I ended up living in a playing card factory.

In a place where not a single ray of light could enter, where the stale, suffocating stench of mold filled the air, hundreds of women worked day and night.

They were divided into three shifts—dawn, day, and night—worked without pause. A rigid schedule was posted in large print on the factory wall: 170 minutes of work, 10 minutes of rest, 40 minutes for each meal, and 20 minutes to clean up at every shift change.

To enforce it, the foremen at each workstation watched the female workers with sharp, unblinking eyes, making sure every second was obeyed.

Compared to the thugs who guarded the women in the red-light district, they almost seemed humane.

They didn’t tell us to strip. They didn’t force us to sell our bodies. And most of all, they didn’t beat us. That alone made it feel like I could finally survive.

The work itself wasn’t difficult.

Machines stamped out cards printed with the twelve flowers of the year. Some women inspected the printed designs, others sanded down the sharp edges. Then everything was gathered in order and packed into palm-sized boxes.

Watching the dizzying colors—plum blossoms, orchids, crimson bush clover—I sat in a corner of the factory, folding the boxes those cards would go into.

As the lowest of the low, I wasn’t even allowed to touch the cards themselves. For the past ten days, all I had done was fold boxes.

“Who got blood on the boxes?”

The foreman tapped the stacked boxes with a long wooden stick, glaring around. I quietly turned my hand over and looked at it.

“Me.”

“Hey, are you blind? If you got blood on them, you should’ve taken them out yourself!”

“I didn’t know I was bleeding.”

“Shut it! Count them properly. They’re coming out of your pay. Got it?”

I answered obediently, stood up, and put on the gloves used for moving the boxes. Then I sorted out the bloodstained ones.

There were exactly ten.

Two hundred won. The price of a carton of milk.

They hadn’t even paid me yet, and they were already deducting from my 50,000 won wages. How could they take so much already?

Uniform fees, dormitory costs, food—by the time they finished naming everything, more than half was already gone.

When I sat back down and took off my gloves, dried blood had stuck to them. With a faint tearing sound, my hand came free.

My fingertips burned.

The boxes were so thick that unless I pressed them firmly with my fingertips, they wouldn’t fold properly.
The skin on my palms, still raw from the coal ash, hadn’t healed either—but my fingertips hurt far worse, throbbing with every movement.

It was ridiculous that something as simple as a box could cause this much pain.

“Why is the box team so slow today?! Keep this up and you won’t get any break time at all!”

The foreman shouted at the girl sitting next to me.

“Loud mouth. It was my mistake—why are you yelling at her?”

I muttered it under my breath, glaring at the back of his flat head. The girl beside me nudged my arm, telling me to stop.

‘The girl beside me was the owner of the clothes I had tried to steal.’

Wearing nothing but my underwear and that oversized coat, I ran until my feet were torn raw—and the place I reached was this factory.

Behind it, the backyard was lined with clothes hung out to dry. I didn’t hesitate. I climbed over the wall and grabbed whatever I could from the line. It felt like a work uniform—stiff, fully dried fabric, probably hung out to air.

Through the rows of fluttering uniforms, a girl stood there, staring at me. Her face was marked with patches of acne scars, and she looked at me cautiously.

I froze, watching her carefully, wondering if she would scream and call someone. But she didn’t say a word.

As I hesitated and took a step back, she lifted her hand and gestured at me. It seemed like she was telling me to follow her.

On the factory wall, there was a job posting.

Eulji Industrial Company Hiring Female Workers
Room and board provided (dormitory)

The paper was half-torn, barely hanging there, with only those two lines left.

The girl pointed at the factory, then at herself. She awkwardly mimicked shuffling playing cards, then pretended to eat with a spoon.

She couldn’t speak.

When she pressed her hands together and tilted her head as if sleeping, I let out a quiet, dry laugh.

“So what are you trying to say?”

“….”

She just stood there, silent.

“Looking like this, I can’t go anywhere.”

With my face covered in scabs and dried blood, I would be turned away no matter where I went. No one—even the most indifferent person—would offer help. No one wanted trouble.

But she grabbed my wrist and pulled me along, leading me into a three-story building beside the factory.

In the washroom, she cleaned my hands and face with soap. She applied ointment to my palms and carefully covered them with bandages. She gave me a pair of white socks, and even a pair of fur-lined shoes.

Then she pushed me into a bathroom stall and shook her head firmly, telling me not to come out no matter what.

So I stayed there, in that cramped stall, waiting for her.

She was a complete stranger—and it was the first kindness I had ever received in my life. I couldn’t understand why she was helping me.

But I couldn’t refuse.

Refusal was a choice for people who had something. I had nothing—less than nothing. I was miserable beyond measure.

After a while, she came back and held out a piece of paper.

[If you give the foreman a portion of your monthly pay as a referral fee, you can get a job here and survive. I’ll talk to the foreman for you. I’ll tell them you want to work here.]

At the bottom, she quickly scribbled another line.

[If you don’t want to, you can just leave.]

But I wasn’t someone who could simply walk away. And so, from that day on, I began working at the card factory.

“Name.”

“Lee Chun-hee.”

The woman said to be the longest-serving foreman looked me up and down, then asked what was wrong with my hair.

I had hacked it off myself in a frenzy to avoid taking customers in Mia—no matter how tightly I tied it, uneven strands stuck out in every direction, making me look a mess.

I didn’t make excuses. I lowered my gaze obediently, and the foreman let out a small, dismissive laugh, as if it were nothing.

“There are plenty like you here. Don’t cause trouble, and behave yourself. The moment you step out of line, every last bit of your pay becomes mine. Got it?”

Maybe her ears were dulled from the constant roar of machinery—she spoke louder than necessary. I found that irritating, so I deliberately said nothing.

“Write today’s date and your name over there. And if you want to sleep in the dorm starting today, go ahead. But don’t expect food if you haven’t worked.”

I wrote ’85 on the work ledger—then realized I didn’t know the exact date.

“What’s today?”

The foreman jerked her chin toward the wall. A daily calendar hung there, the date written in large, bold numbers.

December 20.

The day I was born.

Though, in the end, it was just another meaningless day.

While she went to eat dinner, I waited for her in front of the dormitory cafeteria on the first floor.

I waited—for her.

She came back not long after going in. From her work uniform pocket, she pulled out a roll of kimbap and held it out to me. It was stiff seaweed wrapped around plain rice and kimchi.

I chewed and chewed the cold rice and sour, over-fermented kimchi—slowly, carefully, trying to make it last. I couldn’t even remember how many days it had been since I’d last eaten a proper meal.

That night, as we lay side by side, she handed me another piece of paper.

[I’m the same as you. I ran away too.]

No.
You don’t know me.

You couldn’t possibly imagine where I came from, where I was dragged to, or how I managed to escape.

I could tell just from the way she treated me. She was someone who had never been trampled on—nor had she ever trampled over others. Maybe she had lived with nothing, scraping by like a beggar, but she had never lived like garbage.

I had.

I was garbage—born in a pile of it, raised in it. I ran errands for women who sold their bodies, skimming a little extra for myself. And when the men who bought them passed out drunk, I picked their pockets.

Everything she had done for me that day forced me to look back on the life I had lived.

That night, I didn’t sleep at all.

I felt pathetic. Cheap.