HLKZ-TV
Seoul was quiet after the election. A mild May breeze, the sort that ripens barley, stirred the street trees in their new green, and though the grain had not yet come in and a great many people were still hungry, the weather, at least, was kind.
If only May would pass.
Ki-jo wanted the spring hunger over with quickly. It was a season when eighty percent of the nation was starving or stretching what little food it had. He had made a good deal of money, yes, but everything he earned had gone only to feeding the people of Eundae-ri and those on his payroll. Even counting the families they supported, the number came to three or four thousand at the outside. The road ahead was still long.
It was in the midst of that barley hump, so cruel to ordinary people, that unexpected visitors arrived at the Cheongsan Building: Jacob of RCA, and Frank.
Ki-jo greeted the two men warmly.
"It's been a year."
They had last met in early June of the previous year, nearly twelve months past, and in that time Jacob had become head of RCA's branch in Japan.
"What brings you to Korea?"
He asked with the answer already in mind. If a man from RCA had come to Korea, there could be only one reason. A television station was about to open. Should history take the course he remembered, then on June 16, a month from now, HLKZ-TV—the first television station in the Republic of Korea, financed by RCA—would take to the air.
Sure enough, Jacob gave him the answer he had expected.
"The opening of a television station."
"So RCA means to build a television station in Korea? My congratulations."
He offered them to a man he had not seen in a long while, and still something in it unsettled him. If Frank and Jacob had sought him out, this was no courtesy call. They had business. He looked at Frank, who seemed to have something to say.
"We came to consult you, Mr. Lee, about RCA opening a television station in Korea."
"Consult me?"
"Yes. The Korean government put a condition on the license. The station has to be a joint venture with Cheongsan."
"A joint venture with Cheongsan?"
He was startled, in spite of himself, that the government had named Cheongsan as the partner.
Frank explained.
"Cheongsan has partnered with RCA before, and they seem to think highly of the loudspeaker posts you've put through villages all over the country. And you air whatever programming the government tells you to, don't you?"
That last point seemed to be the heart of it. Cheongsan Radio broadcast its programs exactly as the Director of Communications dictated, and a man who did as he was told was, apparently, judged a safe enough partner. The government of Syngman Rhee was furious with CBS, the first private radio broadcaster, for refusing to heed it. During the third presidential election CBS had declined to take the Liberal Party's side. It had ignored demands to raise the Liberal share of election coverage and to run more news favorable to the party, and had split Liberal and Democratic coverage evenly, fifty-fifty. Nor could they simply haul in the station's president, Otto DeCamp, and dress him down. DeCamp was an American. The government could not handle him as it pleased.
Ki-jo could roughly guess, now, why they had pointed at Cheongsan, and he shook off his surprise and thought it through. This was not a business he meant to have dropped in his lap. In the history he remembered, HLKZ-TV had failed less than a year after it signed on. In a Korea where even radio had yet to spread properly, television was too soon. With every one of his enterprises finally on solid ground, he had no wish to take on a losing venture.
"The government never said a word to me."
"We're no less awkward about it," Jacob said. "The government turned on us without any warning."
Frank seemed to read that Ki-jo had no intention of taking the business, and he spoke more carefully.
"Mr. Lee, I came with Jacob partly to help him. But I also came to help you."
He took out cigarettes, offered them to Ki-jo and to Jacob, and explained why the matter was not a simple one.
"RCA's move into Korea overlaps a good deal with my own work. That's why I've been helping Jacob for the past few months."
Ki-jo nodded. It was true enough. Ever since the radio business had succeeded, Frank had been nudging him, asking whether he had any thought of going into broadcasting.
"The thing was moving along nicely, and then right after the election it suddenly changed direction. Somebody high up seems to have named you, Mr. Lee, as the man for the job."
"Who do you think named me?"
"As you know, since Kim Chang-ryong died—the chief of the Counter Intelligence Corps—a lot of people have been trying to fill the space he left. There's General Won, commander of the Military Police. There's the police post at Gyeongmudae..."
In that instant Ki-jo was certain. Kwak Young-joo. The two of them had dealings enough. He had once gone to Kwak bearing a golden toad as a gift, to plead for Ma-ryang's life after Ma-ryang beat Lim Hwa-soo, Kwak's sworn brother. And every year on the President's birthday, when Kwak ordered him to hand over a Cheongsan building or to hold it back, he had obeyed without a word of protest. Kwak, it seemed, looked on him as a subordinate who could be managed with ease. As the saying went, in a mountain with no lion the fox is king. Kim Chang-ryong was dead, and Kwak Young-joo was running wild.
"Mr. Lee, if you turn his offer down, your businesses are going to run into a lot of trouble. I'll do what I can to protect you, of course. But if the Korean government comes after you in earnest, even I have my limits."
Ki-jo nodded. He knew well enough that Frank's warning was more than idle worry, and he had a feeling he would end up taking this on after all. Half resigned, he turned to Jacob.
"Who were you originally planning to partner with?"
"We were moving ahead with a man named Hwang Tae-young. He runs RCA's exclusive distributorship in Korea."
"Would that be the man operating the RCA television dealership in the building at the Jongno crossing?"
"That's him. He holds the television distributorship."
So that was it. Ki-jo nodded. Back in May of the previous year a television dealership had appeared without warning in the middle of Seoul, and he had wondered at it. No station on the air, and already a man selling televisions—it had hardly made sense.
"Does he know how things stand?"
"Of course. We told him first."
Hwang Tae-young must have been bitterly disappointed. Even so, Ki-jo was curious how a man who merely ran a television distributorship and an American giant like RCA had ever come to plan a station together.
"Give me five days to think it over," he said to Jacob and Frank.
"President Lee," Jacob answered, "if Cheongsan partners with RCA this time to establish the television station, RCA will pursue joint ventures with Cheongsan in other businesses as well."
He was offering to have RCA help with the low-priced radios Ki-jo had once planned to manufacture, and to place RCA's exclusive television distributorship for Korea in Ki-jo's hands.
"Isn't Mr. Hwang running that distributorship?"
"The contract lets RCA terminate it whenever we wish. We would pay Mr. Hwang compensation, of course."
Ki-jo nodded.
"And there's something else to partner on, isn't there, Jacob?" Frank put in.
"The Korean government made one further request of RCA as a condition of licensing the station," Jacob said. "They want televisions manufactured inside Korea."
"Manufactured in Korea?"
"We would bring RCA sets in half-finished and do nothing but fit the cabinets. The quantity is very small—two hundred units. I wasn't sure it even counted as a joint venture, so I hadn't mentioned it."
Spoken like a man from RCA: assembling two hundred sets was hardly worth mentioning. Ki-jo nodded. Laying down a full RCA production line was out of the question, given the state of the country. This was a showpiece, one more line to add to Syngman Rhee's list of achievements.
"Very well. Let us meet again in five days and talk it through."
With that, he brought the conversation to a close.
After Jacob and Frank had gone, Ki-jo turned the matter over: a television station the country was not ready for, and a first step into the electronics industry. If Kwak Young-joo had twisted the deal to suit himself and thrown it at him, he could not simply refuse. Kwak plainly meant to earn the President's favor by seeing the venture succeed, and if Ki-jo wrecked it, retaliation was certain. He had never imagined that the mere disappearance of Kim Chang-ryong would set everything right, but he had not expected Kwak to come at him like this.
If he had no choice but to take the hot potato that had landed in his hands, he would at least have to keep the station's losses as small as he could. He had ideas for how to run one. What he did not have was the technical skill. He would need broadcasting people, and enough of them—yet every broadcaster in Korea had come out of radio, and so far as he could tell, no one knew how to put television on the air. Hwang Tae-young, who had been looking into a station and preparing for one, would know more than anyone. Even if Ki-jo took the business on himself, he would need Hwang's help. He decided to learn a little more about the man, and then go and see him.
The first floor of the Dongil Building, across from Bosingak in Jongno.
Ki-jo stood before the shop and looked at the twenty-four-inch black-and-white set in the display window. He smiled at his own face caught in the screen. With no broadcast yet on the air, the television was showing whatever a camera inside the window happened to catch. Watching himself there, he thought of Hwang Tae-young, a man trying to open a station and sell sets in a Korea where people could barely feed themselves. Not a realist, he decided. A realist could never have attempted it.
He opened the door and asked for the owner.
A man in dress trousers and a white shirt, a small nameplate pinned to his chest, bowed to him. It was Hwang Tae-young.
"Good afternoon. I'm the owner of this shop."
His hair was slicked with pomade, glasses on his nose, and he looked for all the world like a salesman in an American appliance store. The interior, too, was straining hard to feel American.
"Have you come to look at televisions?"
There was no station, and little reason anyone should come to buy a set, but Hwang asked all the same.
"Ah, yes. I heard a rumor that a television station would be opening before long..."
Ki-jo let the words trail, and Hwang smiled.
"You've heard correctly, sir. Television will be on the air before the year is out. Buy a set now and you may have it at ten percent off. Once they catch on, you might have to pay a premium. Ha ha."
Ki-jo ran a hand along one of the sets on display.
"What country makes RCA?"
"The United States. The largest television company in the world."
"I see... How much for one?"
"The set you just touched is our finest. A twenty-four-inch screen. The price is four hundred seventy thousand hwan."
Ki-jo swallowed the sigh that nearly escaped him. That was enough to buy twenty-six sacks of rice—more than two years' pay for an ordinary salaried man. Had Hwang truly believed a thing like this would sell? He had already looked into the man, but he wanted to know whether the belief was real.
"If that's a bit much, we also have a twenty-one-inch. Four hundred thirty thousand hwan."
Ki-jo nodded. Taking the price for lost interest, Hwang moved straight on to the smaller models.
"This seventeen-inch is three hundred ninety thousand. And the fourteen-inch is three hundred forty."
When Ki-jo's face darkened further at the figures, Hwang offered the smallest set of all.
"We have an eight-and-a-half-inch as well. The list price is one hundred ninety thousand hwan, but if I take ten percent off, I can let you have it for one hundred seventy-one thousand."
The screen was smaller than a tablet, and the price matched a city worker's wages for a year. Ki-jo looked at the man earnestly pitching a product with no market at all.
"I'm Lee Ki-jo, president of Cheongsan Development."
The smile on Hwang Tae-young's face went cold. He leveled a finger at the door.
Perhaps he ought to have given his name a little sooner. Even so, Ki-jo had not the slightest intention of walking out.