A Busy February
The Cheongsan Transport Garage, Cheongnyangni.
Seo-gwang and Ma-ryang were inspecting the ranks of four hundred drivers drawn up before a hundred buses. The men stood rigid at attention, uniforms buttoned, caps set square.
"All faces I know."
At that the drivers smiled. Every one of them had come through the driving school in Jegi-dong. They were Seo-gwang's pupils, and Ma-ryang's.
Once they had looked over the drivers' dress, the two of them turned to the conductresses standing in their own line. The women wore blue work uniforms and pillbox caps. All two hundred of them took fright at Ma-ryang, a man over six foot three with shoulders twice the breadth of an ordinary man's. He passed along their rank without a word. Seo-gwang had no scolding for them either, and went by with a smile.
When he had made sure all six hundred employees were ready to receive Gijo, Seo-gwang cleared his throat and raised his voice.
"The president will be here any minute. If you've got something to bring up, say it now! I'll carry it to him!"
One of the drivers put his hand up.
"Hey! You there. Speak up."
"I've got a complaint about the shift rotation!"
Ma-ryang drew a sharp, displeased breath and made to step forward, but Seo-gwang checked him. He pointed at the man who had spoken.
"Jeong-man, isn't it? You are Jeong-man?"
"Yes, Director!"
Seo-gwang had a fair idea why Oh Jeong-man was unhappy. The schedule Gijo had drawn up was a four-crew, three-shift rotation. Four crews in all: while two of them worked eight-hour turns, one by day and one by night, a third stood by in reserve and the fourth took the day off. The load was far lighter than at the other bus companies, but the man was plainly thinking of his pay. Better to stretch the hours, even if it wore him down, so long as it meant more money.
"Jeong-man."
"Yes, Director."
"You pack a bus full—how many people do you figure you're carrying?"
"Fifty or sixty, maybe?"
"Right. You're answerable for fifty or sixty lives. And if you drive yourself too hard just to earn a little more and land in a wreck, then what?"
"Well, that's..."
"Once there's an accident, what can anyone do? Your life is ruined, and the passengers' lives along with it."
Seo-gwang said it gently, almost coaxing. Ma-ryang, sour-faced until then, spoke anyway.
"Want out of this company, say so whenever you like. Drivers begging to get in here are thick on the ground. Go where they're paying more."
That one remark swept the mood clean.
"Nothing else? Don't wait to be asked once the president's standing in front of you. Say it now. He's run off his feet these days."
At that, one of the conductresses raised her hand, cautious.
"Hey, you. Go on. What's your name?"
"Song Jeong-hee, Director."
"All right, Jeong-hee. If you've got something to say, say it."
"We conductors are on two shifts, but I heard more people are coming in soon. Is that true?"
"That's right. More youngsters who've learned their arithmetic, so I'm told."
"Yes..."
Song Jeong-hee was fifteen. She answered with her head bowed.
The conductresses were no different from the drivers. They were afraid a four-crew, three-shift schedule would thin out their earnings, and Seo-gwang knew that feeling well—the wish, however hard the work, to spend one's own body and send a little more home to a household barely getting by. But what was to be done? For the safety of the workers and the passengers alike, Gijo meant to hold to four crews and three shifts no matter what.
A short while later, Gijo's jeep turned into the garage. As he stepped down, the drivers' representative shouted.
"All hands, attention! Salute the President!"
"Cheongsan!"
Six hundred employees saluted as one, and Gijo checked, caught off guard. He returned the greeting with a nod, then spoke quietly to Seo-gwang, who had come up beside him.
"Director Kim, from now on have them greet me with a nod. I don't care for this sort of thing."
"Yes, sir. The staff took it on themselves. I think the uniforms brought it on."
"I see."
Gijo climbed the platform in the garage yard. Cheongsan's buses were to begin running on the twenty-eighth of February, and a week remained. These days he had not a moment to call his own. After this stop at Cheongsan Transport he had to look in at Cheongsan Heavy Industries and the train wheels they were forging, and then he still had the apartment complex to visit. Wealthy entertainers were moving in, and they had come forward offering to pay out of their own pockets to have the outer walls painted. The other residents had agreed. He was due to meet a man from Samhwa Paint, the only paint maker in the country, right there at the complex. With a day that full, he kept what he had to say as short as it could be.
"Thank you all for preparing so thoroughly. From here on, I ask you to do your very best to carry our passengers safely and in comfort."
That was all of it. The employees, expecting more, kept their eyes on him.
"That is everything I wanted to say."
One or two people began to clap, caught the looks around them, and let it die.
Thinking he might have been too spare, Gijo spoke again.
"If there is anything you wish to say to me, or any suggestion you would like to make, please tell me now."
No one stepped forward. Seo-gwang came close and murmured at his ear.
"I already asked. They seemed unhappy about the shifts, so I explained the reason."
"You did?"
Gijo nodded. He had expected as much himself—that however hard the work sat on their bodies, they would still want to earn more.
"I see. Then I ought to explain a little further."
"I put it so they'd understand. You're busy. Best keep to your schedule."
"No. I'll explain, and then I'll go."
He let his gaze travel once along the ranks.
"You're worried you won't earn enough on four crews and three shifts. Isn't that it?"
No one found it easy to answer. A few of the conductresses nodded without a word.
"Don't trouble yourselves too much. You won't take home less than you would at another company."
He told them his plan. Drivers and conductresses would draw a base wage, but unlike the other firms, he meant to pay a bonus every quarter, scaled to the number of passengers the company as a whole carried. He had his reasons. There were too few buses and too many riders, and the staff's workload and their stress would only climb. The way to soothe that, he believed, was to let them feel that the more people boarded, the more their own pay would grow.
The monthly wage he had set for the drivers was already high. The difficulty was what the conductresses earned. From what he had learned, a conductress elsewhere took home no more than a hundredth of her company's receipts. The average fare was ten hwan. Pack a bus tight with a hundred passengers and run it as you liked, and still not five hwan ever trickled down to the woman taking the fares. He had arranged matters so a conductress would receive a fiftieth of the company's revenue—twice what the other bus lines paid. Even on four crews and three shifts, base pay together with the bonus would come to more than she could make anywhere else.
His aim in the bus business was not to make money. It was to keep adding buses, to offer a decent service, and to sustain a company whose own people were satisfied with their lot. So long as the man at the top was not greedy, a firm could run without losses and still be a decent place to work.
When he had laid it all out, applause broke from them of its own accord.
"Yeah!"
"A good deal of that worry has lifted, hasn't it?"
"Yes!"
The bright voices of men and women mingled together, and it pleased him.
"I'm afraid I'm busy, so I'll be going. My apologies."
Before he could even step down from the platform, a great voice rang out.
"All hands, attention! Salute the President!"
"Cheongsan!"
Aigoo...
He was not used to a soldier's salute, and it shamed him. He climbed into the jeep, started the engine, and drove out of the garage, and the employees went on clapping until he was gone.
Gijo drove the jeep in under the sign of Cheongsan Heavy Industries. This time a tremendous din of beaten iron came out to meet him. He went to where a great press was hammering heated steel and clapped Professor Kim Moon-hwan on the back where he stood watching the work.
"Ah! Representative Lee, you're here!"
The professor dug a wad of cotton from his pocket, tore a piece loose, and held it out. Gijo plugged his ears and watched a train wheel being forged.
Inside the plant it was hot with the heat the molten iron threw off. A mass of steel glowing orange lost its light blow by blow under the press, and as the glow died it took the shape of a wheel. When the wheel was finished, several men closed in with enormous tongs and hauled it clear.
While it cooled, Professor Kim led him outside.
"Have you tested the wheels you've made?" Gijo asked, lifting his voice. The din had left his ears ringing.
"We'll be into the testing soon! The Minister says he'll set aside a stretch of track where we can try our wheels!"
Minister Lee Jong-rim had agreed to open a section of the Gyeongwon Line so the Korean-made wheels could be put to the test. They would be mounted on freight cars running back and forth between Cheongnyangni and Yeoncheon: sand loaded into the last car of a train, the domestic wheels fitted, and their endurance watched. It was the crudest possible way to test a wheel's strength, but they had no instruments to measure with, and there was nothing else for it. The Minister seemed determined, even if he had to strain to manage it, to let them run the trial before the pressure on him to resign grew any heavier.
"And the springs?"
"For now we're running them alongside the Japanese ones. A set takes two springs—Japanese on one side, ours on the other. We'll see how they do in service, and if they hold up, we'll try both sides with nothing but our own."
One look at Kim Moon-hwan's face told Gijo the work was going smoothly. After several years side by side, the face was enough.
"Professor, are you pleased with the apartment?"
"Pleased? Nothing but."
To cut his commute, the professor had moved into the Cheongnyangni apartments himself.
"One complaint, though, if I'm honest. Word's gotten round that ours is the entertainers' apartment, and I don't care for it. Fans come swarming in day and night."
Flowers and gifts, he said, kept turning up at his door. An entertainer lived next door, and the fans muddled the numbers and left their offerings in front of his.
"At first I thought they'd come for me, so of course I tore the box open. I was sure you'd sent it. Ha ha ha!"
"I'll have a mail room built in front of the main gate, so they can leave the gifts there and go."
"Now that is a fine idea!"
Neither of them thought to pull the cotton from his ears. They talked and laughed at a bellow.
Only after he had left the plant and was driving toward the Cheongnyangni apartments did Gijo realize his ears were still stopped, and he tugged the cotton free.
President Lee Man-ik was there to greet him.
"You have arrived, sir."
"I'm a little late, aren't I?"
"Not at all. We are calculating how much paint the apartments will take. A man from Samhwa Paint is here as well."
Gijo shook hands with the Samhwa man at Lee Man-ik's side. Samhwa Paint was the only paint manufacturer in the country.
"We're going to be building a great many apartments. We'll be buying paint in quantity, so let's talk price."
Holding the monopoly on domestic paint, Samhwa sold it more cheaply than the imported kind. The quality was sound enough that they were already supplying the American bases.
"How large an order did you have in mind, sir?"
"Cheongsan Construction is doing work for the U.S. Army as well, and we'll be painting the Hangang Footbridge besides, so the volume will be considerable."
He added that Cheongsan Freight, Cheongsan Transport, and Cheongsan Shipping would all be using paint too.
"Understood. I'll take it up with our president."
Gijo was walking the apartments with them when he halted before a playground where children were at play. In the complex there were concrete slides cast in the shapes of animals, a small castle, and seesaws of wood. Watching the children put it all to happy use, he found himself smiling.
"President Lee, since we're painting the place, have them paint the elephant and the giraffe as well."
Lee Man-ik went blank for a moment, then saw the elephant-shaped slide the children were climbing and laughed.
"Understood, sir."
The man from Samhwa laughed too, looking at Gijo.
"We'll show you how to mix the color of an elephant, and of a giraffe."
"Please tell your president he'll have a regular customer from now on. And tell him that if he brings the price of the paint down, we'll run his advertisements on the broadcasting station free of charge."
"Understood."
Every venture was going smoothly. But once the business was finished and he turned back toward the broadcasting station, an uneasy feeling found him all at once.
Nearly a month had passed since James Hausman took up his post in Korea, and Gijo thought the time had come when Hausman would send for him. Frank had once put funds in his hands, and Hausman would be curious what sort of Korean had taken American money. Against that day, Gijo had already set aside once more the sum he had spent putting up the Miwon factory, ready for Hausman to demand it returned. He knew very well what kind of man James Hausman was.