So Near, and Yet So Far
September 28, two days before Chuseok.
Ki-jo made his way to the Christian Literature Society building on Jongno 2-ga. The red-brick exterior rose five stories, the same height as his own building. It had begun as four; when CBS moved in, another floor had been added on the roof. Up on the fifth, an English sign bore the station's call letters.
He went inside and headed for the president's office. An American in glasses rose to greet him.
"Hello, Mr. Lee Ki-jo. I'm Gam Ui-do."
"President Gam. A pleasure to meet you."
Ki-jo shook hands with Edward Otto DeCamp, the man who went by that Korean name.
"The drama is so entertaining it's become a real problem. People listen to Seoul Ttoksuni more than they listen to the Bible readings. We are quite plainly a Christian station, and yet we've turned into the Ttoksuni station."
Otto DeCamp delivered the joke in fluent Korean. The kindness in his face put Ki-jo at ease. He knew a little of the man. Born in Korea in 1911, DeCamp had lived there sixteen years while his missionary father served in colonial Joseon. In 1937, at twenty-six, he came back and took up the same calling. A sermon in 1941 urging people not to worship at Shinto shrines earned him five months in prison, and then deportation to the United States. He returned in 1948, did religious broadcasting at KBS, and resolved to found a Christian station of his own. The Korean War broke out just before it could be established, and only after a long run of setbacks did CBS finally go on the air, on December 15, 1954.
"Would you care to look over the CBS facilities first?"
"Yes. I'd like that."
President Gam walked him through the station and explained as they went.
"The Korean War broke out while this equipment was still coming in by ship. So the machines sat four years in a warehouse in Kobe. A great deal of dust piled up."
"What did the storage cost?"
"Eight thousand dollars. We very nearly let the Japs walk off with it."
Gam Ui-do had a gift for sly, straight-faced jokes in Korean as well. When the tour was done they returned to the office and sat down to renew the contract for Seoul Ttoksuni. CBS meant to move the hit from a special slot onto the regular schedule, and was asking that a run of thirty episodes over ten weeks be stretched to a hundred and fifty episodes over fifty.
"A woman I met at church said to me, 'Pastor, I think I'll have to move to Yeonhui-dong, if I want to hear Seoul Ttoksuni properly.' Just like that. Ha ha ha."
The CBS transmitter stood in Yeonhui-dong.
"President Gam, is there any trouble with the story itself? The characters don't go to church. Is that all right?"
"No trouble at all. Ttoksuni lives by God's teaching. She has faith, love, and hope. She is a very good person."
Ki-jo nodded.
"We're running advertisements around the time signal, and before and after the drama..."
"President Lee, we won't take a fee for that. America has plenty of dramas with the advertising built in."
DeCamp did not ask to be paid. In good spirits, Ki-jo finished the renewal and went back to the office on Sejong-ro. Standing at the window of the fifth-floor chairman's room, looking out toward Jongno, he let go of a breath that felt light. The drama's runaway success seemed to have flung Lim Dae-hong and Lee Byung-chull a long way off, just as they were closing in on the seasoning market. By any ordinary means, it would take them three years at least, and perhaps five, to catch up with the name Miwon had made for itself. He felt as if he had driven a million-man army twenty-five miles back from the castle gates.
He took the sugar cubes from his trouser pocket, dropped them into a desk drawer, and called Seong Dae-ik in.
"Dae-ik, tell the staff they're to leave at one. The Chuseok holiday starts tomorrow. They'll need time to get home."
From September 29 through National Foundation Day on October 3, five golden days of holiday lay ahead.
"Yes, sir. I'll notify every department."
The word went out floor by floor, and Cheongsan's people began clearing their desks in a hurry. Ki-jo rose and left before any of them. If the man at the top did not go first, how were the presidents and everyone under them to head home without watching his face?
Home again, Ki-jo got ready to go out with Sunrye. She put on her best clothes and dressed Yeong-su in a clean new outfit. Ki-jo saw to his suit and hat, loaded the gifts into the car, and climbed into the jeep.
"Your sister says she won't go to Mother's house in Mapo?"
"No..."
He did not ask again. Unlike Ki-jo, an orphan with no parents and no past that could be traced, Sunrye came from a tangled house. The one who had raised her and Soon-young was Sunrye's paternal aunt. When Soon-young was a year old their father had walked out and set up house with another woman, and Sunrye's birth mother, in despair over her husband's infidelity, had left the two children with his sister and gone herself. She met another man, made a new home, and was living in Mapo.
Before he married Sunrye, Ki-jo had heard that history and treated the aunt who raised her as his mother-in-law. The tie had been left to lapse, and Sunrye lived on that way until 1978, when she learned that her mother was in Mapo. By then her health was failing badly. She grieved that she had found the place so late. How much better if they could have met while she was still well, while her mother was still a little younger. Her mother was already so old, and she herself was dying; the regret knotted itself inside her, and Sunrye wept many tears.
Having lived through all of it in his eleventh life, Ki-jo wanted her to meet her mother sooner. That was why he had proposed they call on his mother-in-law before this year's Chuseok. When Sunrye asked how he knew her mother lived in Mapo, he braided what he remembered from the eleventh life with what he had learned in this twelfth one.
"The Deokjeong station master once told me you were the daughter of his father's cousin. So I asked him where your mother lived."
"Then he's my older second cousin. Why didn't he ever say so to me...?"
She said it, and then she nodded. Belatedly, she seemed to understand. A cousin-aunt had abandoned her children and remarried; to tell the children who had been left behind would only have stirred up trouble no one needed.
With Sunrye and Yeong-su settled in the jeep, Ki-jo eased the car forward.
"I wonder if Mother will like the gift."
"She will."
He glanced at the gift box of Miwon, then studied Sunrye's face in the rearview mirror. She did not look well.
"Did you fight with your sister?"
"No. She said she didn't want to go, so I said all right at once."
That was what she told him, but he knew she would have tried to persuade Soon-young. Sunrye had lived with her mother until she was five, and she had memories; she must have wanted to see her. Soon-young, abandoned at one and with no memory of a mother at all, would not have been able to forgive the woman who left her.
Hoping to lift Sunrye's mood, he tried again.
"We ought to go to Deokjeong Station one of these days and pay our respects to that second cousin of yours. He's helped us a great deal — and he was the one who sent our brother-in-law on to Eundae-ri."
"Yes. Let's."
Even so, the trouble did not leave her face. When they reached Mapo he parked the jeep at the foot of the hill in Yeomni-dong, took up the box of Miwon, and climbed. Sunrye and Yeong-su stayed in the car. A child of a former marriage might not be a welcome guest. He would find his mother-in-law's house first and explain, and if it did not go well, he could still let the two of them meet outside.
The house Sunrye's birth mother had married into was a large traditional hanok. Ki-jo knew she had remarried a salt peddler and lived without hardship. He knocked, and the gate opened on Sunrye's maternal half-sister. Even in his previous life the likeness had startled him. Seeing the girl as a child, he found her more like Sunrye still. She looked at him warily.
"Who are you...?"
"Are the grown-ups home?"
"Yes. Whom shall I say is calling?"
"I'm Lee Ki-jo, from Jongno. I've come to bring a holiday gift."
"Please wait a moment."
The gate shut, and he heard the girl running. A little later it opened again, and a stranger stepped out.
So this was the man Sunrye's mother had married.
Ki-jo had never seen him. He had died in the 1960s, a man this life had not yet let Ki-jo meet. Ki-jo bowed to the kindly face.
"How do you do? I'm Lee Ki-jo, from Jongno."
"I don't believe we've met. What brings you here?"
"I deal in seasoning, and I'd like to buy some salt."
The moment Ki-jo said he sold Miwon, the salt peddler's face brightened. He did mean to buy the man's salt and mix it with Miwon, to see if he could make a seasoned salt.
"Please, come in."
Inside, Ki-jo agreed to purchase eight hundred kilograms of salt, and only then did he give the real reason he had come. As Sunrye's birth mother listened, the color drained from her face. She seemed to be worrying over how her husband would take it. The husband, who had heard Ki-jo out in silence, spoke.
"You did well to come. You did very well to come..."
He turned an easy smile on his wife.
"I'll take Haemi down to the ferry landing, so call Sunrye into the house. Say everything you've been wanting to say, and be sure you feed her before you send her off."
Then he rose, took the hand of the daughter who looked so like Sunrye, and went out the gate as unhurried as a man stepping off to pay a neighborly call. When husband and daughter were gone, Sunrye's birth mother let out a long breath.
"What face does a mother have, a mother who threw her child away and left to live for herself, to look at that child now..."
The feeling was only natural. But Ki-jo had learned in his previous life that Sunrye had not resented her mother. She had missed her.
"I'll bring Sunrye. Please wait just a moment."
He went back down the hill to the car where she was waiting.
"Dear, go and see your mother. She's the only one home."
"She said she wants to see me...?"
"That's why I came to fetch you."
He gathered Yeong-su into his arms, and the three of them climbed the hill in Yeomni-dong. When he opened the gate, Sunrye's mother was sitting on the wooden veranda. She saw her daughter and sprang to her feet.
"Sunrye..."
"Mother..."
Whatever had held them back held them no longer. They ran to each other, caught each other up, and wept. Ki-jo had never seen Sunrye cry like that, in great heaving sobs. He bent and whispered to Yeong-su, who could not understand why his mother was crying.
"Mom's crying because she's so happy. She's seeing Grandma after a very long time."
"But Grandma lives in Byeokje..."
Of course he did. To Yeong-su, the grandmother was the aunt in Byeokje who had raised Sunrye.
"A person can have two grandmas, Yeong-su. Byeokje Grandma and Mapo Grandma. That's all you have to call them."
Yeong-su nodded.
Sunrye cried until she had cried enough, and then she stopped. It was not a mealtime, but her mother set food out all the same. Eating what her mother had cooked, Sunrye was happier than words could hold. The time they could share, though, was not long. Before the family left, at the gate, Sunrye's mother spoke to her.
"Sunrye, come whenever you miss your mother. Next time bring Soon-young too. I want to see her..."
"Yes, Mother."
She turned to Ki-jo as well.
"Thank you, son-in-law."
"Not at all. Please keep well, Mother."
In the 1950s a daughter, once married, was an outsider to the house she had left, rarely seen even at the holidays. Sunrye was more than that: a daughter her mother had thought she might never see again. That the man who had married such a daughter had sought her out and brought her in person seemed to deepen the gratitude.
"Goodbye, Mapo Grandma."
Yeong-su had acquired a second grandmother between one breath and the next, and he took her as simply as he took the one in Byeokje, with no confusion in him at all.
"Yes, Yeong-su. Mind your mother, and grow up strong and well."
"Yes!"
Ki-jo took his leave, settled Sunrye and Yeong-su in the jeep, and drove back toward Jongno. In the rearview mirror her face was easier by a good measure than it had been on the way to Mapo.
"I saw Haemi, and she looks so much like you I was startled. For a moment I thought I'd traveled back in time and met you as you used to be."
"They say it isn't only our faces. She was sickly too, and she cried a lot."
On the way to Mapo, Sunrye had been dark and quiet. Now her heart seemed light, and the words came freely.
"There's an older brother above her, too. He's eighteen, and he's at a commercial high school. He's a good student. He means to sit for the exam at the Customs Bureau of the Ministry of Finance."
Ki-jo knew that Sunrye's maternal half-brother would in fact become a tax official.
"And Mother's husband is a good man. I'm so glad. She says she lives without a worry in the world."
"He seemed so. I only met him briefly, but he struck me as gentle, and refined."
He thought of the man's back as he walked toward the ferry landing with his daughter. It had been a quiet sight. And yet it was, to Ki-jo, the very picture of a man's true strength.
"Dear?"
He found her in the rearview mirror. Their eyes met.
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"I don't think I'll miss her quite so much now. I know where she is, and how she's living."
He nodded. For Sunrye, Mapo would be a place near and yet far. He was content. One of the old griefs knotted in her heart had come loose.