Works · Short fiction
The Temperature of Revolution
혁명의 온도
On the morning Korea's civilian military employees are supposed to stage a nationwide walkout, a former army captain turned contract civil servant must decide whether to take the blame for an accident to save his new apartment.
Synopsis
The narrator served seven years as an army officer, failed at selling insurance, and is now a five-year contract civilian employee at an army unit on the rural edge of the capital region. His mother and disabled brother are gone; for the first time in his life he has a decent income, imported beer in the fridge and a new villa he has borrowed heavily to move into.
Online, a community of civilian military employees, angry about being made to stand night duty and carry weapons like soldiers, has organized a “revolution”: on the day the president hands out commendations, every one of them will refuse the award and stay home.
Three days before the walkout, his young company commander, a female captain who outranks him now but is his junior from his officer days, takes him to dinner. A private has lost an eye in an accident that happened while she was running a mandatory lecture, and she has a favor to ask: tell the investigator, an old acquaintance of his, that the work was his order. His promotion, and his loan, depend on officers like her.
Monday morning comes, and everyone shows up for work. The revolution has failed. And yet, in the hands of an old colleague, he discovers the real temperature of revolution.
Why it works on screen
- A sharp, satirical look at hierarchy inside the Korean military, from a former officer.
- A ticking clock to a Monday walkout and a moral dilemma in a single weekend.
From the opening
Monday morning arrives without shame, like an illegal debt collector. Both the express buses and the city buses stop at the bus stop in front of my villa. That is why students on their way to school and packs of office workers commuting to Seoul or the new towns gather there at a quick trot. I go to work against the crowd, like a salmon. I have no interest in the commuting struggles of people who put up with moving all the way out here to satisfy their desire to live in a brand-name apartment.
Between them and us lies a gap far wider than the road between the apartments and the villas. I don't like them. Slogans like “Commute to Seoul? Totally doable” or “A special city embracing a new town” may prop up their self-esteem, but they have been pushed out to what is plainly the boondocks, where the stench of manure hangs in the air from spring to fall and the stream floods every monsoon season and soaks your shoes in sewage. And still the quiet arrogance in the way they look at the people of the villas across the road gets on my nerves. Or is it my own inferiority complex?
A morning of revolution, thick with fog. There is nothing grim about my stride as I advance through the damp northwest wind. A revolution is usually directed at state power. The target of our struggle is the Republic of Korea Armed Forces, a legal organization of violence that runs on taxpayers' money: the Ministry of National Defense, in other words. Not that we plan to ram a vehicle through the barricade at the guardhouse or cut through the razor wire on the base fence. If anything, the opposite.
Translated from the Korean.