The Western Princess
After he put the plain of Jeongok-ri to the torch, Kijo went quiet for a time. Now and then he turned up at the Cheongsan brick-factory site, took a discreet look at how the work was coming, and slipped away again — and once he was gone, no one knew where he went. This day was no different.
When Kim Seogwang, Youngbae's father, came to the house looking for him, Kijo was not there.
"Chief didn't say where he was headed when he left, did he?"
"This morning he said he was going out to look at the construction site, and then he left," Sunrye said.
"Ah, then he'll be at Cheongsan. All right. Heh heh heh."
Kim Seogwang turned away from Sunrye, and the laugh dropped dead off his face. He had just come from Cheongsan. Kijo had not been there.
Something's shifted in the Chief...
Seogwang struck out again and walked hard for Cheongsan. At the site he looked for Jang Ma-ryang first, and the moment he caught sight of him he beckoned him over.
"What is it?" Ma-ryang asked, blunt as ever. The two of them did not get along.
"I... Ma-ryang..."
"Spit it out. I don't have time to stand around jawing with you."
"Let's step over there and talk."
Seogwang caught him by the arm and hauled him off to where the building materials were stacked, and only then did he get it out.
"The Chief... these days he's been going in and out of a Western princess house..."
"Don't talk nonsense! You son of a bitch!"
Ma-ryang grabbed Seogwang by the collar and hoisted him clean off the ground. It was exactly the reaction Seogwang had expected. He didn't so much as blink.
"I saw him. With my own eyes..."
"What? And what were you doing there? A man with a wife and a kid, at a Western princess house..."
"Me? Our boy Youngbae said he wanted chocolate, so I went."
"And the likes of you have money for chocolate?"
"I don't. When the GIs go by, I go out and yell 'give me chocolate.'"
Ma-ryang looked him over as if he were a sorry sight.
"You tell that to anybody besides me?"
"You're the first, Ma-ryang."
Ma-ryang set him back down on the ground.
"You sure? You didn't mix him up with somebody else?"
"Is there another man around here built like the Chief, walking around in a new suit and a fedora?"
"He'll have had his reasons. You keep that mouth shut, wherever you go. If you don't, you can forget about ever living like a man again."
"Ha... You think I came here without knowing you'd do this to me? I said it ready to take a beating from you, because I'm honestly worried about the Chief... you damn idiot."
Once it struck Ma-ryang that there was sense in the words, his voice softened a little.
"How many times did you see him?"
"Three."
"Three?"
"Yeah. Truth is, I thought the same as you — I must have seen wrong — so I staked out that Western princess alley a few times, like a detective."
"Slack season, nothing to do, so you're living high... playing policeman."
"Don't get smart with me. You're the Chief's brother-in-law. Has he been having a hard time lately? You really didn't feel it?"
"He's fine."
"Ever since he burned the Jeongok-ri fields clean off, he's seemed strange to me. He's not a man to go pulling something that wild..."
"Quit the idle talk and wait here a minute."
Ma-ryang stepped out from behind the stack of materials and went looking for Lee Bongok. He told her he would be away for a little while and asked her to stand in for him. These days Bongok was less the leader of the women's crew than a deputy foreman set directly under Jang Ma-ryang. When he came back, he was wheeling a bicycle.
"Whoa — what's the bicycle? You buy it?"
"It's the professor's. Borrowed it for a bit."
"Oh... and where are you riding that?"
"Get on the back. You're going to show me the place you saw the Chief."
The two of them rode for Dongducheon. The U.S. 7th Division was garrisoned there, and right in front of the post a camptown was taking shape. Shops of every kind were fattening on the dollars the soldiers scattered — portrait studios, uniform-mending shops, antique dealers, and, at the end of the row, the house Seogwang had meant, where the Western princesses took the GIs' money. Ma-ryang never once let up on the pedals, and he made Dongducheon in an hour. Seogwang had never been on a motorcycle in his life, but he figured it would feel about like this, with Ma-ryang driving the bicycle.
At the main gate of the 7th Division, Ma-ryang asked,
"Where's this Western princess house?"
"Follow me."
Ma-ryang followed him into the alleys of the camptown. As he walked the bicycle through, the girls threw him looks and called out for his trade. He told himself there was no way Kijo would be coming and going in a place like this. But at the very house where Seogwang stopped, Kijo stepped out and came face to face with them.
"Brother!"
"Brother-in-law!"
Kijo greeted Ma-ryang with open warmth.
"How did you end up here?"
"Ah, well..."
For a moment Ma-ryang had no answer ready, so he seized on Seogwang, the easier man to blame.
"Kim Seogwang said he just had to come here, so I brought him over on the bicycle."
"And the work at the site?"
"I left it with Bongok."
"Good. She's worth trusting with it. But Brother Kim — why did you want to come here?"
"M-me? Ah, I... I wanted Ma-ryang to give me a ride on the bicycle, so I just said we ought to come out this way."
"Is that so? It does me good to see you and Ma-ryang getting friendly. Hahaha."
Whether the man was simply shameless, or whether there was nothing at all weighing on his conscience, he looked so artlessly innocent that Ma-ryang and Seogwang laughed in spite of themselves.
"Brother, couldn't the two of us step over there and have a word?"
"Why? Say it here, with Brother Kim present."
"Well, the thing is..."
"You want to ask why I came here, don't you?"
"Well... something like that."
While Ma-ryang got the admission out with some difficulty, Seogwang was nodding like mad.
"It's nothing. I came to see if I could make a little money."
"What?"
That Kijo had come to a Western princess house to make money shocked Seogwang so hard he couldn't get his mouth closed.
"C-Chief. What can a man even do here, if he wants to make money?"
At the question Kijo smiled, drew a notebook from the inner pocket of his suit, and held it out.
"Open it, Brother Kim."
Kim Seogwang opened the notebook. American names, ranks, and duty assignments were set down in a hand as fine as sesame seed.
"What is this?"
"Come again?"
Kijo took the notebook back from the bewildered Seogwang.
"Have you all had lunch?"
"No. Not yet... we've been running around looking for you, Chief..."
"I'm all right."
Kijo nodded at the two opposite answers.
"Then the four of us will eat together."
"Four?"
Seogwang started. A moment later a man came down the Western princess alley with a quiver on his back and a bow in his hand.
"Hansu?"
"Brother Seogwang!"
Shim Hansu broke into a run, bright with pleasure at the sight of him.
"Little brother! What are you doing here?"
"And what brings you brothers here?" Shim Hansu looked from Ma-ryang to Seogwang, smiled brightly, and turned the question back on them. His face, too, was all innocence.
"We're all here, so let's go. Follow me."
Kijo led the way with the three of them behind him. The place he took them was a shabby little restaurant tucked into a corner of the camptown.
"What do they sell here? That broth smells awfully strange," Seogwang asked, working his nose.
"Try it first, Brother Kim. The stew here is something special."
Kijo had eaten it plenty of times already, but he wanted the three men to taste it for themselves. The stew they had ordered came out, and with it a bowl of rice apiece. In place of kimchi, a plate of salty pickled radish was set on the table.
"Strange kind of kimchi stew..."
Seogwang lifted a spoonful of the broth to his mouth, and his eyes went perfectly round.
"Oh...?"
An odd little murmur of pleasure escaped him.
"It's good, isn't it, Brother Kim?"
"Yes, Chief. How do I put it? It's not pork kimchi stew, and it's not spicy beef soup either. There's a curious taste to it."
At that, Shim Hansu took a spoonful of the broth himself.
"Mm... I know. This is chicken and pork and beef, all mixed in together."
"You've got the right of it, Hansu. Mixed — that's exactly what it is."
Ma-ryang took a mouthful of the broth as well, and nodded.
"And you, brother-in-law? What do you think?"
"Ha... this is a taste I never came across, not even in China."
Kijo let out a hearty laugh.
"Eat first. We'll talk after."
At his word the three men fell to, devouring without a thought for anything else the rough ancestor of the dish a later age would call army-base stew. Kijo watched them with quiet satisfaction, and in his head he set in order what he had gathered on the American soldiers at the Western princess house.
Not many of them above NCO, let alone anything like officers. Even so... there might be a GI in this lot who can be of use.
He lifted his own spoon, worked broth and the solid bits into his rice, and put it in his mouth.
Still short on MSG. If I'm going to run a franchise, I'll have to get my hands on MSG one way or another.
Food made to suit a modern palate, he figured, would turn a profit. He could not simply sit and wait for a fortune to drop out of the sky. The parcel he had sent to America was a lottery ticket, for the time being. In the world as it stood, he had to find a way to raise money.
The place in northern Gyeonggi where the most money moved — and where dollars changed hands in earnest — was Dongducheon. A full American division sat there year-round, and an economy that lived off the GIs turned at a brisk pace. Was it the seventies, or the eighties? In the years when Dongducheon was booming, word went around that the teachers in the local schools took their under-the-table gifts in dollars. Some even said an envelope in Dongducheon ran fatter than one in Gangnam.
With almost nothing to be made in Yeoncheon, and with gold bars melting away one after another into the building of the brick factory, Dongducheon was where Kijo had turned his eyes. He had to catch hold of some chance there and make real money.
Before his regression, when he was choosing a foothold from which to get through the 1950s, he had considered Dongducheon too. It had not seemed a good place to raise children, and he had given it up. What a man brushed past on those streets were Western princesses, and decent GIs and rotten ones were jumbled together with no sorting between them. A beauty like Sunrye could hardly walk there without soldiers pawing at her and making sport of her. That had sat wrong with him, and he had struck Dongducheon from his choices.
Seeing Ma-ryang empty a whole bowl of rice in no time, Kijo called out to the owner.
"Five more bowls of rice over here!"
Two of them were Ma-ryang's share. The rest were for the three men.