Chrysanthemum Wine
Preparing for the talk show, Kijo turned over the question of gifts for the guests he meant to invite. There would be no appearance fee, so he wanted something that would not weigh on whoever received it, and yet had real care worked into it.
When he asked the secretariat, Hyun-kyung offered an idea.
"President, what about chrysanthemum wine? My father used to brew it every autumn. I know how it's made."
"Do you? Could you manage ten bottles or so?"
"Of course, President. Only, to pick the chrysanthemums I'd have to go up the mountain, and going alone is a little..."
"Go with Director Shim. I'll speak to him."
That Sunday, Hyun-kyung and Hansu set out for Naksan, the hill close by Jongno. From the mountainside they climbed at an easy pace, plucking wild chrysanthemum petals as they went. Anyone passing and catching sight of the two gathering flowers on the slope might well have taken them for newlyweds; they looked that well matched.
Hyun-kyung, though, was not pleased with Hansu, who did nothing but pick in silence. They were drawing near two years of knowing each other, and still he could barely bring himself to speak to her. It was always Hyun-kyung who had to begin, and Hansu who answered.
"Director Shim, do we use these petals? Are they sweet?"
A proper chrysanthemum wine called for the bitter petals to be thrown out and only the sweet ones kept. Just as her father had done, Hyun-kyung tore a petal free, chewed it to test the taste, and only then picked the bloom.
"You try one, Director Shim. I've tasted so many I can't tell bitter from sweet anymore."
With that she pushed the petal in her fingers straight into his mouth, and laughed at the shock on his face.
Scarlet to the ears, Hansu chewed, then said, "It's sweet."
"How sweet?"
"Pretty sweet."
Hyun-kyung picked the flower he had called sweet and dropped it into the sack. This year, she thought, had given her an unusual number of chances to draw closer to him. They had made trip after trip to the Yankee market together, running errands for the entertainers, and when Seoul had nothing they needed they had taken the jeep out to Paju and back. A run to Paju meant two or three hours shut up side by side in the car, and yet Hansu still could not bring himself to close the distance. He likes me. I can see it... Even as she picked, the regret would not leave her.
She went on gathering flowers, turning over how she might get him to open his mouth. They hardly spoke, but their rhythm fit without a hitch. No instruction, no request — they picked in one spot and moved on to the next as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
After three or four hours she held the sack up for him to see, brimming with petals. It was the signal that they could stop. Hansu nodded and dropped down where he stood. Long work together had taught them to read each other even like that.
When Hyun-kyung settled softly beside him, he shifted a little and opened a gap. When she leaned in to offer her handkerchief, he edged his body away. Tch... Am I really so hard to come near? His constant retreat stung.
She remembered January of 1955, the intersection in front of the Gwanghwamun post office, the moment her eyes had met his as he rode past in a truck. Her heart no longer pounded the way it had then. What she wanted now was simpler, and somehow harder: to sit pressed close against his side, and to have him speak to her with a little warmth.
She found herself comparing him with Director Ko Wang-chul. Whenever they crossed paths at the company, Ko spoke first and flashed her a grin. As a man he was nothing special, but there was a side of him she wished Hansu would take after. Today, she decided, she would have to be the one to begin. There was no other way.
"Director Shim, you said you were the same age as the president, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"He already has two children. Don't you envy him?"
"It's a fine thing to see."
Hansu wiped the sweat from his brow and gazed down toward Jongno, a faraway look in his eyes. Hyun-kyung wished he would look at her the way he looked at that street.
"You've never once told me how you grew up."
"There isn't much to tell. I wasn't in an orphanage, like the president. I just lived, one way and another."
"Mm... Then would you like to hear how I grew up?"
Hansu nodded.
Hyun-kyung began to lay out her childhood.
"My father was a man of few words, like you. He was from Andong, in Gyeongsang, so he was blunt. He had even you beat. That's why I'm used to men like you, Director Shim."
"I see..."
"He came up from Andong to study in Seoul, and that's where he met my mother. They both fell for each other at first sight, they say. So he set up house with her right away."
Hansu nodded.
"But doesn't that strike you as strange? A man who came to Seoul to study, setting up house all the way out in Guri?"
"It does."
"There was a reason. The truth is, my father already had a wife in Andong. He hid it and lived with my mother, and he was afraid his family might come looking and drag him back, so he put the house out there."
Hansu had no answer for that.
"Wasn't my father awful? After I was born, and then my little brother, the wife came from Andong. Mother was stunned. Until that day she'd thought he was a bachelor."
Hansu listened in silence to the whole astonishing story.
"From that day on, the wife from Andong — Big Mother, we called her — and our family lived together. Can you imagine it? The shock to Mother, and to me, and to my brother?"
Hyun-kyung tore up a little dry grass nearby and flicked it aside.
"Mother says Father was too soft-hearted to turn Big Mother away. The elders of the house forced the marriage on him, and he'd never wanted it from the start."
"I see..."
Hyun-kyung let out a long sigh before she went on.
"I feel for my mother, and I feel for Big Mother too. Her husband went off to study, and for five years there wasn't a whisper from Seoul. How frantic she must have been. She came up just to learn whether he was even alive, and it took her three months to find him."
She turned her childhood over for a moment, then smiled brightly.
"Even so. Big Mother and my mother got along. They were both country women, of the old sort, and they took it all as fate and accepted it."
Hansu had no idea what he was supposed to say. When she stared straight at him, as if begging him to offer something, anything, the words jammed harder than before.
"Director Shim."
"Yes?"
"I respected my father. I loved him. But I want a man who is his opposite. A man who can say, plainly, what he likes and what he doesn't."
"Yes..."
"You can do that, can't you? Say clearly whether you like a thing or not?"
"O-of course."
In that instant she kissed him on the cheek.
Hansu stared at her, dazed.
"Director Shim. Right now. Do you like it, or not?"
Both their hearts were hammering. Hansu's, above all, felt as if it had climbed into his throat and might burst.
"Do you like it? Or not?"
Hansu gathered his reeling senses and forced the answer out with everything he had.
"I like it..."
At that, Hyun-kyung threw her arms around him and held on tight.
They came down from Naksan as the sun sank low.
November 6. The start of winter.
The department heads of Cheongsan gathered at Kijo's house and ate supper together. There was no particular business. They had come to taste the wine Hansu and Hyun-kyung had brewed.
Kijo took a sip of the yellow chrysanthemum wine and started.
"Well, now... this is incredibly sweet."
The rest of the Cheongsan family murmured their agreement, openly impressed.
"Hansu. You telling me you brewed this?"
Kim Seogwang asked.
"No. I only picked and dried. Hyun-kyung saw to all the rest."
"Well, well! Brew wine like that between the two of you, and one of these days you'll brew a fine son! Kahahaha!"
At Seogwang's wicked joke, Hansu's face flared red as heated iron. Hyun-kyung, sitting across from him, flushed as well, but she picked up the bottle at once, poured for Seogwang, and said, "Director Kim, have another glass."
"Much obliged, Hyun-kyung. Here's hoping you and Hansu make us chrysanthemum wine every year from now on."
Everyone laughed, looking from Hansu to Hyun-kyung and back again. They had all caught on that things were going well between the two. Since the end of October, Hansu had taken to smiling to himself at his work, and his clothes had grown sharper. He was no longer the man who threw on whatever came to hand; he went about in new things that looked as if a woman had chosen them. Hyun-kyung's face had brightened too. It had always been fair, and lately it seemed to shine.
Ma-ryang pretended not to have noticed a thing, and said to Kijo, "Hyungnim. Back at Cheongsan Brick, didn't you give a bit of money and some days off to the couples who paired off?"
"I did."
"Company's bigger now. Be good to send them on a honeymoon, too."
"Ah. We ought to, at that. Where would be good... Yuseong Hot Springs? Or Nanjido?"
"Brother-in-law! Nanjido. Nanjido's the one. Come spring, everybody goes. I want to go to Nanjido myself."
Soon-young, who had joined the tasting, put in.
In the 1950s, Nanjido was not the garbage dump it would become in the 1980s. True to its name — Nanjido, the Isle of Orchids — it was an island of many flowers, and beautiful. You took a boat out from Seoul, and there, set in fine scenery, stood inns and restaurants: a pleasure ground where you could circle the island by water and pass a splendid day.
"Ah, come on. A honeymoon means taking a taxi up Namsan."
Kim Seogwang threw cold water on the notion. He was not wrong, either. In the fifties Namsan was a famous honeymoon course, and the very idea of a honeymoon was nothing like what it would later become.
"I think Nanjido would be best."
Kijo settled it.
"Now then... I hope every maiden and bachelor gathered here will marry just as soon as you can. Whoever comes in first, our Cheongsan Staff Association will make a special gift of a jade ring."
Seogwang said it with his eyes on Hansu, Dae-ik, Tae-sik, and the brother and sister, Hyun-kyung and Yeong-gi.
"And why won't you so much as look at me? Legally speaking, I'm a bachelor too."
Wang-chul protested, and Seogwang shot back, "Hey! Hey, Wang-chul! When the talk turns to maidens and bachelors, you step outside. Go on — all the way past the four city gates."
Everyone burst out laughing.
"I've got a feeling my sister takes first. Twenty-five, a proper old maid. She must be in a hurry these days. Hahaha."
Yeong-gi laughed with a curious look that left it impossible to tell whether he had no tact at all or far too much.
In the fifties, twenty-five was an age at which a woman was treated as an old maid. That Hyun-kyung had courted Hansu so boldly on Naksan, where they had gone to pick chrysanthemums, could not be parted from the mood of the times. The years were stacking up, and the man she liked kept hemming and hawing, so Hyun-kyung, direct by nature, had lost patience and gone after him herself. There was nothing to blame in what she had done. The fault lay with Hansu, who had dragged his feet.
Everyone who had come to the tasting waited for news of a wedding. Kijo expected Hyun-kyung would move the day forward.
The day after the tasting, Kijo went to Yeouido Airport to see off the third group of students leaving for the United States in 1956. Chung Shin-yung of the Dong-A Ilbo was there. He was covering Kijo's broadcast searching out separated families, and he meant to follow it with a piece on Kijo's work of sending students to America.
Kijo, who preferred that even his good deeds not show, slipped in a word.
"What if you ran the story with only the students in the picture?"
"What are you saying, hyungnim? I'm putting your picture out big as a barn door."
Fine. Have it your way.
Kijo let the Dong-A Ilbo photographer shoot him as he shook hands with the three students.
"Study hard in America, keep well, and come home."
"Thank you, President."
Was it because he had become president of a broadcasting station? The look in their eyes had changed. It was nothing like the days when he introduced himself as the owner of a brickworks, or as president of Cheongsan Transport.
As they watched the students board the plane, Shin-yung asked, "When those students come home, do you think this country will have shipyards? Automobile plants? Steel mills?"
"Well... I expect it will."
"I hope we can make our own steel. Then ships, cars — we could build them all, couldn't we?"
"We could."
Kijo rode back to Jongno with him, let him off in front of the Dong-A Ilbo building, and headed for the conference room where the department heads were waiting.
A powerful competitor had appeared in the Miwon business, which until now had stood on solid ground. Two companies, and both at once.
Kijo opened the conference room door and went in.