Selecting Students for Study Abroad (1955)
March 26, 1955.
A grand ceremony marked Syngman Rhee's eightieth birthday. At Seoul Stadium in Dongdaemun, before the vice president, the dignitaries of the three branches of government, the past and present commanders of the Eighth Army, senior generals of Korea and the United States, and the foreign ambassadors, tens of thousands of students had been mobilized for the occasion.
Along Sejong-ro, where Gijo's five-story building was still rising, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps held a review. The people of Cheongsan came out into the street to watch the troops march by, and applause followed the soldiers each time they passed. When the Sherman tanks granted by the U.S. military rolled through, the ground shuddered under the roar, and the crowd went wild. After what North Korean armor had done to them in the war, the simple fact that Korea had tanks of its own seemed to fill people with reassurance and pride.
As the tanks went by, Sunrye covered Yeongsu's ears to shield him, and Gijo covered Sunrye's. Soon-young, watching from beside them, seized Ma-ryang's hands and pulled them up over her own ears whether he liked it or not.
When the parade was over, Gijo looked up at the Cheongsan Building, which had climbed no higher than the third floor. White cloth had been hung over it, and across the cloth ran a line of formal script.
Senior Inspector Kwak Young-joo of the Gyeongmudae police had ordered the building covered, declaring that a site still under construction would be an eyesore along the parade route. He had even sent the words to be lettered on the cloth. Orders were orders. There was nothing to be done.
In Gijo's memory, 1955 was the year Syngman Rhee advanced an outlandish claim. The Korean War, he insisted, had been "an invasion of the South plotted by Japan and North Korea hand in hand," and by deftly stirring anti-Japanese feeling together with anticommunism he launched yet another round of government-staged demonstrations. The claim was nonsense, but the public swallowed a good deal of it.
Memory of the colonial years, the fortune Japan had made off the Korean War, and hatred of the North that had started the fighting all tangled together, until people grew heated in the certainty that Japan, of course, would have done exactly that. Gijo found it absurd that the same Rhee who talked this way had seated pro-Japanese collaborators in the high offices of the government. Perhaps feeling some self-reproach even so, Rhee had gone on to say:
"Of late the question of the pro-Japanese has grown confused — who is a collaborator and who is not — and so I should like to explain once more..."
A collaborator, he argued, ought to be judged without regard to what he had done under Japanese rule, and solely by what he was doing now and what he meant to do hereafter.
Gijo flicked one glance at the great banner on the Cheongsan Building, then told Lee Man-ik to leave the cloth up for form's sake and have it taken down again. After that he set out for the American Cultural Center on Euljiro.
Rhee's birthday was also the day they would choose the second group of students for study abroad. While Gijo and Professor Kim Moon-hwan were preparing for the interviews, the center's officer for educational and cultural affairs came to see them. After some talk of this and that, he asked why they were selecting students in so awkward a month as March, when Harvard chose its entering class on the first day of January and the first day of November each year.
"In Korea the new term begins in March. We mean to choose the students first and have them attend a university at home through at least one semester while they prepare to go abroad. Along the way, we can also see whether they manage their studies and their preparations equally well."
"I see. So you'll keep an eye on them even after the selection."
"That's right."
"Indeed. I hope a great many good students have applied."
When the officer had gone, Gijo took up again the conversation he had been having with Professor Kim.
"Professor, do the briquettes absolutely have to be punched with nine holes?"
"No, not strictly. I've tested it. Nineteen-hole and twenty-two-hole both do well enough. Punching a great many holes is difficult, so nine is simply a convenient number."
"How many are we planning to make?"
"The twenty-two-hole. You want to widen the surface that meets the air and raise the heat."
"Won't they burn out too quickly, then?"
"Look here, President Lee — don't you know Koreans? They aren't satisfied with a thing that lingers on lukewarm. It has to flare up good and hot before they'll call it a fine briquette."
"Ha. Understood."
Seeing that the professor had chosen heat over how long the fuel would last, Gijo put his next question.
"Have you automated much of the plant?"
"No. There isn't the power to drive a press that stamps the briquettes. I took a truck engine we had at Cheongsan and built a machine around it, but it hasn't the strength, and it burns more oil than it's worth."
"Then we'll have to hire a great many people."
"That we will. Korea is a country where a man's wages cost less than fuel."
Gijo nodded. He was glad the briquette works could employ so many hands. He wanted to hire as many people as he possibly could. He believed that was the contribution he could make to society.
"How's business these days, President Lee?"
He looked faintly uneasy about the coal mine they had bought.
"The three-horse team is pulling well."
"The three-horse team?"
"Bricks, Miwon seasoning, and radios are bringing in the cash."
"Didn't you land a hauling contract with the U.S. Army not long ago?"
"Yes. An exclusive one."
"Ha — exclusive, was it? Congratulations. Have you fuel enough for the trucks?"
"The Army agreed to make up the fuel. They fill the tank of any truck that has carried their freight. Hauling American cargo costs us nothing in oil."
"Then send them out with as little in the tank as you can, and have them leave the American base with the tank full."
"Chief Ko Wang-chul will see to that."
"Well, good for you, anyway. You've a gift for making money, I'll say that. Ha ha ha!"
That day Gijo and Professor Kim Moon-hwan selected two students for study abroad. Unlike the first time, each of them chose the one student who suited him.
The student the professor picked was an engineering student who wanted to learn petroleum refining in the United States — more than enough to catch the eye of a man so absorbed in energy. Gijo was satisfied as well. Korea produced not a drop of oil, but refining petroleum and making compounds from it was a promising industry all the same.
Professor Kim, though, looked puzzled at the student Gijo had chosen.
"President Lee, why a medical student? Thinking of trying your hand at the medical business?"
"I am. Earning one's living matters, but there also have to be people who can treat a man when he falls ill."
"True enough..."
The professor nodded. Gijo could not tell him what he really meant.
"I'd best be on my way. The briquette plant needs me. I'll leave the rest to you."
After Professor Kim had gone, Gijo called into the office the medical student he had kept waiting in the anteroom. A young man came into the interview room, pale in the face, his hands remarkably fine. Gijo spoke to the student seated before him.
"I've decided to send you to America. But there are conditions."
The student rejoiced that a chance to study at Harvard had come to him, and at the same time went tense wondering what conditions Gijo might name.
"I would like you to specialize in the liver."
"The liver — do you mean research into hepatitis?"
Gijo nodded.
"I'll be specializing in internal medicine, so you needn't worry. I'll make the treatment of the liver my chief concern."
"Good. You're a medical student. You know how many people in Korea suffer from hepatitis."
"I do."
In the unsanitary conditions of the 1950s, and with medical skill still scarce, hepatitis ran rampant through Korea. Through the 1940s and 1950s, epidemics of acute hepatitis had killed thousands of patients within a month of their falling ill.
"And one thing more. Put off your return for as long as you can, and practice medicine in the United States for a long while. You needn't come back at all. If you stay on there, taking in the latest in medicine, I may even be able to support you."
The student stared at him, bewildered. Not having to return to Korea ran against the very terms of the selection. But Gijo had his reasons. This choosing of students had been entirely his private affair. He had picked a medical student with Sunrye's future in mind. In her eleventh life, Sunrye had died of liver cancer. He could not know whether this life would end the same way, but he meant to be ready. And he had told the young man he need not come home from America because even Harvard Medical School, ranked among the finest in the country, was still far behind in the study of hepatitis. The work would not advance in earnest until the 1960s, and the hepatitis B virus itself would be demonstrated for the first time only in the 1970s, once the electron microscope had come into wide use.
"Is it really all right if I study in America for so long...?"
"I mean it. If you ever wish to naturalize as an American, come to me whenever you like. I can put my weight behind you."
The gravity of Gijo's face and voice kept the student from asking anything more.
"From your papers, your family's circumstances don't look especially hard."
"No. We aren't rich, but we aren't worrying over the next meal either."
"Good. Then there's no need for me to support the family you'll leave in Korea. Even so, so that you can give yourself to nothing but your studies, if they should fall into difficulty, I will help them."
The terms were difficult to believe. But Gijo was so much in earnest that a lie was past imagining.
"Thank you, sir. I'll become the finest specialist I can, just as you wish."
Gijo nodded to him.
After the student had gone, Gijo turned the papers over to a clerk from the embassy and went to see the director of the United States Information Service. James Stewart received him warmly and offered tea, then asked, half in jest:
"It's President Rhee's birthday. Weren't you invited to the party?"
"I can't set foot in Gyeongmudae."
"Why not? You're the very man who made a success of the wired-radio business."
"There are reasons."
Gijo did not trouble to explain that it was Kim Chang-ryong who kept him from setting foot in Gyeongmudae.
"The president may send for you before long."
"For me?"
James quietly let him in on a proposal that had come in secret from the Korean government and the Liberal Party.
"There's a presidential election next May, isn't there?"
"Yes, there is."
"Getting ready for it, the Liberal Party seems to want radio in the campaign. A request has reached the embassy, asking whether we couldn't buy them a hundred thousand used American radios."
Gijo gave a dry little laugh.
"Well, we want radios to spread too, so I did recommend it to Washington. The more amusing part is that they went to RCA as well."
Having watched Gijo join hands with RCA in the wired-radio business, they seemed to have copied him outright.
"But RCA has always held its head rather high, and from what I hear the talks never came together. The quantity was only five thousand sets, I'm told, and they pressed too hard to have the price cut. Ha."
Gijo had dealt with RCA men himself, and a quiet snort of a laugh escaped him.
"The Ministry of Communications sent an official notice the other day about setting up amplifier villages — communities on a wired-speaker system — didn't they?"
"They did."
"A hundred thousand radios looks unlikely, so they seem to be preparing the election through wired radio instead. Your business will do all the better for it."
The director's words pleased Gijo, and left him faintly uneasy at the same time. It would look as though he were helping Rhee win another term. But Rhee was bound to be reelected whether Gijo helped or not, and so he put it from his mind.
After tea with the director, he went home alone. On the way he looked about for anyone selling minari. The herb, a spring water parsley, was properly harvested in April, though by the end of March an early cutting sometimes appeared. He found an old woman sitting at the roadside with hers for sale, and took out his wallet.
"Grandmother, I'll take all of that minari."
"All of it...?"
He paid the flustered old woman handsomely, the wrapping cloth included, shouldered the great bundle, and went home. Sunrye started when she saw him come in under all that green.
"Goodness, why so much minari? And it's out already?"
"It came in early, didn't it? I bought it because I wanted some."
"At this rate I think we'll be eating nothing but minari for a week..."
"Don't go sharing it with the neighbors just because there's a lot. We'll put it in the stew, and we'll have it seasoned, too."
"All right... I never knew you liked minari so much..."
Gijo had never been one for minari. But in this life, for Sunrye's sake, he could eat his fill of anything that was good for the liver.