This is the opening of a letter. The writer is Shappae, a woman from Myanmar. She works in a strawberry field in Korea and lives in a plastic greenhouse. The recipient is Bopa, a Cambodian woman who had been working in the strawberry field before Shappae. People in the strawberry-field village treat the two like “disposable chopsticks or paper cups in a single bag.” Shappae knows they are treated that way. Even so, they go on living. And through strawberries, the strawberry field, and the things that surround her now, she tries to understand what life is. The letter is that record.

[Flat] The ‘Distorted Korean Dream’ of Cambodian women migrant workers

<Strawberry Theory> is the new full-length novel by the writer Kim Sum. Over the years, the author has listened to the stories of those placed on the margins of societyincluding victims of the Japanese military ‘comfort women’, forcibly relocated Koryoin, people with disabilities, and shipyard workersand has illuminated them through literature. This time, the figures at the focus of her gaze are women migrant workers.

Bopa and Shappae have picked strawberries at the same field and shared a room for seven years, but they are not ‘friends’. Bopa, who is Cambodian, speaks Khmer, and Shappae speaks Burmese. Because their spoken and written languages do not match, they have never really communicated. Neither is proficient in Korean. Shappae at least tries to learn Korean, but Bopa has no interest. They talk using only short words like “strawberry”, “is”, and “is not”.

In fact, the lack of communication is not the problem. Just as people do not try to talk to machines in a factory or to things like sickles and hoes, language for communication is an unnecessary skill for migrant workers who exist merely as ‘labor power’. The couple who employ Shappae and Bopa may even hope that the two know nothing about Korea and cannot speak a single word of Korean. That way, even if they “put a roll of vegetable gimbap in our hands and then dock from our pay a meal cost three times its price,” the two would not be able to raise any objection.

In South Korean society, where low birth rates and aging are rapidly shrinking the labor force, the presence of migrant workers is no longer negligible. From care workwhere demand is expected to grow furtherto rural areas nationwide and shop-floor jobs at small and medium factories, they are replacing domestic workers across a range of occupations. It is true that views toward migrant workers have improved, yet it is also true that they still face discrimination in harsh conditions.

Because <Strawberry Theory> directly takes up the voices of migrant workers, the discrimination and isolation they experience are drawn as they are. The novel then goes a step further, entering the characters’ inner lives to confront their varied desires.

Young women who compare Japan and Korea as workplaces, who look to the city rather than the fields and dream of being exchange students rather than workers. Laden with resentment and anger at the world, yet, to earn money, able to say only yes to the boss, and then sending all the money they make to families back homeshrewd in some respects and endlessly naive in othersthese are Shappae, Bopa, Wanna, Tura… and countless other nameless migrant workers.

[Flat] Novelist Kim Sum, who writes about ‘comfort women’ “I wrote because I wanted to… but I have never forgotten my responsibility”

In recent works such as <Gandan Huku>, which deals with the Japanese ‘comfort women’, and <Rainbow Eyes>, based on interviews with a visually impaired person, Kim Sum actively employed poetic expression and structure. Poetic language stands out in this work as well. Short sentences that heighten a poetic feel and words that reveal an unusual sensibility blend with Shappae in the novel, who is not familiar with Korean.

“Bopa, you not there. / Yesterday, in the strawberry field, you not there. / I, I called you. / You, no answer. / In the strawberry field, you not there.”

“I glare at the strawberries and wait for the strawberries to swallow me. In one bite. Okay? Like a strawberry, a girl who picks strawberries tastes right only if she too is swallowed in one gulp. I glare at the strawberries until they feel like the drops of blood pooled in my eyes, so that I can be swallowed by the strawberries.”

[Flat] Marriage-migrant women decide to speak, assert themselves, and get angry as ‘I’

Not every sentence is poetic. In some parts where Shappae addresses her own situation, the situations around her, and certain events, the novel also gives the impression of explaining events somewhat diectly.

The author said she wrote this book over a little more than two years of research and interviews. The book also includes incidents we actually saw in the news, such as the story of Sokhaeng, who died in December 2020 while sleeping in a plastic greenhouse dormitory at a farm in Pocheon, Gyeonggi Province, amid a cold wave of minus 20 degrees.