The Bus Business
Once the drive to produce railway parts at home was moving smoothly, Minister Lee Jong-rim hurried the bus business along as well. Ki-jo had meant to begin that venture in earnest only in the 1960s, gathering buses at an unhurried pace, but the minister's impatience pushed him to increase the number of used buses brought in from the United States. He had his own guess as to why Lee Jong-rim was in such a rush.
As Ki-jo knew it, the minister's term ran only until June 9, 1957. When the man—counted the most uncontroversial minister in Syngman Rhee's cabinet—handed in his resignation, every sort of rumor ran wild in the streets. The most persuasive blamed him for a large-scale theft of railway supplies. Another held that the cause was rice.
The Ministry of Transportation administered vast rice granaries tied to the railways, and the story went that Minister Lee Jong-rim had resigned after refusing an order to turn their management over to private hands. If that account was true, he was even now under heavy pressure to surrender the granaries. He would know that resisting meant he could not keep his post, and so, Ki-jo thought, he was rushing the work while he still held it.
In return for pressing the bus venture forward, Minister Lee Jong-rim promised to license whatever routes Ki-jo wanted. For a transport operator, the route was everything. To be given the right to choose one was an extraordinary favor. An ordinary operator, handed that choice, would have skimmed off only the profitable cream. Ki-jo did not.
In laying out the lines, he drew on the history of Seoul he already carried in his head. In the 1950s, Jongno District, the heart of the city, had the largest population. By the 1960s, Dongdaemun District's numbers would explode. As land in central Jongno grew expensive, people crowded into neighboring Dongdaemun, close to Jongno and comparatively cheap. More and more ordinary folk would live there and commute into Jongno for work.
On the map he had prepared, Ki-jo drove in the first pin, threaded with red string, at Cheongnyangni, and the second at Jongno. The red line left Cheongnyangni and cut straight through Jongno. The third pin went into Yeongdeungpo, and the string ran on through Yongsan, crossed the Hangang Footbridge, and continued to Yeongdeungpo.
Guro, adjoining Yeongdeungpo, would see full-scale development in the 1960s. Once the Guro Industrial Complex rose, people coming up to Seoul in search of work would make for Yeongdeungpo and Guro. Pin by pin, Ki-jo carried the string all the way to Incheon. Cheongnyangni, Jongno, Yongsan, Yeongdeungpo, Guro, Bucheon, Bupyeong, Incheon—the line he had strung matched, in the end, what would become Subway Line 1. This was the first trunk route he had planned.
Next he spun branch lines off that trunk in strings of different colors. He invented a hypothetical Mr. Kim living in Cheongnyangni and racked his brains so the man could reach Seoul's major districts while changing buses as seldom as possible. Days of deliberation left their mark all over the map. Threads of every color filled it like a spider's web.
The day the routes were finished, Ki-jo called the Painter to the president's office. Now an art director at a broadcasting station, the Painter studied the tangle of string for a long while before he spoke.
"It looks exactly like a bunch of grapes."
"Doesn't it? I'd like you to simplify it, so the civil servants can understand it easily."
"Hmm... Each line is a bus route. If you want it grasped at a glance, those winding, complicated curves have to be pulled out into simple straight lines."
"Exactly."
"Then I'll try drawing it like this."
The Painter drew a single vertical line on the paper. That was the trunk. Then he joined the branches to that vertical axis as horizontal strokes, and at once the tangled twenty-five routes fell into clean order. Ki-jo had been about to ask for precisely that drawing. The Painter had seen through to the essence and done it unprompted, and the result startled him.
"I'd like you to make the charts the way you used to, as well."
"One large chart and several small ones, you mean?"
"That's right."
"You wouldn't happen to need sketches of the bus stops, would you?"
"Draw them in two kinds. Yellow signs for the transfer stops where the trunk meets the branches, and blue for the ordinary stops."
"Understood."
He and the Painter had worked together for years, and they still moved in easy step.
A few days later, when the charts were finished, Ki-jo went to see Minister Lee Jong-rim. Briefed from the charts, the minister—long accustomed to the complexities of running a railway—understood at once. Thoroughly pleased, he said,
"A splendid route strategy. The trunk line you've conceived, President Lee, is really the sort of role the railway itself ought to be playing."
Minister Lee Jong-rim could not have known that Subway Line 1 would open twenty years later, but he recognized the worth of the trunk.
"Still, with the hundred buses Cheongsan has on hand, it looks impossible to carry out."
"We can add fifty buses a month."
"Is that so? Then... in five years you could be operating three thousand."
"Yes. At the start the gaps between buses will be absurdly long, but we can close them little by little."
"Even so, three thousand is too few to be the feet of a million and a half citizens of Seoul. You'd do better to cut the branches off the trunk to five or fewer. That alone would sharply reduce the inconvenience."
He was right. Ki-jo had never meant to run the whole network all at once. He had only wanted to set out the large blueprint first.
"And I like these stop sketches very much. Distinguishing the transfer stops from the ordinary ones by color is a good idea."
"Thank you."
"Could you turn those charts over to our people at the Ministry? They're worth consulting for a long-term development strategy."
"Of course, Minister."
Together with Lee Jong-rim, Ki-jo settled the main line from Cheongnyangni to Yeongdeungpo and agreed to divide Seoul into four zones for the branches. With the routes in hand, he moved at once to hire. At the driving school Ma-ryang and Seo-gwang had opened in Jegi-dong, a hundred drivers were trained every month, so the supply of drivers was no worry. The problem was the bus conductors.
Instead of the official title, Ki-jo ran the recruitment notice under the name bus girl. To a man who had lived in the future, calling a woman conductor a bus girl felt a little awkward, but in truth the term had been in common use since the 1920s. Until Liberation, bus girl had stood on the same level as stewardess. In the 1950s, conducting was work both men and women could do. Public complaints about the men ran so high, though, that in 1959 the Ministry of Transportation would go so far as to order all six hundred of Seoul's buses to switch to women conductors.
Fare-dodgers were plentiful in those years, and the men who dealt with them tended to be rough, even violent. They were hard on the young mother who begged them not to charge for her child, on the old man who asked to have his fare reduced, and on the student caught riding after he had doctored a booklet of ten bus coupons into eleven. The male conductors were not, of course, in the wrong. It was only that everyone was struggling to live and hoped for a little leeway, and when the men came down too strictly, public feeling turned against them. Ki-jo himself had thought it too much—watching a conductor trade curses with male passengers and then throw a punch, or seeing a student seized by some foul-tempered man and flung bodily off the bus. Since 1959 would require women conductors anyway, he decided to recruit only women from the start.
Four days after the notice went up, he was astonished to find fifteen hundred bus-girl applicants gathered at Gyodong Elementary School, the interview site.
"Good heavens..."
Dae-ik let out a sigh of his own as he looked over the applicants packing the schoolyard. For a young woman, work meant a maid's place or menial labor and nothing else. Women factory workers would not appear until the 1960s. Perhaps because of that, the crowd was not only women in their twenties; here and there were others in their thirties and forties.
It pained him, but Ki-jo decided first to send home every girl under fourteen. The laws of the 1950s placed no particular restriction on employing minors, yet by his own measure anyone under fourteen was far too young. The moment he made that decision, crying broke out here and there. Most of the weeping children were girls their families meant to send out as maids. They had come hoping that if they became bus girls and earned money, they could go on living at home with their parents. Hyun-kyung's face was grim as she turned the young girls back out through the school gate. There was nothing else to be done.
Ki-jo's target was women around eighteen. Those in domestic service often had to leave the households where they worked at about that age. There were many reasons, but the greatest, from the employer's side, was that a young girl was easier to handle. There was also the fear that a grown woman in the house might become entangled with the men of the family. Turned out with nothing to their names, those grown maids were driven into the street. With little schooling and no trade, unable to find work easily, too many of them drifted, pitifully, into the pleasure quarters or the camptowns around the bases.
According to figures Ki-jo had learned while studying Dongducheon before his return, a quarter of the women who sold sex to American soldiers in the 1960s had once been maids. Not because they liked living by selling their bodies, but because life was so hard that even that was a way to eat.
Taking women from fourteen to eighteen as his principal hires, Ki-jo put them through written and practical tests. The written test was simple arithmetic. Even in the chaos of the morning and evening rush, fares had to be reckoned quickly, so a conductor had to manage basic sums. More than half failed.
The next test was a dead hang from the horizontal bar. Often enough a conductor had to cling to a bus packed full and hold on by the strength of her arms, so the test was essential. Hire someone with weak arms, and one mistake could cost her life.
Every girl who gripped the bar was desperate. Teeth clenched, they fought not to let the cold iron slip from their hands. Faces flushed as if they might burst, arms shuddering, they twisted their whole bodies to hang on even one second longer than the rest. The girls who dropped first stared at the sky with the empty eyes of people who had lost the world, or else broke down and wept where they stood. Hyun-kyung and Han-su comforted them and led them out of the testing ground.
In the end, a hundred passed through a competition of fifteen to one. Sixty-four were in their teens, twenty-eight in their twenties, and eight in their thirties. Dae-ik issued certificates of acceptance on the spot and told them to be examined for tuberculosis at a hospital designated by Cheongsan Transport. Ki-jo had decided to check for infection as well. There were simply too many tuberculosis patients, and the health of the riders was at stake. Dae-ik also told the hundred chosen as alternates that if a successful candidate's place opened, they would be contacted in numbered order.
The three-hour hiring exam ended, the applicants departed, and the schoolyard stood empty. Ki-jo, Han-su, Hyun-kyung, and Dae-ik sat blankly at one side of it.
"Chief, we've hired people, and yet I feel hollow."
Dae-ik said it looking at the ground. Hyun-kyung and Han-su sat with the same drained expressions. Ki-jo thought for a moment, then spoke.
"Let's hire all the alternates for now. And we'll hold another exam in a month."
At his words, three pairs of eyes went wide.
"We only have a hundred buses. Hiring any more people won't..."
Dae-ik's voice trailed off.
"This country has something called the Labor Standards Act. Keep that law, and we're fine."
"The Labor Standards Act?"
All three looked as if they had never heard there was such a law. Korea already had one, enacted in 1953.
"It requires working hours of seven a day and forty-two a week. The buses run more than fourteen hours a day, so we can employ two hundred."
"Then we'd have to cut the wages in half..."
"I hesitated over that myself and nearly let it go. But seeing them today, I think there are girls who would want to study even if they earned only a little."
The children who had failed the arithmetic rose in his mind. He wanted to open a path for those girls who, never having been taught, could not manage simple sums—to study at school, and after two o'clock to earn money working as conductors.
"And the buses will be increasing by fifty a month anyway. Wouldn't it be better to hire ahead? We'll set the arithmetic aside for later. Test their stamina first, teach them the sums, and examine them after that."
"Chief, let me teach the girls."
Hyun-kyung, who had majored in mathematics education at university, stepped forward.
"It hurt me too, seeing children who couldn't even read numbers. If I open a night school and teach them, I think they'll improve quickly."
"You'd do that? If you're willing, Hyun-kyung, I'll back you."
"Thank you, Chief!"
Hyun-kyung's face, gloomy all this while, brightened.
"Manager Seong, put out another recruitment notice. Hyun-kyung, you prepare the night school..."
"I'll teach them self-defense!"
Han-su cut in.
"Self-defense?"
"Yes. How to snap the fingers of some man who can't keep his hands to himself on the bus, and where to hit so a grown man can't move."
"That's good."
The four of them, drained of spirit a moment before, found their energy again.
"Then I suppose it's my turn to step up."
At Ki-jo's words, the others wondered what he meant to do.
"When I visited the Cheil Wool mill in Daegu, I envied the dormitory there. We ought to build one for the women conductors. That way we can hire people from the provinces as well."
"That's truly wonderful, Chief!"
Hyun-kyung seized his hand and broke into a wide smile. Ki-jo gently eased his hand free and looked at Han-su. Han-su did not seem to mind that his sweetheart had taken Ki-jo's hand. He was simply grinning from ear to ear.
"Well then, let's head back and each get ready for our work."
At his word they all rose and walked toward the gate of Gyodong Elementary School. The sun was sinking in the west, and the four shadows it cast stretched far longer than the people who made them.