Jajangmyeon
At noon on Monday, January 7, 1957, Gijo went alone into the pleasure quarter of Gwancheol-dong, behind the broadcasting station, to find his lunch.
Most days he ate at home, or shared whatever the staff had ordered in, but that day he turned his steps toward Myeongwolgwan. He was on his way to see Lee Seong-ryong, and he had no sooner stepped inside than he came face to face with Mi-hyang.
"Oh my. President Lee. What on earth brings you out in broad daylight?"
"I came to see the proprietress."
"Did you, now. Still hard at the business, I suppose? If anything's weighing on you, go and see our superintendent. Oh — that's right. He said he'll be an assistant commissioner before long, didn't he?"
"So I hear."
"Well, making a great deal of money is all very fine if you're born a man, but for a man, nothing really beats rank, wouldn't you say? A man ought to have power."
Mi-hyang looked him over from head to foot as she passed. Word had already reached him that since becoming Kwak Young-joo's lover she had grown so high-handed that even Lee Seong-ryong could scarcely keep her in hand. Seeing it for himself, he thought the talk was true. He gave each ear a light, scouring pick, as if to rinse her words clean out, and went into Seong-ryong's room.
"Come in, Yeongsu's dad. Or shall I call you Yeongeun's dad? Which do you like?"
"Yeongsu's dad, if you would."
"There, you see. Men never love anyone but their sons."
Seong-ryong slanted a look at him and smiled. It was not how he felt, but he did not trouble himself to explain.
"What's this about, then, dragging me into lunch?"
"Isn't your brother coming?"
"Of course Hwa-ryong's coming."
He had already set the meal with the two of them. Hwa-ryong came into the room, and close on his heels came the Chinese dishes, sent over from Cheonghaeru, the high-end Chinese restaurant Seong-ryong ran. She kept both Myeongwolgwan and Cheonghaeru, and both houses were thriving.
"Come on, sister. Let's give the Chinese food a rest."
Hwa-ryong grumbled even as he plucked up the spicy japchae with practiced ease.
"Don't eat it if you don't want it."
Seong-ryong tossed the words out coldly, then turned to Gijo with a sudden grin.
"I eat Cheonghaeru's cooking twice a week. Making sure the kitchen's still holding the line. Let the taste slip, and a business is finished overnight."
She set a little of each dish onto her plate and tasted them one by one, taking her time.
"Mm. That's good..."
She smiled, satisfied. Hwa-ryong, spooning up the broth of his ulmyeon — wheat noodles in a hot, savory soup — looked over.
"That boy Won-chul. Getting out of the service this time, is he?"
He meant O Won-chul, Seong-ryong's eldest son.
"Yes. Says he wants to quit."
"A man puts on a uniform, he ought to try for a general's stars. Walks out a major with one lonely horse-dropping on his collar, and you think that's enough for him?"
"And how do you imagine that boy makes general? He's an air force technical officer. Colonel would be the ceiling."
"What's he mean to do once he's out?"
"Going into that Sibal automobile company, he says. They've promised him the plant manager's job, or so I hear."
"Have they? If you're going to do a thing, be the president. Like President Lee here."
"Quit fussing over somebody else's son and look after your own. And get yourself home once in a while."
Brother and sister carried on the whole exchange without once looking at each other's faces. Every time Gijo watched them, he thought they were the very model of what real siblings were.
"Ah! That's right. Cheongsan Construction is doing the work on the Daegu airfield, isn't it? Won-chul said so."
"Yes, that's right. Jets are coming in from America, so we're extending the runway."
"Oh my. Those shrieking things are coming here?"
"Yes. Around summer, the Americans are giving a few jets to the Korean Air Force."
The United States, hoping to soothe Syngman Rhee and the Korean public in their opposition to a withdrawal of U.S. forces, had decided to grant the Korean Air Force a handful of jets.
"You must have made a fortune. How much did you clear last year on the American military jobs?"
"Not much. I only took the low bids."
What he had actually made on those contracts came to about two hundred thousand dollars. It was a great deal of money, but never boasting of money in front of other people was one of Gijo's fixed principles. Besides, that sum still had to pay off the broadcast equipment bought on credit from RCA and purchase high-power transmission gear. If he meant to acquire the HLKZ-TV stake as well, against the day RCA pulled out of Korea, he would need still more.
Fortunately the military freight runs had brought in eight hundred thousand dollars, so there was room to breathe. Even after he carved off two hundred thousand for Cho Choong-hoon in subcontracting fees, he had still made that much. In the fifties, nothing earned dollars like hauling cargo for the U.S. military.
"And the tungsten shipments? Going well? That's good money too, isn't it?"
Seong-ryong, whose interest in money never flagged, pressed on.
"I bought two ships on credit. Paying them off, there's nothing left."
That, too, was a lie.
In 1956 the Korean tungsten shipped to the United States had come to thirty-two million dollars in all. In the original history it had been sold without being concentrated, for twenty-two million; the chemical processing plant had let them earn ten million more. On those exports AMKO Tungsten had made about ten million dollars, and one million of it had come to Gijo in forwarding fees.
The two freighters he had taken over from Roberts's bank, where they had sat under mortgage, had cost four million dollars between them. Drawing on America's cheap interest, he was paying them down at four hundred and twenty thousand a year over ten years, and with what remained he bought used trucks, buses, and heavy construction equipment in the States. The trucks gathered that way came to about a thousand. The buses — thirty a year of the commuter buses the U.S. military rotated out of service — came to exactly one hundred. Excavators, cranes, bulldozers, rollers: eighty machines in all.
Hardly anyone knew it. Gijo simply never let it show. In equipment, Cheongsan Transport and Cheongsan Construction were the finest companies in the country.
"Sister, if President Lee had real money, would he be living in a four-room house in Jongno? He'd have thrown up a palace of ninety-nine rooms before you could blink. I stopped by his place not long ago. Plain as anything."
Even Hwa-ryong, a member of the Patjuk Gathering, had little notion of Gijo's wealth.
"True enough. Word is Yeongsu's dad pays the people he hires a proper wage, and does a good deal of charity besides..."
Seong-ryong smacked her lips, then turned to Gijo.
"Yeongsu's dad, it's time you set a little money aside. A business doesn't last forever, you know. Live so you keep hold of what ought to be kept."
"I understand."
Gijo only smiled. They talked of this and that through the rest of the meal, and when the sujeonggwa came — cold cinnamon punch, sweet and dark — he brought out what he had really come to say.
"I'm thinking of starting another venture this year. Would the two of you come in with me?"
At that, Seong-ryong's eyes lit.
"What is it? You're going to let us in?"
"Yes. I need help from both of you. Badly."
"Just say the word, Yeongsu's dad. Though our Hwa-ryong hasn't a coin to his name, so as a partner he's a lost cause..."
"Not at all. I need my brother's help more than anything."
Hwa-ryong rolled his shoulders at that. Gijo laid out for the siblings the business he meant to begin with the new year of 1957. When she had heard him through, Seong-ryong wore the face of a woman who had found a fly floating in her cold noodles. Hwa-ryong stared at him with a look that asked what in the world he was talking about.
"Yeongsu's dad. So what you're saying is, you want to feed jajangmyeon to elementary schoolchildren?"
"Yes. That's right."
Hwa-ryong put in his own question.
"And what do you need gangsters for, feeding noodles to students?"
"Because I need people to haul the flour, knead the dough, and carry the sauce."
Hwa-ryong looked at him as if he had lost his mind.
"Yeongsu's dad, is there money in that? Even Cheonghaeru doesn't make much selling jajangmyeon."
"I'll put up the money. Cheonghaeru only has to lend its name. And you, brother — just send your boys out to serve the meals."
Neither of them could have guessed his deeper purpose. He had come to them so that later, when Hwa-ryong fell, there would be something to lay before a court in mitigation. Feeding jajangmyeon to hungry schoolchildren was, in all honesty, a thing Gijo could have done by himself.
"No. Gangsters don't set foot in a school. Temples, churches, schools, hospitals — those are places we don't go."
Hwa-ryong was against it.
"Then do it in the name of a Myeongdong Merchants' Association."
"A merchants' association?"
"Yes. Form a group like that and work through it. Children won't look at the kind men bringing them good jajangmyeon and think those are gangsters."
"Ha. There you go again, President Lee, cooking up one of your little schemes."
Seong-ryong had been listening in silence while her brother and Gijo talked. Something occurred to her, and she turned to Hwa-ryong.
"Hwa-ryong. Let's do as President Lee says."
"Sister — not you as well. Why?"
"Don't ask. If I tell you to do it, do it."
She was remembering the year before, when her brother had been the talk of the town for a while over the Golden Carriage raid, and then been locked up over another matter. The Golden Carriage affair had been gangsters fighting it out with stones, men hurt and things smashed, and the police had not pressed it hard. The other case they had sunk their teeth into and would not let go. A brother who lived as a gangster might be arrested any day. All she would be able to do then was beg for leniency. When Gijo spoke of feeding jajangmyeon to schoolchildren, she could already see those small hands writing a judge to ask for mercy. It might help keep her brother alive.
"Yeongsu's dad, we'll do it. Pulling noodles — the restaurant's full of people who can do that. And the sauce only has to be fried the day before, doesn't it?"
"You'll really do it?"
"Of course. Hwa-ryong, you start a Myeongdong Merchants' Association. Today."
Hwa-ryong still looked sour, as if the notion of gangsters walking into a school stuck in his throat.
"I mean to begin when the new term starts in April, and go from school to school — one a day — feeding them jajangmyeon."
"I like the sound of that."
"But listen here, President Lee."
"Yes, brother."
"You're not thinking of going into politics, like Du-han, are you? Lining all this up ahead of time..."
"What are you saying... They tell me there are seven hundred thousand children in this country who go without a meal."
"Seven hundred thousand?"
Hwa-ryong was startled.
"Seven hundred thousand — that's enough people to hold the country in a war, isn't it?"
"It is."
Gijo thought of what had happened in the life before this one. In May of 1957, in Anseong, Gyeonggi Province, a thing beyond belief would take place. At the height of the barley hump — those starving weeks before the new harvest — pupils at Baekseong National School, unable to bear the hunger, mistook the wisteria in the schoolyard for arrowroot, stripped it, and ate it. Twenty-seven of them were poisoned. At neighboring Juksan National School, three hundred and forty-five of nine hundred and twenty-two pupils were missing at least one meal a day, and it had come to that because the principal took the powdered milk issued for hungry children and fed it to the pigs at his own house. The country was full to overflowing with starving students.
"Yeongsu's dad, you're going to cover all of that money yourself?"
"Yes. From here on, flour is going to get a great deal cheaper. Farm prices will come down too."
Nineteen fifty-seven was the year the runaway prices that had tormented the Republic for twelve years since liberation were brought to heel for the first time, and the reason was America's food-aid program.
"Everything you predict comes true, so I'll grant you that. But are you sure? It sounds like a good deal of money..."
"Of course. I've thought it all through."
He had already bought the noodle machines. In truth, all Seong-ryong had to do was fill the great cauldrons at Cheonghaeru with black-bean sauce. In the end he meant to carry the meal program forward with help from the parents. If only twenty of them came forward at a school, they could knead the dough and pull the noodles, boil them, and ladle the sauce on top. For those parents, he intended to cover the association dues.
Through the 1950s the government poured ten percent of the national finances into education, but there were so many children that it could not keep up. In the end the school support societies carried over from the U.S. military government made up what the state could not. Their formal name was the Parent-Teacher Association, the PTA. After the Second World War, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers had ordered the organization established in both Korea and Japan. Through the parents' associations, schools spent the money they collected from mothers and fathers not only on extra classrooms and new buildings, but on teachers' salaries. At the national elementary schools, forty percent of a teacher's pay came out of those dues. And so the teachers, however it galled them, had little choice but to punish the children who came without the fee, or set them to cleaning the latrines. It was a state of things that hurt the children, the teachers, and the parents alike.
In the life before this, when Yeongsu had asked for the association money, Gijo had not been able to give it to him properly. Once, a homeroom teacher, taking pity on a kind and clever boy, had paid it in his place. The child who went hungry and lived in dread because there were no dues to bring, and the parent beside that child — that had been Yeongsu, and that had been Gijo.
He finished his lunch at Myeongwolgwan and walked out. On the way back to the station, the days of dock work in Busan came over him all at once. Before the currency reform of 1953, his wage had been one thousand eight hundred won for day work and two thousand two hundred for the night. A bowl of red-bean porridge then cost seven hundred won, and a pack of American cigarettes one thousand two hundred. Only if he worked the night clean through could he buy a single bowl and take Sunrye and Yeongsu to eat it.
It was hardly different now. Someone, somewhere, was still living that life. It was a world in which you had to labor a full twelve hours before you could gather your courage and take the family out for jajangmyeon. Through this last return he had overturned a life like that for himself. He had not been able to do the same for the others. Whenever that knowledge pressed in on him, the same question rose.
Why had twelve chances to live again been given to him alone?
Think as he might, he could not know. But change the question, and he could offer something close to an answer. If he had the power to give a chance like that to someone — to whom would he give it? Asked that way, the answer was a person who could share the gift of returning with everyone else.
Of all the answers he had found, that was the one he liked best.