Kim Soom writes novels about people who have been uprooted: adopted children; sex slaves, or so-called “comfort women;” people who have been driven away from their homes; and ethnic Koreans in the post-Soviet states who have been deported to Central Asia. This time she follows the life of workers at a shipyard with her usual thoughtful and yet unceasing introspection into their work and life.

“It’s not easy working at a shipyard. Some are killed at the workplace. It is the secret and truth of everyone who lives by working here from day to day.”

Hyesuk, the main character, works for the subcontractor of a subcontractor at a shipyard. The workers at a shipyard are divided into three categories: the people who belong to the company, the workers dispatched by a subcontractor, and the workers who are dispatched by a subcontractor of the subcontractor. The shipbuilding company outsources the work to subcontractors to cut down on labor costs and to avoid dealing with labor management. Safety inspectors walk around wearing a yellow armband to make sure that painting is not done at the same time as fire-hazardous work such as grinding or welding. But a foreman sends all his subcontract workers into a steel block so that they can finish the work as soon as possible. Because the workers from a subcontracting company get paid by the day, they don’t get paid if they call in sick or don’t finish their work in time.

A ship hull is assembled by putting together steel blocks, which are twenty meters in width, length, and depth, and weigh about sixty tons each. When they are all assembled, you have a ship. One ship is made of 300 steel blocks that are welded from more than 100,000 steel boards. The steel blocks are indispensable parts of a ship, but they also represent the fate of workers who build them and yet are treated as an easily discarded workforce. In A Swallow’s Heart, workers constantly get lost in steel blocks. Seonmi dies in one of the steel blocks, and the main character wonders if Seonmi would have survived if only her partner Choi had looked around just once to check up on her. The main character realizes, however, that workers like her are like spooks who are not really there, and therefore they cannot get lost even if they wanted to. 

The workers spend their whole life at the shipyard, but they never see the ships they build or the company owner they work for. At the front gate of the shipyard there is a signboard with “392” written on it, meaning that it’s been 392 days since any accidents. But workers have died and been injured; they are just unable to claim it as a work-related accident or death. The story prompts readers to ponder the lies and irony behind that number as they read about workers who die or get hurt making a ship they will never get to see.   

Kim Soom began her literary career by winning the Daejeon Ilbo Spring New Writers Contest in 1997. She is the author of the short story collections Would I Be Able to Touch Trees, Noodles, Your God, and the novels Sewing Women, One Person, Have You Ever Wished A Soldier to Become An Angel, The Drifting Land, The Listening Period, A Swallow Heart, and others. She has won the 2012 Heo Gyun Literary Award, the 2013 Contemporary Literature Award, the 2013 Daesan Literary Award, the 2015 Yi Sang Literary Award, the 2017 Dongni Literary Award, the 2020 Kim Hyun Literary Prize, and the 2020 Dong-in Literary Award.