New Year, 1957
On the first of January, 1957, Kijo sat in the president's office at the broadcasting station, reading the front page of the Dong-A Ilbo.
Across that front page was printed a photograph of the sunrise, taken from Uisangdae Pavilion at Naksansa. Directly beneath the picture ran an editorial titled "Hopes for the New Year," and he read it.
"...In the days when we lay beneath the iron chains of Japanese imperialism, we believed that liberation alone would set every matter right. Yet now that liberation has come, one hears it said that we are worse off than we were under Japanese rule..."
Such thoughts were not the private property of pro-Japanese collaborators. The 1950s had been so bitter and so hard that many of the people around Kijo said life was worse than it had been in the days of Japanese rule.
No one holds out against hunger.
Kijo himself had gone days without a meal, and he understood the feeling. He read on.
"...Some will blame our backwardness. They mean to shift every responsibility onto the poverty of our policies, the lack of technical skill, and the scarcity of capital..."
The piece was putting its finger on a national sense of defeat—the shame of being a backward country. Kijo set the self-reproaching New Year editorial aside and turned to the HLKZ-TV program schedules printed in the Dong-A Ilbo and the Hankook Ilbo.
He had placed the schedules in both papers in lieu of advertisements. The aim was simple: let people see that the television station was doing something worth watching, and send them out to buy a set.
He checked the conversation program that aired at seven in the evening, Encounters with Notables. Today's guest was Lee O-young.
At twenty-four, the young university student was not yet what anyone would call a celebrated name, but he was already causing a sensation in cultural circles. With a razor-sharp reading of the poems of Yi Sang—a poet long dismissed as a madman—he had hauled that poet up out of the dark, and he had shown the nerve to take on Kim Dong-ri, a man treated as one of the great trees of the literary world.
From 1957 on, Kijo meant to begin with Lee O-young and put before the public people who could offer the country some hope. It had not been so in 1956. That year, to win the favor of the powerful, he had put on men such as Minister of Home Affairs Lee Ik-heung, Vice President Chang Myon, and Director of the National Police Kim Jong-won.
Lee Ik-heung, who had appeared in December of 1956, was a man already disgraced. When Syngman Rhee broke wind, Ik-heung had been heard to say:
"Your Excellency must feel so relieved."
The remark got out, and the shame stuck to him. On the talk show he offered this protest.
"If your own father broke wind in the middle of a meal, would you put him to shame for it?"
The line proved unexpectedly effective. Some of those who had mocked him as a toady began to change their minds.
"When you look at it that way, maybe he had a point."
Satisfied with the shift in opinion, Lee Ik-heung stopped by the president's office, thanked Kijo for the chrysanthemum wine, and took his leave. Once he had successfully smoothed his disgrace away through television, other figures began to sound the station out about appearing themselves. People were starting to open their eyes to the power of broadcasting.
Those who actually watched television were still few, but what they said after watching spread quickly from mouth to mouth.
Kijo turned away no one who asked to appear. Unless a man was truly beyond the pale, he took them all. There were so many requests that the schedule for Encounters with Notables filled completely, and he had to create another program: Hear Me Out.
Instead of paying appearance fees to those eager to be on the talk shows, he asked them for contributions. Tell them the station was in difficult straits and would be grateful for a donation, and they paid willingly. Nor was he merely running a business by way of talk shows. Alongside those guests, he also invited people he genuinely wished to promote, and he did it free of charge. Foremost among them was Jeon Hyeong-pil.
The man had done countless good works and yet, for a long while, remained little known. When Kijo went to him and asked whether he might come on the talk show, the answer that came back was a refusal.
"If I become known, the treasures in my keeping become known as well. Then they grow only harder to look after..."
He was right. Kijo went back over the list of those who had applied to appear, and he was marking in ballpoint the names his memory told him would cause trouble later, weeding them out, when co-president John Miller came in.
"President Lee, might I have a word?"
"Of course."
Kijo and Miller sat facing each other on the sofa.
"Headquarters has summoned me. It looks as though I'll have to leave the country tomorrow. And since I'll be back in America anyway, I was thinking of taking about a month's leave. Would that be all right?"
"Of course. Go safely, and come back."
"You're running the station so well that I can leave it in your hands with an easy mind."
"It must have been a long time since you saw your family. Rest properly with them, and come back when you're ready."
"Thank you."
Miller said only that, and left the office.
From the man's manner, Kijo had the sense that RCA would soon be taking its hands off the running of the station. Since the opening on June 16, the losses had marched on for six straight months, and RCA televisions had sold barely more than a hundred sets. Subtract the ones Kijo had bought with his own money and handed out under Kwak Young-joo's name, and what remained was some sixty sets, supplied on long-term installment to the tea rooms that kept a television—and that was all.
For RCA, which had expected that building a station in Korea would sell televisions, it could only be a disappointment. The two hundred thousand dollars already invested in the country was to be repaid by Kijo as the cost of the broadcasting equipment, so from their side the loss was no great one. Shake free now, and they could get out of Korea without a serious wound. Kijo was confident he could keep the station running even if RCA withdrew.
He was checking the talk-show guest list again when a knock came at the door.
"Come in."
"Sir, your wife is on the telephone. Please take it."
The secretary came into the room carrying the telephone itself, its long cord trailing behind. He took the receiver. It was Sunrye.
"Dear, I need you to come home for a little while."
"Is something the matter?"
"Mr. and Mrs. Jeon Hyeong-pil have come to see us."
"Have they? All right."
Kijo hurried out of the president's office and headed home. From the station beside Bosingak to the house in Jongno was not even a ten-minute walk. In those days the heart of Seoul was no bigger than the palm of a hand, and every major institution lay within reach of an outstretched arm.
When he arrived, Jeon Hyeong-pil and his wife rose from their seats in the inner room.
"Forgive me for calling on you from New Year's morning."
"I should have come to see you first. I'm sorry."
"What kind of talk is that? Ha ha ha."
Jeon Hyeong-pil laughed brightly, though his face was burned black by the sun. It had darkened because he had spent the whole of 1956 busy hauling Goryeo celadon up out of the West Sea.
The moment Jeon decided to donate the badly deficit-ridden Dongseong Academy to the state, Kijo had gone straight to him. He congratulated him on the decision and told him to drag a net across the waters off Boryeong. Giving up the educational work that had been his father's dying charge had left Jeon hollow inside. Kijo's suggestion of the seashore came at just the right moment; thinking the sight of the ocean might soothe him, he set off for Boryeong at once.
For several days he did nothing there at all. Then, just as Kijo had said, he took a boat out, cast a net, and scraped the bottom—and fragments of Goryeo celadon truly came up. Forgetting the grief of his failed educational venture, Jeon went to sea every day like a fisherman and cast the nets himself. Then, at the place where a ship carrying ceramics had gone down, he brought up Goryeo celadon in quantity, and he could hardly believe he was not dreaming.
For a while he was not himself. Like a man addicted to gambling, he worked without feeling the hardship, digging for the bonanza under the water. In the course of it he gave up drink and tobacco, his strength improved, and he grew far healthier than before. Kijo was glad to see him taken up with a pastime that cost less money.
His wife, Madam Kim Jeom-sun, looked glad of it as well. Once her husband's spendthrift ways(?) had vanished, the ease seemed to have come back to her; a soft sheen had returned to her face.
The four of them sat in the inner room and talked.
"Thanks to you, Kijo—teaching me how to come by treasures without spending a single coin—my fortune has grown for the first time since I was married. My wife is the one who brought me here, so we might give thanks for it. Ha ha ha."
Madam Kim, as if embarrassed, smiled and lowered her head. Then Sunrye whispered in Kijo's ear.
"They brought hanbok for our family to wear..."
Four sets of hanbok, laid to one side of the room, caught his eye.
"Elder brother, what is all this you've brought?"
"My wife prepared them. I had nothing to do with it."
"Give us just a moment. The two of us will change into the hanbok and come back."
Kijo and Sunrye changed into the hanbok, and they dressed Yeongsu in a new set as well. When the family came back into the room in traditional dress, Madam Kim spoke with happiness all over her face.
"Truly lovely... Far too lovely. How do the two of you, husband and wife, suit each other so well? And Yeongsu is beautiful too..."
Kijo and Sunrye laughed, shy. Dressed in his hanbok, Yeongsu offered the Jeons a deep formal bow. The sight was so endearing that Jeon Hyeong-pil called the boy onto his knee and took him in his arms.
"This child will surely become someone great. He has his father's looks and his father's character—so won't he live a life like his father's? Ha ha ha."
Whenever he saw Yeongsu, Jeon Hyeong-pil did not stint on kind words. The Jeons drank tea and talked with Kijo and Sunrye, looked in on little Yeongeun, who was sleeping in the room across the way, and then started for home. Before they left, Madam Kim took Sunrye's hand and held it tight.
"Your husband saved mine. I don't know how we are ever to repay that. Truly, thank you."
Whenever her husband was praised, a sting rose to the tip of Sunrye's nose. It was because she remembered the man who had been scorned in Busan, who had suffered there nearly to death.
Once, she had seen her husband apologizing to another man in the street. The man was a work-gang foreman from the docks, and he was taking Kijo to task for failing to come and help when the foreman's household moved house on a Sunday. At the time Kijo had been laid up with a fever that ached through his whole body, pouring sweat at home and groaning where he lay.
When her husband kept bowing his head and begging pardon, the man had said:
"A rude bastard like you has no business working the docks. Don't show up from tomorrow."
"I'm sorry, Foreman. Please, just this once. I have a two-year-old son at home. I'm begging you."
When she saw Kijo drop to his knees in the street and plead with the foreman, Sunrye felt her whole body give way beneath her. As people passing by looked at her husband, laughed, and went on, she wanted to kneel in his place and apologize herself.
But the husband who came home that day was utterly calm. He had suffered such a thing in the street, and he let none of it show. Instead he comforted Sunrye, who had cried alone in the house until her eyes were swollen.
"If something's hard, tell me. I'll hear all of it. Living so far from home is hard, isn't it?"
Her husband was that kind of man. When she thought of him going about in those days with his liver and his gall set aside—swallowing even the words he had no need to hear, all so he could feed his family—the life they had now was a happiness almost past believing. That was why it delighted her so to see him treated with respect.
After the guests had gone and the house had grown quiet, Sunrye spoke to Kijo.
"Yeongsu's father—you have to go back to the company, don't you?"
"It's the first day of the year. There's nothing in particular I have to do."
"Then spend a little time with me."
She sent Yeongsu out to play, took Kijo by the hand, and led him into the inner room. She locked the door, spread the bedding, and slipped free of the hanbok, one garment at a time. She wanted to be held in the arms of a husband who was good, and whom she could trust. He was so dear to her, and so fine, that Sunrye could not bear it.