the Korean Peninsula. The three brothers fled to northeastern China and settled in a small town in Jixi, leaving only one sister in South Korea.
At first, the father-in-law and the mother-in-law were both paper mill workers, the efficiency of the paper mill gradually deteriorated, the mother-in-law was a temporary worker, very early out to open a sewing shop, the lover was five years old, the father-in-law also stopped working to drive a tricycle, and later bought a mini-van to pull passengers, which was the first one in their town. At that time, the lover's family lived a very prosperous life, and in their leisure time, the family would take a van to the park to play. However, the unexpected death of the father-in-law and the accident of the lover's brother in the car caused a series of changes, so that the family fell to the bottom of the valley. The mother-in-law sold the old house, paid compensation with all her savings, and rented a house with my lover, the eldest son who worked in Harbin after graduation, recruited students for accommodation, and had three meals a day. In 2006, the mother-in-law bought a house with the money she had saved, and the two finally took root in Harbin.
The eldest son has a job and a house, the second son has not yet landed, and the mother-in-law still dares not relax. In the summer of 2007, the mother-in-law took the Chinese Korean labor language test for Korea, and after passing, she waited for the embassy lottery once a year in September, waited for three years, the mother-in-law was drawn, and came back every six months to apply for a visa.
When I got married to my lover, my mother-in-law had been working as a nurse in Korea for a year, and after our wedding, my mother-in-law immediately returned, and a year later, I gave birth to a child, and my mother-in-law came back to help. Several sisters of the mother-in-law, the eldest aunt and the second aunt of the lover, all went to South Korea to work in this way, and the son and daughter came back when they needed to take the child, and when they brought the child to the age of two or three, they went out to work again. My aunt worked as a home nanny, and my mother-in-law worked as a nurse in a nursing home.
In 2014, the mother-in-law applied for a five-year visa. The second son got married, the mother-in-law came back to help pay the new house down payment of more than 100,000 yuan, and then paid the loan of 120,000 yuan that had previously bought a pension house in Harbin, and the mother-in-law had little money left to work. I helped my young son watch the child for two years, and in 2018, my mother-in-law began to make a fool of herself again. In the mother-in-law's view, not grasping some real hard currency in her hands is to increase the burden on the juniors.
Three
In the wave of Chinese Koreans going to South Korea to work, the mother-in-law is not the most typical.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the South Korean government has begun to introduce a large number of foreign workers to make up for the shortage of domestic labor force. Many of the Korean migrant workers are ethnic Chinese Koreans. According to South Korean media reports, by the end of 2017, more than 462,000 ethnic Chinese Koreans working in South Korea with Chinese passports had been enrolled, and 85,000 had become South Koreans.
Going to South Korea to earn money and returning to China to spend money has long become a common way of life for Koreans in China. In 1984, China and South Korea allowed citizens to visit relatives in each other's countries, and their aunts who stayed in Korea issued invitations to their uncles and aunts at home, and their uncles and aunts were able to legally enter South Korea as migrant workers and obtain the right to stay permanently. And the lover's brother-in-law and aunt are not so lucky. After the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and South Korea in 1992, Chinese Korean laborers could visit their relatives and travel to South Korea, but they would return within a week or three months on the specified date. But this still attracts a large number of Ethnic Chinese living in the countryside, many of whom borrow the name of visiting relatives and tourism, and even more adventurous stowaways illegally stay in South Korea to work. My brother-in-law got a tourist visa, but when he went, just in time for the 1998 Asian financial crisis, South Korea began to revise immigration laws to reduce immigration, and visa applications and approvals were more stringent. The brother-in-law sold the popsicle factory, took out all the family's savings, and scraped some from relatives, spending nearly 70,000 yuan to find an intermediary to apply for a visa. The brother-in-law is a welder with a monthly income of nearly 10,000 yuan in South Korea. Three years later, the brother-in-law used the money he earned to do it for the little uncle's mother. At that time, the two children of the little aunt, one in the second grade and one in the sixth grade, were handed over to the care of the old man, and the house was rented out. However, a month later, the aunt was repatriated and could not go back to Korea until five years later.
The little aunt originally worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant, working nearly ten hours a day, and did not rest on Saturdays and Sundays, and even so, every day like a thief, hiding in tibet in case she was caught and repatriated.
There are differences in accent between Korean and Korean, and as soon as you open your mouth, you will be discovered immediately. Generally, the working restaurant will help cover up, because the illegal detainees will also be fined.
The aunt was found very suddenly, a group of police officers directly broke into the hotel and took her away, and was taken to the airport with the other stranded people, forcibly repatriated, and fined. Before and after, the adventure of the brother-in-law and the little aunt was put into 160,000 yuan.
Five years later, my aunt passed the exam to obtain a visa and went to South Korea. In 2012, the policy was getting better and better, and the Korean Korean visit to South Korea for employment cancelled the Korean Chinese examination, as long as the Chinese Korean citizen over 25 years old, regardless of whether there are relatives in South Korea or not, can apply.
Today, the brother-in-law and aunt have rented a house in South Korea, and the little aunt has achieved the position of hotel foreman. But their sons and daughters have been working in China.
Four
The mother-in-law has four sisters and two younger brothers, except for the four aunts who are at home to serve their uncles who are not in good health, they have all been to South Korea to work, and the time is longer or shorter. Like their mother-in-law, they mostly work in South Korea as labor-oriented workers, home nannies, nursing homes, nurses in hospitals and nursing homes, electricians, restaurant dishes washing, and back kitchens. But none of their children, their lover's cousins, their cousins, went to Work in South Korea. Like the Han Chinese, they work and study in various cities in China.
Lovers have been learning in Chinese schools since childhood, Korean only exists as a family language, and the traditional rules of intermarriage between Koreans and Koreans have gradually been broken by them. The lover and his brother both married us Han Chinese, and the only thing that retained their Korean characteristics was their diet, rice, spicy cabbage, all kinds of kimchi, kelp, all of which were loved by lovers. The lover said that when he was a child, he could feel a little bit of the estrangement between Koreans and Han Chinese, and the diligence and cleanliness of Korean women made them think that Han people were lazy and sloppy. After growing up, I had more interaction and understanding with Han people, and prejudice gradually disappeared. Lovers have no feelings for Korea and have not even traveled to Korea. Due to the early death of his father-in-law, the lover's family had no contact with their aunt and uncle in Korea.
The mother-in-law said that young people go to South Korea to work, they can't eat that hardship, and they can't save money. Another point is that the mother-in-law feels very deeply that koreans in South Korea are not very popular. There are many reasons for this. Like my aunt, in the 1990s, the Koreans who went to Korea to work were basically northeastern farmers, and most of them were Yanbian people, with a strong accent, which was very different from the Korean language in the south. For South Koreans with clear hierarchical boundaries, Koreans with thick accents are "not my race." In addition, their cultural level is not high, they can only engage in dirty work that Koreans do not want to do, and the unconscious rural bad habits and low-level work they engage in have made Koreans form stereotypes. My mother-in-law had seen with her own eyes that a Korean nurse in their hospital had been fired. Only because when she was resting, she put her hands into the pocket of her apron, showing a hint of unseriousness. The logistics minister spoke roughly: You, take your hands out! The nurse asked rhetorically, what's wrong with that? The logistics minister immediately became angry and pointed with his hand: The hospital does not want you, let's go. In general, they say that you are wrong, that you are wrong, and you cannot distinguish between right and wrong. "We can bear it when we're older, and young people can't stand that anger." Mother-in-law said. However, the mother-in-law said that she was fine, because of the special relationship between the nursing elderly and the dean, the mother-in-law worked diligently and neatly, and was invisibly looked up to.
My mother-in-law bought us two Korean brand rice cookers, mailed us a variety of beauty cosmetics, spices, kelp, learned the Korean people's healthy and light diet, rarely fried and fried, a plate of kimchi, a bowl of kelp soup, or seaweed bibimbap, is a breakfast. The mother-in-law praised the good environment in South Korea, but the mother-in-law also sighed, saying that it was still good in China, there was a human touch, koreans were too cold between people, and everyone was desperately trying to earn money.
March 5 is the mother-in-law's lunar birthday, South Korea's brother-in-law transferred 200,000 won (about 1,000 yuan) to the mother-in-law, saying that if you want to eat, you can buy something, and several aunts also sent birthday wishes, which is the mother-in-law's uninterrupted affection in South Korea.
The lover told her mother-in-law a few years earlier that we would not go to Korea to earn money, and you could come back and live with us or alone. However, in the special year of 2020, the mother-in-law's return road was unexpectedly stranded, the mother-in-law said that it was closed everywhere for inspection, it was very inconvenient for her to go out, and there were many risks, it was better to stay here, no matter whether there was a natural disaster or a man-made disaster, there was a time in the past. "I didn't do anything when I went back, I started working at the age of twenty, I haven't rested for fifty years, I can't move." Mother-in-law said.
Launched in 2009 by an independent bookstore in Beijing, One-Way Street is a quarterly journal that publishes essays, fiction, poetry, art, and criticism by emerging writers and artists from around the world.
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