Cheongsan Heavy Industries
In the Cheongsan Heavy Equipment office beside the Cheongnyangni freight yard, Ki-jo and Kim Moon-hwan sat down with the four officials the Minister of Transportation had sent. Professor Kim Moon-hwan looked over the materials they had brought, and his eyes went wide.
"Where did you get all this?"
The chief of the Ministry's Railway Division smiled with his whole face.
"Minister Lee Jong-rim sent us to Japan on an advanced railway course."
"Oh... Even so, this is hardly something you come away with after a casual look around. How did you manage to obtain industrial data of this kind?"
"We toured the firms that build the trains and carried ourselves as if Korea intended to purchase rolling stock. We said we needed to compare their cars with the ones already running and asked for the specifications and strength ratings of the parts, and they handed them over without a moment's hesitation."
"Ah. So that's how you did it."
Kim Moon-hwan's eyes glittered.
Once the equipment for the briquette plant had been built, the professor had found himself at loose ends. It was he who had come begging to go in with Cheongsan Heavy Equipment the moment Ki-jo opened a new engineering project. Ki-jo could feel how badly the man itched to throw himself into the making of railway-car parts. Offer Kim Moon-hwan a new machine to build, and he was the sort who would kick aside the presidency of Cheongsan Briquettes and walk out without a backward glance.
Ki-jo turned to the division chief.
"Did Minister Lee Jong-rim tell you to go about it that way?"
"Yes. It was the minister's instruction. He told us to leak a false report—that the Korean government was planning a second Gyeongbu Line with aid funds."
Ki-jo was quietly satisfied. Even in Syngman Rhee's government, there was at least one minister who knew how to work.
Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Hitachi, Nippon Sharyo, Kinki Sharyo, Tokyu Car—one after another they had taken Minister Lee Jong-rim's bait and laid their industrial intelligence at his feet. Under it all lay the complacent certainty that Korea would never dare build such things for itself. There were more than ten rolling-stock makers in Japan. Bleeding one another white for the home market, the Japanese firms had looked upon their former colony and begun to lick their lips over a new one.
"Aigoo... they've gone and written down exactly which steel goes into the train springs. Tsk."
Professor Kim Moon-hwan was salivating over the documents himself.
Ki-jo glanced at him and asked, lightly, "Professor. Shall I find a new president for the briquette plant?"
"That's for you to decide, Director. I'll hand in my resignation—just approve it, and set me down at Cheongsan Heavy Industries."
"Cheongsan Heavy Industries?"
"Take the Cheongsan Heavy Equipment sign down. We aren't simply a company that rents out machinery anymore, are we?"
"Understood, Professor."
Ki-jo smiled at Kim Moon-hwan, who was already gulping the kimchi broth—celebrating a feast that had yet to be served. The professor was dreaming of a heavy-industry boom that would not truly arrive until the 1970s. Certain that Ki-jo meant to seat him as president of the heavy-industries firm, he threw himself into talk with the five railway officials.
"When they forge the wheels, did you find out how many newtons per square meter they strike with?"
"Of course, Mr. President."
The officials had already caught on that Professor Kim Moon-hwan was to become president of Cheongsan Heavy Industries, and they adjusted at once.
Ki-jo watched the five men Minister Lee Jong-rim had sent as they talked with the professor. The technical exchange was a pleasure to his ear. From the sound of it, the Railway Bureau officials had met the Japanese engineers in private, drunk with them, and come home with a great many manufacturing secrets. All through the drinking they had plied the engineers with cries of sugoi, sugoi—amazing, amazing—and secrets no one had meant to tell had come pouring out.
Ever hungry for talent, Ki-jo spoke the moment their talk reached a pause.
"If you've said all you need to say, I would like you to enter an employment contract with me."
"An employment contract?"
The division chief's face tightened.
"If we were hired by a private company, we would be in breach of our duty of integrity. A firm supplying rolling-stock parts to the government—the connection to our official duties would be far too direct..."
"That is the case when the thing is put on paper. Make the contract with me by word of mouth."
When Ki-jo said he would pay a consulting fee on the order of ten thousand hwan a month, the five officials nearly jumped out of their skins. It came to four or five times the salaries they drew.
"Even so, if you pay it as wages, the question of tax remains..."
Every one of them wanted the enormous fee, and every one of them was afraid of the trouble that would follow if he took it.
"Set your minds at ease. Didn't I say a consulting fee to the value of ten thousand hwan? I'll pay it in kind."
He meant to pay in briquettes and in Miwon, the bottled seasoning that passed through every kitchen in the country. Both were easy to turn into cash, and the officials' faces brightened. But Ki-jo knew that disposing of ten thousand hwan's worth of Miwon and briquettes every month would be a chore in itself.
"I'll provide only four thousand hwan's worth in Miwon and briquettes. The rest I'll furnish as housing."
"Housing?"
"Yes. Cheongsan Construction has built apartments in Cheongnyangni."
Ki-jo had raised, in Cheongnyangni, the first apartments built in the Republic of Korea since its founding—more than a year ahead of the Jongam Apartments that history, as he had first lived it, would put up in Jongam-dong in 1958.
"Would you care to go and see them?"
"Shall we? I'm curious myself."
Professor Kim Moon-hwan rose with them. President Lee Man-ik had shown him the drawings once, but he had never seen the thing itself. He wanted to know how the Cheongsan apartments felt as space.
It was no more than a ten-minute walk from the station. The moment they stepped into the complex beside the tracks, the visitors caught their breath. Sixteen buildings, two hundred and fifty-six households, broad gaps between the blocks and greenery in plenty—a snug apartment village.
"Well, I'll be... four-story buildings of concrete."
"How many pyeong?"
"Twenty-five."
"Twenty-five pyeong? It'll be a palace."
The officials were elated. Public revival housing of the day ran to nine pyeong, barely three hundred square feet, and the Jongam Apartments, still years from being built, would measure only 17.3—scarcely more than six hundred.
Ki-jo climbed the stairs and unlocked the door of Unit 403 in Building 101.
Inside, they gasped at the living room that had taken the place of a traditional house's wooden maru, and at the standing kitchen set against it. What astonished them most was the flush toilet in the bathroom with its tub.
"The toilet... it's inside the house..."
Every one of them lived in a house whose privy stood out in the yard. Several came from neighborhoods with a communal outhouse and fought a toilet war with their neighbors every morning.
"Have a look at the balcony as well."
Ki-jo led them out. They stared, amazed, at a space that existed a good thirty feet above the ground. A balcony without window frames was neither quite outside nor quite in. For people who grieved a house with no yard, a fourth-floor balcony could at least give them a breath of open air.
The officials asked what the place for setting out sauce crocks was meant for, and whether windows might be fitted to the balcony.
"For the present, it's difficult to make window frames large enough to stand up to the drafts."
"Hm... Couldn't we develop those ourselves?"
Professor Kim Moon-hwan's appetite stirred again.
The officials were spellbound by the look of a modern apartment. The professor, too, seemed taken with a space that climbed straight upward, and he asked about this and that.
"Director Lee, what worries me most is the water. Does it truly reach the fourth floor? The pressure can't amount to much."
From the balcony, Ki-jo pointed to a structure standing at the center of the complex. The visitors gazed in open wonder at the thing, shaped like a flying saucer.
"Ha! So that was the water tower!"
At Kim Moon-hwan's words, Ki-jo nodded.
"Live here, and when you retire from the civil service, register the title and take it with you. For as long as you reside in it, I won't collect rent. I'll keep these units as company holdings and won't put them up for sale."
The youngest of the officials—newly married, sharing a single room in a hillside slum with his wife, lining up every morning before the village latrine, hauling drinking water home on a shoulder yoke—swallowed hard. He wanted to resign on the spot and take the apartment. The mere thought of seating his constipated wife on the flush toilet of a clean bathroom made his chest feel ready to burst. His greatest worry in life was his wife doing her business every morning to the grumbling of the people waiting outside the privy.
Ki-jo handed out the keys one by one, from Unit 103 through Unit 403.
"Do let your families have a look at the apartments as well."
The newlywed whose wife suffered from constipation let out a long breath.
"Hah..."
"What's the matter, Clerk Kim?"
The division chief stared straight at him.
"Ah... it's nothing..."
He wanted to resign this very day, take the apartment, join Cheongsan Heavy Industries, and draw twice the salary.
Ki-jo passed out copies of the contract. The agreement was oral, but they were to look the terms over. Written into the document, besides, was what Cheongsan promised them on the day they retired from the civil service.
Watching him, Professor Kim Moon-hwan thought to himself, There goes Director Lee again, adochida—scooping up every last talent in the room. Heh heh...
"Professor? Let's head back for today."
Kim Moon-hwan caught his meaning.
"Ah, right—of course. I ought to go and tell the staff I'm stepping down."
Ki-jo and Kim Moon-hwan left the officials in Unit 403 of Building 101 and went on their way.
Once they were alone, the four railway officials gathered in the living room, put their heads together, and began a council of their own.
"Chief. I'm resigning from the civil service."
Clerk Kim, the one who had sighed, declared it outright.
"Decide carefully... I won't pretend the same thought didn't cross my own mind. But you aren't a man on your own anymore."
"The money is the money, Chief. But I want to live here..."
At that one sentence a solemn hush fell over them. They agreed with him a hundred times over.
The other two officials quietly let it be known that they, too, meant to resign. One had four children, and said that on his present pay he could barely put meals on the table for a family of six. The other, as eldest son, had an only sister to marry off; he wanted to give her the house they lived in now and move here himself.
"Now, now... Look at the contract. It says they'll let us live here even if we don't resign, doesn't it?"
Even as he said it, the division chief felt the urge to resign himself.
In the end, strong in his sense of duty, Chief Lee made the decision as their senior.
"All right. Resign, the lot of you. The minister said he trusts President Lee Ki-jo."
"And you, Chief...?"
"What happens if I resign as well? Someone has to stay behind in the Railway Division and look after you. If the minister steps down, this whole venture could be swept away downstream. Or it might simply fail. Should the thing go awry, I'll step forward and have you called back in."
"Chief!"
"Thank you, Chief!"
The eyes of the three officials burned.
In the end they settled it so that Chief Lee would live on the fourth floor, and the rest would descend by rank until the youngest, Clerk Kim, took the first.
"The only way we survive is by turning out proper wheels and springs. Do that, and even if we can never go back to the Ministry of Transportation, we'll be able to make our living selling them."
"Chief! We'll stake our lives on it!"
The four men pledged themselves as one.
Ki-jo and Kim Moon-hwan did not go straight back to the company. They walked the length of the apartment complex.
Others might be perfectly satisfied, but to the eyes of Ki-jo, who had already lived the years to come, too many corners still fell short. Paint was expensive, and so the outer walls had gone unpainted. They were using briquette boilers, which meant a chute had to be built for the ash, and the spent briquettes dropped down it. At the outlet on the first floor, people would have to scrape together the crumbled cinders that fell and haul them away. The earliest apartments left a great deal to be desired.
Kim Moon-hwan called to him as he stood thinking.
"Hey. Director Lee."
"Yes, Professor."
"That Minister Lee Jong-rim—he strikes me as a rather fine man."
"I think so myself. If only the men above them were clean, I suspect we'd see a great many more officials as able and upright as these."
Kim Moon-hwan nodded, and thought, If there were more men like you, this world would be a better place...
He remembered the first time he had met Ki-jo, three years before. A mere youth rose in his mind, come to him with Western pastries and bars of gold bullion, asking that he build a brick kiln. With that memory came another: himself, sneering that the Republic of Korea had no hope left in it.
But now it was different. He wanted to make train wheels and springs and, should the chance arise, locomotives as well. A future drew itself before him of its own accord—Korean-built engines ranging the eight provinces, people boarding trains and setting out to travel.
It was a change that had come over him after meeting Ki-jo. Before he quite knew it, the hope that Korea, too, might develop had taken root in his heart.
"Thank you, my friend."
"Yes?"
Ki-jo gazed at Kim Moon-hwan, searching his face.
"What for..."
"Never mind why. Thank you. Just—thank you."
Professor Kim Moon-hwan was smiling at him. The smile was faint as a daytime moon hung in the sky, but as the moments passed, it brightened.