The Mobile Broadcast Vehicle
On September 17, with Chuseok just ahead, Ki-jo went down to Busan to inspect the U.S. Army mobile broadcasting equipment that had arrived from Japan. A unit from AFRTS, the American Forces Radio and Television Service, had come to carry out a three-month mobile broadcast tour of Korea, following a proposal Ki-jo had made to the Eighth Army. John Curtis, the broadcast officer from the United States Information Service, was there as well. He turned to Ki-jo and asked,
"Chairman Lee, however did you hit on such a brilliant idea—searching for separated families?"
"My brother-in-law is one of them."
"Ah... so there's a separated family among your own kin."
The USIS agreed to divert a substantial share of its budget for publications inside Korea and put it toward the search. They, too, thought highly of what the undertaking meant.
"Starting in Busan and covering twelve cities in three months—the schedule will be tight."
"The preparations are already made. All the American troops need to do is switch the equipment on."
Ki-jo had already been running a newspaper advertisement for two weeks under the heading We Are Searching for Separated Families, and he had posted bills in each of the twelve cities where the search would be held.
"I see you've been promoting the station as Channel 9 TV."
"Too many people can't read the alphabet. I'm truly grateful for the USIS support."
"Haha, think nothing of it."
Liberty News, under the USIS, promised to capture the separated-family broadcasts on film. With neither the gear nor the technique to record a television signal, they would take the film Liberty News shot and screen it as they traveled the country. It was the only way those images could reach the countryside, beyond the reach of the broadcast wave.
"The USIS director says he means to have this film registered with the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration."
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA): an independent agency charged with preserving records of American history and making them available to the public.
"That will cost a great deal."
"There's surplus film lying around in both Korea and Japan. And this project is worth more than anything the USIS has ever undertaken."
John seemed eager to spread the image of an Almighty Strong America even while he helped people find their families.
Ki-jo could count on solid backing from the Eighth Army, the USIS, and the CIA. From the Korean government there was none. They had done nothing but stand in the way.
When the Counter Intelligence Corps learned that Ki-jo was pressing ahead with the separated-family broadcast, they came for him. They hauled him to their office in Yongsan and opened an inquiry. Kim Chang-ryong might have disappeared from the CIC, but its power had not faded, nor had the old habit of eyeing anyone who drew notice and wondering if he were a communist.
Dragged into the Yongsan office, Ki-jo was pressed on the purpose of his "search for separated families."
"You. You're not trying to gather up the spies in the South, are you?"
A CIC agent who spoke in a northern accent put the question to him.
"What do you mean by that?"
"The partisans down here scattered to escape the mop-ups. Aren't you using this broadcast so they can come together again?"
The notion left Ki-jo speechless. Spies stepping before a camera with signs in their hands, hunting scattered comrades under the pretext of looking for family—the idea was absurd. The possibility existed, of course. But Ki-jo knew the war had made 1.2 million separated families. While 1.2 million people suffered, the CIC, in its paranoid obsession, was suspicious of a broadcast meant to find them.
Fortunately Frank heard of the detention and stepped in, and Ki-jo was free within two hours. Frank proposed moving sponsorship of the search from HLKZ-TV to the USIS, and he secured the agency's full support besides. Only after all these turns did the search for separated families begin.
The AFRTS troops were positioning the mobile broadcast vehicles in the plaza at Busan Station. The American vehicles came in three kinds: a studio truck carrying the television cameras, a production truck tied to the transmitting antenna, and a generator truck that supplied the power. The cutting-edge American equipment of the 1950s could send a signal eighty kilometers on the VHF—Very High Frequency—band. A broadcast from Busan Station would reach not only Masan and Gimhae but as far as Ulsan, Gyeongju, and Geoje.
Ki-jo had set televisions in every city the signal could touch and had telephone lines strung, so a call could be placed at once. Already a crowd of twenty thousand filled the station plaza. Some had come only to stare at a television set, but Ki-jo counted even them as useful. Might they not recognize a refugee they knew and help make the link?
With aid from the crew he had brought, the separated families pasted paper to wooden boards and wrote their names, ages, and hometowns, together with the names and marks of the kin they sought. All of it was paid from Ki-jo's own pocket.
Joseph Miller and Hwang Tae-young, watching beside him, seemed to be thinking very different thoughts.
"Chairman Lee, you're doing a fine thing, no question—but I worry about you funding a project like this with private money."
Hwang Tae-young understood what the search meant, and he worried for Ki-jo.
"It's all right. Make all the money you want; you can't take it with you in the end. Better spent on something good."
Joseph Miller appeared to feel otherwise. Now and then he looked at Ki-jo—absorbed in a search that earned nothing—with open displeasure. The station was in its third straight month of deficits on the order of five million hwan, and RCA sets were hardly selling. Three thousand cheap smuggled televisions had already been turned loose on Dongdaemun Market, so Ki-jo's RCA dealership stood emptier than ever, nothing moving in it but flies. Miller said little to him and only examined the AFRTS gear. Watching the man, Ki-jo felt sure RCA would soon drop the broadcasting venture. In the original history they had withdrawn after a single year.
When the broadcast began, the separated families filed into the studio truck one after another, signs in hand. On a set placed outside, Ki-jo watched a man looking for his family. Unused to a camera, the man stood rigid and stammered, forcing out one word and then the next.
"I... I'm Lee Yong-nam. Twenty-five. My home is Wonsan, in South Hamgyong. The one I'm looking for is my mother..."
He could not finish. He blinked, wiped at his eyes, bowed his head, and wept, desolate.
The host beside him took the microphone and read the sign in the man's stead.
"Mr. Lee Yong-nam is searching for his mother. Her name is Bok Sam-rye. She is fifty-one. He says she has a large mole just below her ear."
Citizens of Busan watching the screen murmured in pity.
"What's that poor man to do... He's got to find his mother soon..."
Women looking at the weeping man dabbed their eyes. With Chuseok only two days off, all anyone wanted was for these families to meet their own and keep the holiday together.
After five or six had passed, the host suddenly broke in. A woman separated from her older brother while fleeing turned her eyes toward him.
"One moment. A call has come from Gyeongju—from someone we believe is Miss Gye Eun-seon's older brother. Please take it."
The woman on the screen, looking dazed, was handed the receiver.
"I have the phone. This is Gye Eun-seon."
Every face turned to the set.
"Yes, yes, yes. That's right! When the shells were falling in Okcheon... yes. Brother! Seong-man, my brother..."
She could say no more, and only cried.
"It's him. She's found her brother."
"Found him at once, just off the broadcast. Remarkable."
Applause started up. The announcer carried on in the crying woman's place.
"Mr. Gye Seong-man in Gyeongju, please come to Busan. Your sister Gye Eun-seon will be waiting for you."
The woman who had found her brother stepped out of the mobile studio, and the next face appeared. That woman, too, kept wiping her eyes, as if she had wept along with the one before her.
Ki-jo had sobbed without restraint watching KBS's Finding Separated Families in 1983, and he could not hold the tears back now either. John Curtis, beside him, could not follow the words, but something caught in his throat; he kept lifting his eyes to the sky.
That day in Busan, in a bare four hours, some eighty separated families found their people. It had been the same in the original history. When KBS planned Finding Separated Families, they had expected that ten reunions a day would be fortune enough. Yet even thirty years after the families were torn apart, more than a hundred thousand met again. The crowds before the sets clapped and rejoiced each time a family was found, and they did not leave until the program ended.
Satisfied that the first broadcast in Busan had succeeded, Ki-jo went up to Seoul the next day. Coming out of Seoul Station into the plaza, he found a scene much like the one he had left behind. The search had begun in Seoul the day before as well, and on the opening day of the Chuseok holiday the ground before the station was a solid mass of refugees who lived in the capital and others who had come up from the provinces. They moved through the plaza with signs hung at their necks or held in their hands, each one looking for family.
Kim Seogwang, come out to meet him, boasted that even in Seoul two hundred people had found their families in a single day. The sight of the crowd caught in Ki-jo's throat, and he stood a long while. When he made to go home, Seogwang stopped him.
"Chairman, go to Manager Jang's house today."
"Why?"
"There's an uproar in front of your place right now."
"An uproar?"
Hearing him out, Ki-jo went straight to the house in Jongno. The alley was packed solid with separated families. With the rough of it from Seogwang, he stepped to the gate and spoke to the refugees who had come up from the country.
"I'm Lee Ki-jo, president of Channel 9. All of you here—you've come a long way, haven't you?"
"Yes, Chairman! That's right. Please find our families for us. We can't stay long in Seoul, so we've been waiting to ask you."
He quieted the clamor of voices each begging for their own, and said,
"Wait here just a moment. I'll help every one of you."
He went in, shut the gate, and waited for Seogwang. On his orders Seogwang brought some twenty Cheongsan employees in through the gate of Jin Hyun-kyung's house. They carried cotton cloth, ink, and inkstones, and a great cauldron slung among them.
"Bring the people outside in one at a time. Hyun-kyung, Hansoo—enter their details in the ledger and on the cloth."
At his word some of the staff kept order in the alley while others cooked rice and soup in the yard. Those who came in, one by one, gave their particulars to Hyun-kyung and Hansoo. The two wrote the information into a ledger at the desk; another set it down in ink on lengths of cotton cut to size.
"Do you really think they can be found, just by doing this?"
A refugee asked it, uneasy.
"Of course. We'll hang this cloth in the plaza at Seoul Station. Rest easy and leave it with us. Ink on cotton won't wash away, even in the rain."
To the man who had waited hours without a meal, he gave a bowl of rice soup still hot from the pot. By the time banners had been made for some two hundred families, Hyun-kyung and Hansoo were spent. Ki-jo put other employees in their place and sent the two to rest.
When those who had made the banners returned to Seoul Station and let it be known that the station president himself was helping people search, the crowds kept coming. Some entrusted him with signs they had lettered by hand. Others, in place of the weary staff, kept order and carried out the soup. For all three days of the Chuseok holiday the front of Ki-jo's house teemed with people. Yet he was able to keep a Chuseok more meaningful than any he had known.
Only after the holiday ended could he bring home Sunrye, who had been staying in Mapo, and their first daughter, Yeong-eun. The moment she came through the door she pulled him close.
"You've been through so much, dear. You've done something truly wonderful."
Sunrye, too, had watched the separated-family broadcasts on the television at her mother's house in Mapo all through the holiday. She felt to the bone how extraordinary her husband was. Her mother and stepfather had wept the whole time they watched, fiercely proud that their son-in-law was the one doing such a thing.