The Scars of War
Gyeongchip, the Waking of Insects — the day when, they say, every creeping thing asleep in the earth starts awake, startled by the warmth rising out of the ground.
Kijo had been up since dawn. He finished developing his photographs early and stood out in the mild March sun.
Jongno held a hush and a warmth that Hannam-dong never quite managed.
That precious modern house can wait. Living there from the seventies on will do well enough...
He liked the Jongno house he had come back to better.
Yeongsu had brightened too, once they left friend-poor Hannam-dong for a neighborhood full of children. When his morning studies were done, going out to play all day was his only business. One morning he had left to play and come home around lunch already full to bursting.
"Where did you eat? Over at Yeongbae's?" Sunrye asked.
"Uncle Kim Doo-han bought it for us."
"Assemblyman Kim Doo-han?"
"Yes!"
From the boy's account, he and his friends had been playing in front of Kim Doo-han's house when the man came out and put the question to them.
"You kids eaten yet?"
Every child shook his head. Kim Doo-han gathered up all six and marched them to a seonji haejangguk house — hangover soup thick with ox blood — ordered a bowl apiece, and sat down to his own meal with a bottle of soju. A late breakfast of seonji haejangguk meant he had drunk too hard the night before. Yeongsu, well fed as he usually was, had probably found the soup little to his taste, but the poor children he ran with would have had their noses buried in the bowls.
That was Jongno: a warmhearted neighborhood, where a National Assemblyman might take a pack of children to a soup house and feed them.
Kijo was squinting up into a sky pouring spring light, his face creased against the glare, when Hyeon-gyeong came out of the house next door to greet him.
"Good morning, sir! Did you sleep well?"
Her bright greeting drew a fond, fatherly smile onto his face before he knew it.
"And did you sleep well, Hyeon-gyeong?"
They lived next door to Ma-ryang. The wall between the yards had come down, and the two households shared a single courtyard — as good as one house.
After Hyeon-gyeong, her younger brother came out of the room. Yeonggi, missing a leg, stood on the wooden veranda on his crutches and bowed.
"Good morning, sir."
Hyeon-gyeong's brother was a disabled veteran. Early in the war, on the Nakdong River line where Kijo had met his first death, a bomb had taken Yeonggi's right leg. They might once have had their guns trained on each other.
The moment Kijo heard from Hyeon-gyeong that she had a brother among the wounded, he hired the young man on the spot. He gave him work at Cheongsan Radio Communications — answering the telephone, sorting the mail.
Men like Yeonggi numbered four hundred and fifty thousand across the country. That was only the official tally of the Ministry of National Defense. To Kijo's sense of things, there were more. Civilians had suffered in the war as well, but in the fifties you could hardly find a neighborhood without one or two people missing a finger or two, or an arm, or a leg.
"A fine morning to you, Yeonggi."
"Yes, sir. It feels as if spring has truly come."
Yeonggi smiled wide. He knew he was one of the lucky ones among the wounded. The soldiers who had fought in the war received no hero's welcome; they had not even been compensated by the government. Some of the disabled, with no work and nothing to live on, pushed into any house or shop and shook the people there down, begging that came close to robbery. Many suffered in the mind from the terror and the shock of the war. In the fifties, with no way to recognize PTSD, folk simply said a man had gone funny in the head, or mad.
Kijo stepped closer, looking over the crutches.
"Those are new."
"Ah, yes. Department Head Shim made them for me with his own hands. They fit me perfectly — much easier than the pair I had before."
That bright smile put an ache in one corner of Kijo's chest. Like his sister, Yeonggi was tall and fair, with an open, clean-cut face, and his temper was bright. If not for the war, Kijo thought, he would have been striding the streets on two sound legs.
"Department Head Shim is clever with his hands in other ways, too. If you need anything, just ask him."
"He's already made my sister a coat. Ha ha."
At her brother's words Hyeon-gyeong darted into the room and came back with the coat Hansu had made.
"Look at this, sir. Isn't Department Head Shim's work something?"
Kijo knew at a glance that the garment was one his wife, Sunrye, had worn. Hansu — Department Head Shim — had taken the clothes Sunrye gave Hyeon-gyeong, faced the sleeves in leather, let out the length, and altered them until they sat exactly right on Hyeon-gyeong's tall frame.
"A handsome coat. Ought to be some small thanks for Department Head Shim, shouldn't there? Ha ha."
"What would be good?"
It had only been a joke tossed off in passing, but Hyeon-gyeong's eyes lit.
Kijo remembered something Hansu had said, and offered it.
"Well... Mr. Hansu said he likes Marilyn Monroe, and there's a Monroe picture on at the Kukdo Theater. Try buying him a ticket."
"Marilyn Monroe?"
Hyeon-gyeong looked at him with something complicated in her eyes. The news that plain, unshowy Hansu liked a glamorous woman like Monroe seemed to have given her a small shock.
"That's right. The marquee's up at the Kukdo now. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes — that's the title, isn't it?" Yeonggi said.
Hyeon-gyeong thought a moment, then turned to her brother.
"Yeonggi, do you like Monroe too?"
"Course I do. She's so pretty."
"Is she? Then let's go see the movie with our Department Head Shim. I like Marilyn Monroe too."
Kijo could see straight through her. She wanted to find out whether Hansu really liked Monroe. He was glad she was taking the lead. Hansu was hopelessly bashful, and Kijo had been wondering when the two of them would ever draw any closer.
He finished talking with the brother and sister, went inside, and ate his breakfast.
Breakfast done, Kijo crossed to the far side of the street from the lot where the Cheongsan office and the radio-communications building had stood. As planned the year before, they had pulled the old office down and were raising a five-story building in its place. Lee Man-ik, supervising the work, caught sight of him across the road and came over. Sejong-ro had so few cars in those days that there was no crosswalk to speak of.
"You've come in, Mr. President?"
Tall as he was, Lee Man-ik had grown even leaner than in his army days. That was why they called him Lincoln — because, like President Lincoln, he was thin and long in the body.
"You're not short of cement?"
"Cement we can lay hands on, one way or another. Rebar is the problem."
To take a building up five stories, rebar mattered most of all. Kijo nodded.
"Understood. I'll see to the rebar."
In a country that could not yet make its own steel, rebar was precious. When surplus materiel came out of the U.S. Army, the government bought it and sold it on, and winning a share of that was no easy thing. Lately, with money tight, Kijo had been thinking of bartering stockpiled gasoline for rebar. Or Miwon, if it came to that.
He finished with Lincoln — with Lee Man-ik — and made for the office, set a little apart from where the old one had been. It was not on the main thoroughfare. They had taken a short lease on a cheaper building tucked back inside the lanes.
The moment he turned into the alley that led to the new office, he started.
"What in the world..."
The wide alley was packed solid with women and men. In front of the Cheongsan office, which was serving as Miwon's general distributor, people were clamoring to be given Miwon. The four department heads and Hyeon-gyeong were trying to get the wholesalers into a line, and the crowd was in an uproar, each one accusing the next of cutting in.
Tall Ma-ryang spotted Kijo over the heads of the press and tapped Seo-gwang on the shoulder. Seo-gwang bellowed.
"The president of Miwon has come in! Everybody, clear the way!"
At that, the people filling the alley stepped aside as if making way for a magistrate's procession. All of them bobbed bows at Kijo, eager to be seen in a good light. They wanted even one more packet of Miwon.
Seo-gwang walked him as far as the office door, then shouted again.
"The president says the wholesale lots and the retail lots will be sold separately! War widows, stand to the left! Wholesalers, to the right!"
Kijo disliked the word Seo-gwang had reached for. In the old writing, a widow was a woman who had not died after her husband — one who had failed to follow him into the grave. To dress that up as war widow was almost too much to bear. And yet in this era it was the official name, the one people used when they fancied they were showing respect to women who had lost their husbands to the war.
He looked along the women standing on the left. If the official count of disabled veterans was four hundred and fifty thousand, the official count of women who had lost husbands in the war was a million. Men had died in heaps through the fighting, and both South and North had become societies of women. Those who had lost their husbands struggled desperately to feed their children, but it was a time when even men could hardly find work. Women had still fewer ways to earn their rice. War-bereaved families were treated no better than the disabled veterans. The government had promised to secure the bereaved a living and put a hundred and twenty stalls in Namdaemun Market up for allotment — and the Military and Police Relief Association, charged with the allotment, had handed most of those stalls to the Seoul mayor's close associates.
Whenever Kijo looked at the reality of the fifties, his chest went tight. So he had planned to hire women from war-bereaved families and sell Miwon door to door. Like the Yakult ladies of a later day, they would carry Miwon in a bag, call at each house, and take a share of what they earned. Housewife saleswomen would sink into a neighborhood more deeply than goods left with a corner shop, and he doubted they would need a separate campaign of advertising.
He had the women who were to become the Miwon Ajumma — the Miwon Ladies — take their Miwon first and go. At that the wholesalers, mostly men, burst out in complaint.
"Door-to-door is all well and good, sir, but let us make a living too."
A man among them who looked long in the trade came up and pleaded his case.
"Of course you'll have your share. But it's cash in advance. Those who put down the larger deposits will be allotted the larger lots."
Securing the coal-mining rights in Samcheok and the limestone rights in Yeongwol would take a great sum. The briquette factory going up in Yongsan, and the new headquarters at Gwanghwamun, were already swallowing money. Even so, from March the bricks had begun to sell, and Miwon had begun to move as well; a little air was getting through.
Even at his demand for deposits, the wholesalers flung themselves in as if it were an auction, every man trying to outbid the next. Ma-ryang quieted them, took them around behind the office, and opened an on-the-spot bidding. Dae-ik and Hansu, helping Seo-gwang and Ma-ryang each in turn, poured sweat.
Watching them, Kijo thought that putting up the Miwon plant early had been a masterstroke.
At last the press thinned. He had just caught his breath when he saw another crowd filling the alley and coming on.
Who are they...
He narrowed his eyes. Restaurant keepers from Jongno, Myeongdong, and Euljiro.
"President Lee! So you're in the domestic seasoning trade now? Why didn't you send us word?"
Old Ajinomoto customers.
"As if I would forget you. A separate allotment for the restaurants has already been set aside."
"That's our President Lee — a man who knows what loyalty means! Ha ha ha!"
Kijo took the restaurant owners' orders himself. Cheaper than smuggled Ajinomoto, so they ordered in bulk.
When they had gone, he looked into the office and saw Hyeon-gyeong putting the books in order with all her might, and Yeonggi helping his sister. Brother and sister who had nearly been swept to the very bottom by the war were sorting order slips in a frenzy and entering them in the ledger.
"Let me have the ledgers that are already written up, to start."
He took the book, looked at the volume already covered by deposits, and a broad smile broke over his face before he knew it.
At this rate, we'll be able to breathe again...
Miwon's power was tremendous. No wonder, in the history he remembered, Lim Dae-hong and Lee Byung-chull had been bound for a full-scale fight over a seasoning people used only a little of, every day.
He nodded as he watched Ma-ryang and Hansu put the cash into the safe.
Come evening, the Miwon Ajumma will be back with the money from what they've sold...
The stiffness in the nape of his neck seemed to loosen and run clear. He felt light.
He was humming his way back to his seat when Hwang Ji-un, president of Cheongsan Radio Communications, came looking for him.
"Sir! An official notice has come in from the Ministry of Communications!"
Kijo looked over the paper put into his hands. It was the Ministry's position: his wired radio was to be extended across the whole of the country.
The Ministry hereby sets forth its position that the wired-radio service shall be expanded to every region of the nation.
"The Ministry says it will establish amplifier villages even in the country districts out in the provinces."
An amplifier village meant raising an antenna in a rural hamlet that had no radios of its own, then either sending wired radio out along the lines or playing the broadcast over large speakers for the whole village to hear.
"Not bad."
"No, sir. If the business reaches the provinces, it'll be more than double what Cheongsan Communications is taking in now. Ha ha ha."
Kijo let out a breath. Company money was close to running dry on the mining investment, and yet the bricks, the Miwon, and even the wired-radio business he had thought of as a sideline were all catching as if someone had put a match to them.
Now if I can just secure the mining rights...
The spring wind was giving his enterprises a warm push.