Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Bus conductress update

As I mentioned in this post about bus conductresses, the main character in Yeongja's Heyday, the most popular film of 1975, worked as a bus conductress at one point before losing her arm in an accident. These screenshots should give some idea of how precarious and dangerous the job could be:



Imagine doing that job in Seoul traffic in the 1970s...

1 comment:

kushibo said...

This and its companion posts were interesting reads.

On an early stay in Korea as a teenager in the late 1980s, I encountered what must have been one of the last of the bus conductresses. I think it was outside of Seoul, though, so the bus wasn't all that crowded.

On a trip to Shenzhen, China, around the same time, when it was little more than a dusty backwater of Hong Kong, this position seemed to be the norm, though I don't know if that's still true.

I should go check out that movie if I can.