One woman of thirty-six sat demurely looking at the ocean in a figured white silk gown. I postponed interviewing her, for she looked such a typical housewife that I thought her the wife of some official or engineer. When I asked her what she did, I got a shock.
“I am a gold miner,” she said, “working three hundred feet under-ground. I am a skilled worker; I operate a drill.”
“Isn’t that heavy work?” I asked.
She smiled a bit apologetically and replied that it was. “But not as heavy as the work I used to do. Under the Japanese I loaded ore and pushed the cars, working thirteen hours or more a day. Now, as pneu-matic drill operator, I work only seven hours and get very good pay.”
Lee Mai Hwa was her name. She had worked many years in the mines. But she had only been a driller for one year; under the Japanese rule women were not allowed to learn the higher skills. She was proud of her job.
“How did you get this work?” I asked. “Did you replace a man?”
“I got my job because we are expanding production and because I studied the work. Under the Japanese we had only 1,000 workers in our mine, but now we have 2,500.” Among the 2,500 workers, Lee said, there were 206 women but only two of these werdrillers. Lee Mai Hwa was the first.
Lee was proud of her wages. They are twice what her husband gets. He works for the same mine but on the surface. He sharpens drills. He makes at most 2,000 yen a month. “But I made 4,000 last month,” bragged Lee. “For women now get equal pay for equal work and my work is very skilled… I also set many records. Formerly a driller drilled one car of ore a day, but once, for a record, I drilled twenty cars in one day! It takes four and even six load-ers to load all the ore I drill.”
“You must be the head of your family,” I commented.
“That’s what my husband says,” replied the complacent Lee.
“Is he jealous?” “No, he’s proud,” she assured me.
I inquired into her standard of living. Just what can she buy with the 6,000 yen that she and her husband make?
Under the Japanese, said Lee, the food was very bad. “Now I get rationed food, 750 grams of rice a day for my ration and the same amount for my husband. We are both first category workers.” This rationed rice costs only five yen a kilo. So the basic rice food costs only 230 yen a month from the family wage of 6,000 yen.
“We have a good house now,” Lee added. “It formerly belonged to a Japanese official. It has a warmed floor.” (This is the Korean way of heating good houses.) “We have two big rooms and four closet-rooms and a little hall.”
“Did you ever have a nice silk dress like that under the Japanese?” I asked.
“Oh, never,” smiled Lee with a touch of amusement, stroking her white, silk gown.
Lee also told me about the general elections held in her town where the candidate was “a worker from our mine.” But this I have given in the chapter on government and elections.
In North Korea: First Eye-Witness Report, Anna Louise Strong, 1949