Sangdong Mine
On January 25, Park Hee-jun landed and found Lee Ki-jo waiting for him at the Yeouido airfield.
As Korean agent for AKT—AMKO Tungsten—Ki-jo had done more than pry the government's permits loose. He had won the president's backing as well, and the sight of him gladdened Hee-jun as if he had just met his own brother.
Hee-jun embraced him, shook his hand, and asked, "Have you been well?"
"I have. Is your father in good health?"
Hee-jun was grateful that Ki-jo thought to ask after his father. Acquaintances envied the whole family for having left Korea for America and looked at him as a man without a care in the world, but the truth was otherwise. At first the Parks had been glad enough. A year in the United States, though, had worn them down with open discrimination and homesickness. His father, Park Chang-hyun, felt it worst of all.
"Yes, he's well. These days, though, he says he misses Korea."
"When you grow older, it's the familiar things you long for. Barley rice stirred through with chili paste, and a spoonful of soybean-paste soup—that's what he'll be missing."
"Ha! That's exactly what Father said."
Hee-jun laughed, moved that Ki-jo understood his father's heart so well.
"Today's schedule will be rather tight," Ki-jo told him.
"I'm prepared for it." Park Hee-jun pressed his lips together once, firmly.
Ki-jo took him to the Bando Hotel. He had arranged for Hee-jun to stay at the Bando, which served foreigners only, and to sign with Korea Tungsten there in front of the press. In a banquet hall packed with reporters, Hee-jun concluded a twenty-year contract with the company. Ki-jo watched from a little distance as Hee-jun put his name to the papers. He was easier in his mind leaving the glare of the spotlights to Hee-jun and keeping to the shade himself. Where no one was looking at him, he chewed gum and took his ease.
On the floor were not only the domestic papers but a Daehan News crew from the Office of Public Information and a Liberty News team out of the United States Information Service, both putting the scene on film. Ki-jo watched with interest as the Daehan News men, hoarding stock, ran the camera in snatches of four or five seconds, while the Liberty News team filmed as freely as they pleased.
John Curtis, the USIS broadcast officer, was there as well. When the man Ki-jo had grown friendly with through the radio business came over, Ki-jo offered him a stick of gum.
Curtis took it. "Korean gum?"
"No. Japanese. Try it. It's not bad." What he handed over was Lotte gum, a gift from the four department heads of the Busan team.
John Curtis cocked his head at the wrapper, popped the gum into his mouth, chewed, and broke into an incredulous smile. "This is exactly the same as Wrigley's Spearmint."
"Because they copied it exactly."
Ki-jo and Curtis chewed and grinned at each other.
When the signing was over, Park Hee-jun and the president of Korea Tungsten held up the contract and posed for the cameras. Curtis gave Ki-jo's shoulder a couple of pats.
"Shall we head to Gyeongmudae?"
Ki-jo set off with Hee-jun. AKT's people had been summoned so the tungsten purchase and the groundbreaking of the chemical processing plant could be trumpeted as an achievement of Syngman Rhee's visit to the United States. At the gates of Gyeongmudae, though, Ki-jo was cut. He had been meant to go inside as well. The exclusion came without a word of notice.
A security man walked him to the Gyeongmudae police station. Inside, Kwak Young-joo—the man who had quashed the case of Ma-ryang's beating of Lim Hwa-soo—was waiting.
"Come in. President Lee, it's been a while."
"Inspector. Have you been well?"
Ki-jo had little liking for Kwak Young-joo, but he put on a business smile and took the offered hand.
"Don't take it so hard," Kwak said, with a cynical smile. "Wasn't the police. Kim Chang-ryong still remembers you."
The thought of Kim Chang-ryong seemed to irritate more than Ki-jo alone. Kwak, locked in his own contest of loyalty to Syngman Rhee against the man, looked equally sour. The moment they stepped into the office he stuck a cigarette between his lips.
"That damned bastard blocked your visit. I said you were cleared to come in, but he raised such a storm. He just didn't like the idea of someone he'd once had his hooks in walking into Gyeongmudae."
In a white shirt and a pistol harness, Kwak planted his feet on the desk and swaggered, as if determined to leave a hard impression. Ki-jo had no wish to spend the time with him, but there was nothing for it. He would have to talk here until Park Hee-jun came out.
"Mr. Lee Ki-jo," Kwak said, insolent. "You represent an American company. Why bring a black-haired Korean instead of an American?"
"Inspector, Mr. Park Hee-jun is an American. His legal name is David Park now."
"If you're going to put on a show, put on a proper one. His Excellency the President sitting down with a big-nosed Yankee—now that would have been a picture..." Kwak grumbled that the frames destined for the Gyeongmudae segment of Daehan News No. 52 would come out badly.
Ki-jo stole a glance at him, thinking what a pitiful figure Kwak would cut when the April 19 uprising swept him away, then looked aside.
Half an hour later Hee-jun, finished with the filming, came out of Gyeongmudae with the Daehan News crew and the Liberty News team behind him.
"Did the talk go well?" Ki-jo asked.
Hee-jun laughed, a little abashed. "I had no idea His Excellency would take such an interest. My palms sweated the whole time. I couldn't stop shaking. Ha."
Park Hee-jun's face was flushed, as if he had just been granted an audience with a king.
When the brief exchange ended, John Curtis came over. "Gyeongmudae's done. Let's move on to Eighth Army headquarters."
Curtis's last task was to take Ki-jo and Hee-jun to Yeongwol and film Sangdong Mine. If Syngman Rhee meant to boast of the chemical processing plant there as his own achievement, Curtis had a mission of his own: to publicize the first case of an American company investing directly in Korea.
"Is the Daehan News crew coming with us?"
"No. We agreed to share the film we shoot."
"I see."
"The mine is one thing, but I'd also like to feature Eundae-ri in a magazine as a model farm village. Would that be all right?"
"Of course."
In the 1950s the USIS was the largest magazine publisher in the Republic of Korea, and the chief exhibitor of films. It turned out newsreels—Liberty News—and magazines on anticommunism, modernization, and the theme of a strong and good America, and scattered them across the country. Each magazine ran past three hundred thousand copies, and screenings topped seven thousand a year.
Ki-jo rode in Curtis's car toward the Yongsan base.
At Yongsan, Ki-jo's party boarded a twelve-seat helicopter the USIS had prepared. By air, Yeongwol was barely an hour away.
At Sangdong Mine, Hee-jun met Korea Tungsten's people, looked over the site for the chemical processing plant, and talked the matter through. While he was busy with the working-level talks and the Liberty News shoot, Ki-jo and Curtis, left with nothing to do, leaned against the helicopter, chewed gum, and took the sun.
"What's the capacity of the chemical plant?"
"Crush the tungsten ore and feed it in, and it's seventy tons a day. Run the ore as it comes, and it's six."
"Pretreatment makes that much difference? More than tenfold."
"I don't really know myself. That's what President Park told me."
As they talked about the mine, Ki-jo asked, lightly, "Before we go back to Seoul, could we take the helicopter up and fly around near here? Ten minutes would do."
"And whose request am I going to turn down? Ha. Of course. Where do you want to look?"
Even at a request out of the blue, Curtis agreed at once.
"I'd like to fly over Dogye-ri, near Samcheok."
"If you only describe it, the pilot won't be able to find the place..."
Ki-jo drew a sheet from the bag he had brought. In an age when maps were hard to come by, he had gone to the Bureau of Mines at the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and photographed the charts of Yeongwol, Taebaek, and Samcheok. He had pieced the prints together and carried them to a sign painter. What he held was the handmade map the man had drawn.
Curtis called the pilot over and had him learn the place from the map.
"Understood. Twenty kilometers east from this peak, toward the East Sea. That should do it." The pilot nodded.
When Park Hee-jun and the Liberty News team, finished at Sangdong, came to the helicopter, the pilot started the engine. Ki-jo explained that there was somewhere he wanted to look over, and Hee-jun nodded.
"A coal mine?"
"Yes. Since we're here, I found myself wanting to see it."
In truth, Ki-jo had been waiting all day for this hour. The business with Hee-jun mattered, but he also wanted to test the plan for vertical integration of the energy business that Professor Kim Moon-hwan had laid out.
Once they were aboard, the helicopter lifted toward the east. After about ten minutes the pilot signaled with his hand for them to look down. From fifteen hundred meters, Ki-jo and Hee-jun searched the mountain country of Gangwon, white under snow. Ki-jo found what he was looking for and pointed it out to Hee-jun beside him.
The place under his finger was the ground where, in years to come, the Gyeongdong Mine—the largest privately owned coal mine in the Republic of Korea—would stand. He jabbed at a small patch of earth, black as a flake of soot dropped on white cotton, and shouted.
The helicopter's roar swallowed most of the words, but Hee-jun could read Ki-jo's face well enough to know that an immense seam lay under that ground. He nodded.
Back in Seoul, Ki-jo spread the map with Hee-jun at the Bando Hotel.
"So this mine hasn't been opened yet?"
"That's right." Ki-jo nodded.
After he promised Professor Kim Moon-hwan a briquette factory, a memory had nagged him for days, forever on the point of surfacing and never quite arriving. What was it? While he turned the question over, Sunrye gave him the hint. One night, after changing the briquettes in the boiler, she slipped under the quilt.
"Dear, do you remember? When we lived in Busan, how we envied the rich houses that could afford to burn coal briquettes."
"Ah, we did... What was that brand called?"
"The brand? Let me think. It was Mr. Son's briquettes..."
"Ah! That's it!"
In that instant everything in his mind lit up, as if lightning had struck.
The year after they fled to Busan—1951. Holed coal briquettes appeared in the city. Not the nine-hole briquettes of later years, but lumps with only a few holes bored through them. Ki-jo had known the man who made them: Son Do-ik, a refugee who came south in the January Fourth Retreat. They had worked the docks together, and Son was so tireless, so fiercely grasping, that even Ki-jo was left shaking his head. Diligent as he was, Ki-jo trudged home spent when the day ended. Son Do-ik, even after his shift, went out into the streets to peddle.
Then, from his own house in Choryang-dong, Dong-gu, the man began pressing and selling two hundred briquettes a day, and before long he quit the docks entirely and sold nothing else. Later word went around that he had become president of a briquette works and grown rich, and around 1974 Ki-jo heard that Son Do-ik had bought a coal mine outright in Dogye, Gangwon, and was making Wangpyo briquettes from the coal that came out of it.
Once, passing in a fine Japanese car, Son Do-ik recognized him on the street and took him to a teahouse. In their dockworker days they had both been refugees, neither of them one to shirk, and when they were paired the work went easier for both, so they had often labored side by side. Over tea Son Do-ik explained in detail where his mine lay, somewhere in Dogye-eup, and how large the reserves were. At the mention of Sunrye's Wangpyo briquettes, that memory rose as sharp as something that had happened only yesterday.
The next day Ki-jo went to the Bureau of Mines and looked into every coal working in Dogye-eup. At the spot Son Do-ik had described, there was neither a state-run mine nor a private one. This was it. Buy the land, obtain nothing from the government but the mining rights, put in the works, and he could start digging coal at once. He would not have to wait until the decree disposing of state-owned mining rights took effect in March 1956.
Hee-jun, who had been studying the map for some time, suddenly clouded. "But the railway..."
"The railway?"
"Yes. It's too far from the mine to the nearest station. And this is mountain road—hard to haul by truck, too..." He spoke carefully.
Ki-jo sketched a pencil line along the fourteen kilometers between the mine and Dogye Station. "We don't need trucks."
"Then how do you mean to move the coal?"
"There are conveyor belts."
"Ah!" Hee-jun struck his palm with his fist.
"Come into the coal business with me. All you have to do is bring the conveyor equipment in from the United States."
Hee-jun nodded. Beside Ki-jo, it seemed he would never have to puzzle over how to make money.
What he did not know was that the tungsten he would ship to America would be worth twelve million dollars in 1956 alone. For the time being, AMKO Tungsten was set to account for half the exports of the Republic of Korea. Ki-jo did not doubt for a moment that if Hee-jun sent even a portion of what he earned back into Korea, it would go a long way toward easing the country's want of energy.