The First Day of 1955
On the first of January, 1955, Kijo sat in the office reading the Dong-A Ilbo. From that year the paper had at last grown to four pages. A newspaper once issued as a single sheet, now doubled — small proof that the country's fortunes were inching upward. The Hangul simplification order had the type set the way words were spoken, and he leafed through until the film advertisements on the last page caught his eye.
A year and six months had passed since the war's end. The columns were crowded with notices for movies and touring musical troupes, little comforts meant to ease people's cares. Kijo folded the paper and lifted the telephone. He was calling Hansu, out at the storage yard in Cheongnyangni.
Ma-ryang and Hansu had finished their training and come back to Seoul. Ma-ryang was with Kijo at the Cheongsan Development office, while Hansu lived at the Cheongnyangni yard with a hundred-odd men of the transport crew. Twelve U.S. Army buses, their conversion into trucks complete, had been brought into Cheongnyangni as well. The remaining eighteen had been left as they were, so the first batch could be put to work, its strengths and faults weighed, and a better conversion worked out from what they learned.
When Hansu came on the line, Kijo said, "Hansu, they're showing The Tale of Chunhyang at the Gukdo Theater. Take the transport crew and go."
"A movie, sir?"
Hansu's voice came back through the receiver, bright with pleasure.
"See the picture, and buy the men a good lunch while you're at it."
"The two of you aren't coming?"
"We're fine. You and the crew go on."
"And if the American transport unit should call..."
"They won't. Set your mind at ease and go."
The solar New Year holiday ran from the first of January through the third. The U.S. Army had said that once 1955 arrived it would issue transport orders without warning, but Kijo did not believe they would call on a holiday. He wanted to use the break to repay the men who had endured such grinding training.
When the call ended, he moved closer to the warm stove. He and Ma-ryang kept the quiet office, talking in the heat of the fire.
"You take on a lot of new people?"
"Took some on. Still short, though. Accounting, especially."
"Accounts need somebody you can trust."
"That's why I couldn't hire just anyone."
While Ma-ryang and Hansu had been training the crew in Yeoncheon, Kijo had stayed alone in Seoul, putting out help-wanted notices and working hard to fill the ranks. Plenty of people with fine credentials came looking, but credentials alone were not enough to trust a man with large sums of money, so he asked acquaintances to recommend someone reliable. What came instead was a flood of relatives belonging to the presidents of his client firms. Knowing that Kijo's company was making good money, those men had sent their own kin first. They were, quite simply, people who wanted nothing more than a comfortable job. Kijo was not satisfied, and he sent every one of them away.
While the two of them were turning this and that over, Sunrye and Soon-young came into the office with steamed sweet potatoes. The four of them sat down before the stove, peeling the potatoes and falling into talk.
"Where's Yeongsu got to?"
At Ma-ryang's question, Sunrye said, "He's probably racing through the alleys in Jongno. He has so many friends these days — he finishes the homework his father set him and runs straight out to play."
"Age like that, a boy ought to play his fill."
Soon-young cut in. "And what were you doing at that age, playing in some mountain village up in Hamgyong? Catching foxes and wolves, I suppose?"
"Me, I went with my father, setting traps on the mountain. An animal that runs the woods — how's a man going to catch that? On your own two feet, you never will."
"You, though, I can just see you knocking the beasts down bare-handed. Didn't you shoot a bow, like Hansu?"
"That's a hunter's work. My father and I weren't hunters. You make far too much of me..."
They were deep in that easy family talk when the office's glass door rattled open. A woman came in with a bow, the tip of her nose red from the cold, and for a moment the four of them simply stared.
"What brings you here?"
A woman walking in alone — on a holiday, and into the Cheongsan Brick Development Office at that — was hardly a common sight.
"I heard you were hiring. I saw people inside as I was passing, so I came in. I'm sorry to intrude on a holiday."
She was tall, but painfully thin, and the coat she wore was far too light for the dead of winter. All four of them rose and drew her closer to the stove.
"You've come a long way. Sit here first, and have a sweet potato."
Sunrye held out a peeled one as she spoke, and Kijo's family watched the woman eat. She went slowly, trying to hide her hunger, but all four of them could see how starved she was. The way she gave herself to each bite was a look known only to people who had gone without. Sunrye gave her another potato and passed her a cup of water.
When she had finished both and glanced around, abashed, Kijo asked carefully, without putting on a company president's airs.
"May I ask what sort of work you came to apply for?"
"I can do anything."
"And the work you were doing..."
"I majored in mathematics education at university."
Kijo put another question to her.
"Then you could teach children at a school..."
"That's..."
She lowered her head, swallowed the words for a moment, and then brought them out with difficulty.
"My father was abducted to the North during the war. It's been treated as if he defected, so I can't become a teacher."
"I see."
Kijo nodded. After the war, who was without a story — and yet there were people, not a few of them, who could not find proper work because some member of the family had been taken north. Such people found it hard to enter government service. Family stolen by the North, and life in the South made harder still: the suffering doubled.
They were all looking at her with pity when Ma-ryang put a question, blunt as a stone.
"Begging your pardon, but when you came in just now you were favoring that leg. Is it troubling you?"
Sharp-eyed as he was, the question startled her a little.
"Ah. I was trying to walk carefully so it wouldn't show, and you noticed. During the war I was working at a field hospital when the Chinese hit us in a night raid..."
She lifted her coat and showed them a little of her left calf. Shrapnel must have taken her: part of the calf was gone, and flesh had closed over the place in an ugly scar.
"That must have hurt terribly..."
Soon-young said it with a pang, then gave her husband's arm a quiet shove with her shoulder for having pointed out the woman's weakness.
"I was all right. Even like that, I fell back nearly four kilometers in a daze. When you're desperate, you go on without even knowing you're hurt."
This time it was Kijo who asked.
"You majored in mathematics. How did you come to follow a field hospital during the war?"
She answered with a calm face.
"I wanted to find my father, so I volunteered for the Women's Volunteer Corps."
"You did?"
The unexpected answer startled them all.
"Yes. I volunteered after Seoul was retaken, trained in Daejeon, and was given all sorts of duties. At first I did administrative support. Then I volunteered for nursing."
"Ah."
They nodded at her words. Even in the midst of a calamity that had come out of a clear sky, the way she had stood up to her life was remarkable. Plenty of people had fled the war, or, when family were taken north, had decided there was nothing to be done and given up. This woman, for all her gentle looks, seemed to have a core of iron.
When Kijo's eyes met Ma-ryang's, the two of them nodded to each other. Sunrye and Soon-young wore sorrowful faces, as if the woman who had lived so hard through such storms were almost too much to bear.
"If you'll give us your name and address, we'll be in touch."
"Thank you. I came like an uninvited guest, and you've been very kind."
She stood and bowed deeply, then wrote her name and address on the paper Kijo held out. The name was Jin Hyun-kyung. The address was Topyeong-ri, Guri-myeon, Yangju County.
Seeing it, Kijo asked in surprise, "Your home is in Topyeong-ri?"
"Yes."
Guri-myeon was what is now the city of Guri.
"You walked from Guri all the way to Seoul? How?"
Soon-young's eyes went round.
"I followed the Han River the whole way."
Kijo's family understood then that, frail as she looked, her stamina was nothing to dismiss. To walk from Topyeong to Seoul was more than twenty kilometers. Sunrye sent Kijo a look that begged him, if it was at all possible, to hire this woman. Soon-young and Ma-ryang looked at him too.
Sensing that every eye had turned to Kijo alone, Jin Hyun-kyung shot to her feet and bowed low.
"I'm sorry. I didn't realize you were the president."
"Ah — no, no. Please, sit down. Ha."
Kijo settled her back in the chair and said, "You've the background for the bookkeeping, so I haven't much more to ask. The trouble is that your home is so far..."
"I'll set out early, sir."
That only made their hearts ache more.
"Brother-in-law, Sister. We're moving to Hannam-dong soon, aren't we? Couldn't she rent a room in that house?"
"That would do."
Sunrye agreed.
"Thank you, ma'am."
Quick on the uptake, Hyun-kyung bowed to Sunrye again.
"Brother-in-law, Sister — she's one of us at Cheongsan now, isn't she? Then we women will step out for a bit."
"Go on, then."
Sunrye and Soon-young took Hyun-kyung out with them. They meant to bring her home and put warm clothes on her. It was a case of people who had been kind to begin with, and whose kindness had only deepened once their circumstances grew easier.
Left alone again in the office, Kijo and Ma-ryang peeled sweet potatoes and talked at an unhurried pace.
"Brother. Looks like we've found our person."
"She seems all right. And tough and spirited, whatever her looks say."
"Someone who handles money has to be sharp with numbers. But they've got to be honest."
"She looked honest to your eye, too?"
"Looked sound to me. Her eyes are like Hansu's, so I trust her."
"Ha. You thought that too? I was thinking she has the same air as Shim Hansu."
The two of them passed the time peeling sweet potatoes.
Over the Friday-to-Sunday holiday, Kijo's family moved to Hannam-dong — strike while the iron is hot, as the saying goes. A hundred employees from Cheongnyangni and five trucks shifted the household goods from Jongno to Hannam-dong in no time at all.
And at dawn on Wednesday, the fifth of January, twelve bus-trucks of Cheongsan Transport pulled out of Cheongnyangni bound for Incheon. Ma-ryang rode in the lead vehicle. Hansu rode in the last of the column, with an escort of twenty.
Kijo left the whole of it to the two of them and kept the Seoul office. He was faintly uneasy, but he saw no need to step in himself when they were the ones carrying the haul. If he could not trust Jang Ma-ryang and Shim Hansu with work he had placed in their hands, whom could he trust? That was how he saw it.
When word came that the transport unit had left Cheongnyangni, he telephoned Cho Choong-hoon at Hanjin.
"Brother, it's me. The trucks have left for Incheon."
"Have they? All right. I'll go down to the pier myself and look the ground over."
"Today's Minor Cold, so it'll be bitter. Take care."
"Cold? Thinking about hauling that canned beer has me warm clear through. I'll see them off from Incheon with my own eyes, so tie your worries down."
The very voice telling him not to worry was so plainly on edge that a laugh nearly escaped Kijo.
"Oh, and another thing. Of the firms selected this time, one's already been dropped."
"Before we've even started?"
"That's right. Before the haul, an American transport officer went to the firm and proposed they skim off some of the freight. They never guessed it was a trap and bit right down. Ha!"
"The Americans came prepared."
"Didn't they. A dodge like that, too. If they'd tried it on us, we'd have reported them to the American military police on the spot."
"So we would."
"Anyway, I think today's luck is with us. When the haul's finished, let's have a drink this afternoon."
"Yes, Brother. Take care out there."
"Right. I'll call again this afternoon."
"Understood."
Kijo set the receiver down and sat for a moment with his thoughts. If the Americans had laid a trap like that, then the U.S. military police were in on this business as well. The game he had entered was no small one. Might this single haul be enough to push the U.S. Army into a wholesale reform of its transport?
What else have the Americans got waiting...
It did not sit easy. But whatever they had prepared, Cheongsan Transport was ready to see the canned-beer shipment through.