Certificate of Commendation
For the first time in a long while, Ki-jo was reading the newspaper in the president's office of the Sejong-ro Cheongsan Building.
The January 9, 1957 edition of the Dong-A Ilbo carried an exposé by Choi Hun, an accomplice in the attempt on Vice President Chang Myon's life the year before. Choi revealed that, before he incited Kim Sang-bung to commit the crime, he had met with senior police officials—and that behind those men, he believed, stood Kim Jong-won, director of the National Police.
When the gunman who failed to shoot Chang Myon was being beaten by members of the Democratic Party, Director Kim Jong-won appeared within five minutes, arrested him, and took him away.
Ki-jo already knew who had ultimately ordered Chang Myon's death.
Lee Ki-poong.
His reason for wanting Chang Myon dead was simple enough. In the election of the third president and vice president, Chang Myon had defeated Lee Ki-poong and taken the vice presidency. Should the aged Syngman Rhee die, Chang Myon would succeed automatically to the presidency. He was also the leading candidate for the next presidential election, and so they had tried to remove him.
Whether Rhee dropped dead tomorrow or not, Chang Myon was a grave threat to the Liberal Party and to Lee Ki-poong.
Ki-jo folded the paper.
Lee Ki-poong, who had meant to assassinate Chang Myon with a pistol, would himself die by a bullet from his own son's gun, while the rest would live out the span allotted them. Even the would-be assassin would be spared the death penalty at Chang Myon's plea for clemency, and released after the April 19 Revolution. Looking at it that way, heaven had not been entirely indifferent.
A knock sounded, and Seong Dae-ik stepped in.
"The documents are all ready, sir."
He was carrying a briefcase full of papers.
"All right, Dae-ik. Let's go."
Ki-jo set out with him for the Central Government Building. Inside the case were the papers documenting Ki-jo's record of meritorious service; the Ministry of Transportation had sent word that he was to bring them. It was a five-minute walk from the Cheongsan Building. Ki-jo took the file Dae-ik had prepared and went in to the minister's office.
"Good day, Minister."
He bowed deeply to Lee Jong-rim, Minister of Transportation.
"Come in, Mr. Lee. Please, sit."
Under the minister's kindly gaze, Ki-jo took a seat on the sofa.
"This is already our second meeting."
"Yes, Minister."
Ki-jo thought well of Lee Jong-rim. The year before, the minister had sided outright with Korea Shipping and put him in a difficult position, but Ki-jo believed that whoever held the portfolio would have done the same. In the file of his memory, Lee Jong-rim was set down as a railwayman—a specialist, an elite bureaucrat.
Under Japanese rule he had worked at Gyeongseong Station. In 1945, after liberation, when Lieutenant Colonel Ward Hamilton, director of transportation under the U.S. Military Government, came to inspect the station, he took note of Deputy Stationmaster Lee Jong-rim, whose English was better than the interpreter's. That November he appointed him the first stationmaster of Seoul Station.
"You had a hard time of it last year. I never imagined you would bring ships back from Japan. All I hoped for was that even half of Korea Shipping's crews might be returned, and so I pushed you into it…"
"Thanks to you, Minister, I was able to do some good work in Japan. If it hadn't been for you, I might never have managed it."
He spoke with his inspection of the Sado mine still in mind.
"Is that so? I can hardly bear to look in Japan's direction. The very word sets my teeth on edge. I suppose it's because I met so many strange Japanese in the colonial years… ha ha."
And he launched into a story from before liberation.
"As you know, President Lee, Seodaemun Station was originally Gyeongseong Station. When the March First rallies gathered in the station square, those bastards simply abolished the station altogether…"
"Is that right? I was born in 1930, so this is the first I've heard of it, Minister."
"Were you? Ha ha. It was 1919, so of course you wouldn't have."
Lee Jong-rim, still laughing, went on.
"Once you know they moved Gyeongseong Station to Namdaemun after the March First Movement, you can see just how badly the Japanese were frightened by those demonstrations. Then in 1947 the Military Government changed the name from Gyeongseong Station to Seoul Station."
He lingered a moment over the history of Seoul Station, then turned to a story of his own.
"This was when I was serving as chief passenger officer. I went into the first-class car to inspect tickets, and one Japanese fellow was lying on his berth and stuck his ticket out at me between his toes."
"What did you do?"
"A train attendant happened to be passing, so I told him to fetch me a pair of wooden chopsticks from the dining car. I picked the ticket up with those, punched it, and stuck it right back between his toes. Ha ha ha."
Ki-jo laughed with him.
Minister Lee Jong-rim seemed to have stored up a great deal against the Japanese from the colonial years. He recalled that the moment they boarded a train, they treated Koreans with naked contempt. Listening, Ki-jo thought of their double nature. Among their own they rode in a silence so complete you could not hear them breathe; yet toward anyone they judged beneath them they would, in those same cars, curse, beat, molest, even rape. A man who had watched such things over and over could hardly be expected to think well of them.
"I was cursed at plenty myself, and beaten, too. Still, I had to swallow it."
Lee Jong-rim slapped the arm of the sofa a few times with his palm, then came at last to the reason he had called Ki-jo in.
"Did you write up the service record properly?"
"Yes. Here it is."
It was a record Ki-jo could not bring himself to fill with his own praises, so Dae-ik had written it in his place. The minister looked it over.
"You gave work to a great many refugees. In Yeoncheon you leased out land at low rents, donated bricks for the building of schools, and took almost no profit on the reconstruction housing. You helped carry out the national policy of establishing wired-radio amplifier villages, arranged the export of tungsten to the United States, and assembled two hundred television sets, the first in the country. Over three years you sent as many as six students to Harvard, broadcast searches for separated families, and, last of all, recovered ships from Japan."
"That's right."
Ki-jo answered with his face gone red.
"With a record like this, you must have received quite a few awards. How many?"
"None."
"None? Not one?"
"No."
"Not Reconstruction, not Commerce and Industry, not Education, not Communications—not even the Office of Public Information gave you a single certificate?"
"That's correct."
"Well…"
Minister Lee Jong-rim looked frankly incredulous.
"Your parents didn't go north, by any chance? Or collaborate badly with the Japanese under the colonial government?"
"I wouldn't know. I never knew my parents. I grew up an orphan."
"Ahem… I see. They must have been fine people."
He cleared his throat, then muttered as if to himself.
"Remarkable, this. A service record so long and so solid, and not a single certificate to show for it…"
He called his secretary, handed over the record, and ordered a certificate of commendation drawn up. When the secretary had gone, he turned back to Ki-jo.
"An award is an award. As Minister of Transportation, I have one request to make of you, President Lee, as a businessman."
Ki-jo tensed. What task was about to land on him this time? Lee Jong-rim did not seem an unreasonable or irrational man, but Ki-jo had the uneasy sense of being overestimated.
"I was born in 1913."
The minister began with the year of his birth.
"Three years after we lost the country. I grew up under the Japanese, and I did a great deal of what they told me to do. But listen."
He lifted a small model locomotive from the table.
"It has been a full twelve years since we won our independence, and still we buy every last train part from Japan. I resent it."
Ki-jo did not think the minister was about to propose anything so trivial as merely changing where the parts were imported from.
"Train components have to be made here at home, and you strike me as the right man for it."
Just as he had expected.
In principle, Ki-jo agreed. Train parts, automobile parts—sooner or later they all had to be made in Korea. Among the railway accidents so common in the fifties, many came of using parts worn past their life. Everything was imported, so a component whose service life had ended was kept in use so long as it still looked sound on the outside. But Ki-jo knew nothing of trains, and he had neither the people nor the technology.
Even so, he wanted to do work that made the world safer. The profits would not be large, and the chance of success was far from clear, but he believed it was worth the attempt.
"I'll take it on."
When he answered without hesitation, relief broke over Minister Lee Jong-rim's face in a smile.
"I'm grateful you stepped forward so readily. But it won't be a business that makes money."
"That's all right. I'll see what I can do."
The minister regarded him with something like pride, and smiled.
"Do you even know what you'd be making, that you volunteer so quickly?"
"Surely you aren't going to ask me to build an engine?"
"Ha ha. I was thinking of the diesel locomotives they use in America."
Ki-jo had the sense he was being tested, lightly. He answered as realistically as he could.
"I don't think we could build a diesel engine. The wheels, though—I believe we could manage those."
Korea had no steel mill, but it did have furnaces that could melt scrap. As Ki-jo understood it, a railway wheel had to bear enormous weight, so it would not be made by casting, pouring molten iron into a mold. They would forge it: heat the steel and hammer it, raising its strength as they shaped it. Shaping hot iron with a hammer was a craft blacksmiths had practiced for thousands of years. No human arm, of course, could strike hard enough to make a train wheel, so machines would have to do it—and the calculations of how much force those machines required, he thought, were something Professor Kim Moon-hwan could manage.
While he was turning this over, Minister Lee Jong-rim spoke.
"Cheongsan only has to put up the capital. I've already secured the entire technical staff."
What?
It was the last thing he had expected. For three years he had been forced into work, or had had to pull off something difficult simply to survive. And now he was only to provide the money? What could be easier than that?
"There are outstanding men among the railway people. Some have been not only to Japan and China, but to Britain, the home of the railway. Plenty of them have seen something of the world and studied a long time."
Ki-jo nodded.
"What I want made are wheels and springs. But the railway budget the state provides is absurdly small, and there isn't a single company willing to try—though our railwaymen could do it, if only someone laid out the ground for them."
Ki-jo's part, then, was merely to help.
"And you needn't worry whether parts made here will sell. We haven't the money to buy anything else in any case."
The minister set him at ease.
"If you need machinery, just say the word. It can be brought in from the United States within two months."
"Ha ha. The engineers will ask for whatever they need. Cheongsan Shipping has imported a good deal of transport equipment and machinery from America, hasn't it?"
"Yes."
"And I understand you have something like a hundred buses as well…"
True to his office, the Minister of Transportation knew Ki-jo's businesses, and the number of vehicles he held, inside and out.
"Don't leave those buses sitting idle. Take out a transport license and run them. The whole country is desperately short of buses. I'll issue licenses not only for the city of Seoul, but for the provinces as well."
"Thank you, Minister."
He had already been thinking, on the strength of the buses he had accumulated, of long- and short-haul routes spanning Seoul, Incheon, Gyeonggi, Daegu, Busan, Gwangju, Jeonju, and Daejeon. He had never imagined the minister would grant it of his own accord, without a bribe or a word of persuasion.
"Then I'll be counting on you, President Lee. A section chief will go to Cheongsan headquarters. Leave all the dealings with government offices to him."
Administrative help that came looking for you…
Living this life a second time, he thought, there were days like this as well. He took his leave of the minister, and all the way back to the company his mind was at ease. It warmed him to know that even in the Korea of the 1950s there were ministers who behaved like ministers, and civil servants who behaved like civil servants.
On the way, Dae-ik asked him, "They didn't tell you to hand something else over, did they?"
"They did ask me to take part in a few ventures."
At that, Dae-ik's face darkened.
"But it seemed like work the country truly needs, so I agreed. They recommended the railway and bus businesses."
At the words railway and bus, Dae-ik's expression eased a little.
"Dae-ik."
"Yes."
"How do you think we ought to find bus conductresses?"
Dae-ik considered for a moment.
"There are plenty of country girls coming up to Seoul to work as housemaids, aren't there? What if we built a dormitory, the way Cheil Wool did, fed them and housed them, and hired them on as bus guides?"
Ki-jo stared at the face that had produced so fine an answer.
"Have you been thinking about that for a while?"
"No. Last time, didn't you tell me to go and have a look at the Cheil Wool factory?"
"I did."
He had sent his department heads down to Daegu, where the Cheil Wool plant stood, hoping that a look at a factory of the highest standard might leave some impression on them.
"On the way back, after seeing the dormitories there, I watched girls boarding the train, each of them clutching a bundle."
"I see."
"Yes. That memory and that experience came together on their own, and the idea rose out of them."
It pleased Ki-jo to see Dae-ik still growing. The sharp-edged boy who, back at the brick factory, had taken to task the men quitting the moment they were paid in dollars had, before anyone quite noticed, grown into a man who could think of other people.
"Dae-ik."
"Yes?"
"Thank you."
"Sir?"
"I'm simply grateful."
Dae-ik could not tell why.
Ki-jo was always grateful to Cheongsan's department heads. Without them, he believed, there would have been no him. He did not think of the people under him as his own hands and feet. He thought of them as part of his heart. Those below are shaped by those above; work long enough in the grain of a leader, and before you know it you come to resemble him. That Dae-ik had thought of helping people in difficulty was proof, too, that Ki-jo himself was walking a straight path.
All the way back to the company, his heart stayed warm.