Goodbye, 1958
December 31, the last day of 1958.
Kijo woke in the small hours and lay watching the three children asleep in the inner room. Beside Yeongsu, who would turn eleven any day now, three-year-old Yeongeun slept; Yeongjun, not yet three months in the world, slept as if the world had nothing to do with him. Yeongsu, born in '49. Yeongeun in '56. Yeongjun in '58...
He tried to picture the years they would have to live through. When Yeongsu turns twenty it'll be 1968. What was it that happened then...? He reached back into the memory of his previous life. Nineteen sixty-eight had been a year when the young rose up all over the world, and students of Yeongsu's age had lifted their voices against the societies that raised them. In America the war in Vietnam reached its bitterest pitch; antiwar protests never let up, the assassinations of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy threw the country into chaos, and the hippies multiplied. In France, students sick of Charles de Gaulle's long reign occupied Paris and poured into the streets in massive, violent demonstrations. Japan caught the same fever from France; student struggle flared, and radical groups such as Zenkyoto, the All-Campus Joint Struggle League, were born. In China the Cultural Revolution hit its peak, and young people turned Red Guards smashed the nation's history and culture and refused to learn.
Korean students, cut off from news from abroad, neither became hippies nor took to the streets in any such numbers. Korea had no room for it. From January on, the chaos came in a chain: the commando unit under Kim Shin-jo raided the Blue House; out in the East Sea the American intelligence ship Pueblo was seized by the North Korean navy; armed North Korean guerrillas slipped into Uljin and Samcheok and fought the ROK Army. In the middle of all that, a student movement could hardly flourish, and a hippie life was absurd on its face. Live like an American hippie in Korea, and you starved.
Kijo did not believe Yeongsu would grow into a young man who wasted himself like a hippie or threw himself into protests. He had already watched the boy grow up once, in that other life, and he knew how he would turn out. Yeongsu would keep his head down and go quietly through his school days.
Yeongeun and Yeongjun, he could not know. Yeongeun laughed easily, bright and full of affection; he thought she would get along well with him and with Sunrye. Yeongjun worried him, if only a little. Perhaps it was the rough dream that had announced his coming, but Kijo had a feeling the boy might become a youth who crashed into everything in his path. By the original history, the years when Yeongjun would be a university student fell at the tail end of Park Chung-hee's Yushin rule. The Busan-Masan Uprising would erupt, martial law would be declared, and special-forces and airborne troops would be sent in to crush the demonstrations without mercy. He could only hope Yeongjun would come through a season like that in one piece.
He was still turning it over when Sunrye opened the side door from the kitchen. Kijo got up, carried the tray in, and the two of them ate hard and fast before the children woke. Sunrye especially had to get a full meal down before the youngest stirred. Once Yeongjun was awake, her day would leave her no chance to rest. Watching her eat so quickly made Kijo ache for her.
"Yeobo, let's take on a maid."
"A maid?"
The word brought back something Park Young-ok had said on a recent visit.
"Little sister, if you can manage it at all, keep a maid. It isn't a bad thing. You take in a child from a house that's truly desperate, you feed her and clothe her properly, you teach her how to run a home, and when the time comes for her to marry you send her off with a bit of a stake. The girl doing the work is better off, and so are you. How are you supposed to look after three children by yourself, and one of them still a baby? I'm afraid you'll collapse."
Sunrye had been tempted, but her husband had never seemed to like the idea of bringing a maid into the house, so she had swallowed the words. Now that he had raised it first, she asked with welcome and worry in equal parts.
"Would it be all right?"
"Plenty of girls are pushed out of their homes and sent off to work as maids. Wouldn't it be better if even one of them came to us? Better for you, too."
What he meant, she understood, was that they would bring a girl in and treat her well.
"I don't know if I'd be any good at ordering a maid around."
She was not the sort to hand her housekeeping to someone else, nor the sort who could set another person to work and feel easy about it.
"We'll pay her a weekly wage. Think of her as an employee who came to our house to work, and give her the work."
The moment he said he would pay wages, Sunrye's mind eased. A maid who drew a weekly wage, she thought, probably didn't exist anywhere else in Seoul. She loved that her husband held people dear.
"All right. We'll keep a maid, then."
If she looked after the children herself and the maid took only the laundry and the cleaning, life would be a great deal easier.
Kijo finished his rice, drank a bowl of warm sungnyung—the tea brewed from scorched rice—and rose from his place.
"I'll be home early today."
He smiled, set his hat on his head, and went out. Even on the last day of 1958 he was leaving for work at dawn, and Sunrye felt sorry for him and grateful at once.
Kijo reached Cheongsan headquarters early and stepped into a chairman's office that still held the night's cold. He went to the radiator. Hot water had only just begun to come through, and the metal was barely lukewarm. He laid his chilled hands against it to thaw them.
"Achoo!"
The sneeze took him by surprise, and his nose started to run. He pulled out a handkerchief, blew his nose, and went to look in on the main conference room.
A scale model of the Busan–Ulsan coast, built in clay, had been set up inside. Dawn had not yet broken, and the room was dark. When he switched on the light, a man who had been asleep on chairs gathered at one end of the table sprang upright. Kijo started and asked him what he was doing.
"Director Jang—did you sleep here?"
It was Jang Hoon, the urban-planning specialist. Chief Lee Yong-guk had recruited him, and he was serving as a director in the Integrated Coordination Office.
"Yes... Chairman. It got so late the cars stopped running, so I just slept in the conference room."
Jang Hoon rubbed at his eyes as he spoke. He had spent the night in cold air, and a dry cough kept catching at him. Sorry for the man, Kijo hurried to light the stove, which had gone out.
Jang Hoon had been born in 1911. He was forty-eight, nineteen years Kijo's senior. It shamed him to have kept a man of that age working deep into the night and then sleeping in a heap. After the recapture of Seoul in 1951, Jang Hoon had been the sort who barely went home for years. Those had been emergency days, and he had only just turned forty, so it had been understandable. To see him still grinding away now, close to fifty, worried Kijo. He was afraid the talent he had gone to such trouble to bring in might fall ill.
He mixed a cup of hot cocoa and put it in Jang Hoon's hands. Even as he passed it over, he blamed himself for having laid so large a project on the man. What he had entrusted to him was Preventive Relief Measures against Natural Disasters in Busan—preparations for Typhoon Sarah, the monstrous storm that would strike the city on September 17, 1959. The two of them drank the cocoa while it was still hot and talked.
"Don't sink into the work so completely. You'll ruin your health."
"When you're in the middle of it, that happens sometimes..."
Jang Hoon, gentle-faced as a scholar of the old school, answered with a smile. The sight of that smile—the smile of a man from an earlier time who simply put his head down and worked—stung Kijo at the bridge of his nose. There were people who, if the task given them had worth and served the country, would spend the last of their strength on it.
"Shall I have a little house built for you on the company roof?"
He asked it like a joke, and Jang Hoon laughed.
"That would be wonderful. I never thought of it."
He tossed the joke back. Kijo turned to the scale model of Busan. Working from U.S. military aerial photographs and from reports sent up by Cheongsan staff stationed in the city, they had colored the zones of expected disaster onto the terrain. Those zones fell broadly into two kinds: areas that would flood under a storm surge, and areas where landslides were feared. The surge zones centered on Busan Harbor—Nampo-dong in Jung-gu, where Cheongsan Shipping had its head office, and the stretch around Daepyeong-dong in Yeongdo. The landslide zones lay where the shantytowns crowded together, around Barakchon on Yongdusan and through Nambumin-dong. Beyond those, Dadaepo, Songdo, Nambumin-dong, Chungmu-dong, Namhang-dong, and Taepyeong-dong, all thick with houses under tin roofs, were places where the destruction of homes would be severe.
Kijo remembered the damage Typhoon Sarah had done to Busan. He meant to evacuate the people in the predicted landslide zones and to set a plan that could hold back the sea.
"Have you worked out how many tetrapods the reinforcement of the Busan Harbor breakwater would take?"
Sarah's waves had smashed the harbor breakwater, and the surge that followed had drowned Busan in seawater. That had been one of the chief reasons the damage grew so vast. Kijo wanted to stop the flooding. The only way to protect a breakwater was to cast tetrapods in concrete and pile them against it. When he had sketched a tetrapod for Jang Hoon and explained it, the man had understood at once that it would make an excellent armor for a breakwater. Now he gave the figure he had calculated.
"I think we'd have to stack more than three thousand of the twenty-ton tetrapods."
Kijo nodded. Three thousand was far more than he could shoulder alone. It would take nearly sixty thousand tons of cement. Realistically, it had to be called impossible.
"Then we'll have to concentrate on evacuating the flood victims."
"In Busan alone I expect something over a hundred thousand people to be driven from their homes. With the strength Cheongsan actually has, even managing the refugees would be difficult."
Kijo agreed. The number of people Sarah would displace was more than the state itself could readily bear. The great mass of refugees made in the autumn had lost their houses and failed to leave the government tents even when deep winter came. The year turned, and still the government had not solved the problem of where they were to live.
"Have you looked for suitable places to move the refugees ahead of time?"
"Yes. I've settled on several. But if the disaster you've projected actually comes, there won't be much Cheongsan can do."
Jang Hoon said it coolly. The conclusion was that Cheongsan could do nothing—but he would have agonized a long time before he allowed himself to reach it.
"I understand. This will have to be handled very differently from Agnes last year."
"Yes. If the downpour you've assumed arrives—two hundred millimeters an hour—and the wind blows at fifty meters a second, Busan will come down in an instant, like a city under carpet bombing."
"So we can't prevent the surge, and we can't absorb the refugees it will create. The only answer is to get people out quickly, beforehand."
"That's right, Chairman. This would be a hard thing even if President Syngman Rhee took it up himself. The best we can do, as I see it, is move people and supplies out of the coastal districts."
An urban planner who had built his experience on destruction by war and the work of rebuilding afterward was good at drawing up measures that faced reality. To Kijo, Jang Hoon's plan felt akin to the orderly removal of citizens and supplies south of the Han when Seoul was emptied during the January Fourth Retreat of 1951.
"You mean like when we cleared Seoul in January of '51?"
Jang Hoon nodded.
"Yes, Chairman. Think of the seawater that will cover Busan as the Chinese army, and the wind as the People's Army."
Talking it through with him, Kijo revised the whole of the 1959 plan for Sarah. Unlike Agnes, this typhoon was on a scale Cheongsan could not absorb even if it threw in every resource the company possessed. They would concentrate on getting people and goods out of the danger zones as fast as they could. Once the conclusion stood cleanly—that no amount of human effort could stop the damage of the storm—Kijo's mind felt, oddly, lighter.
"Director Jang, come out and eat with me."
"Did you come in without breakfast?"
"Yes. That's how it went."
He took Jang Hoon's coat from the rack in the conference room and held it out. It was worn and thin, and it looked cold. We'll eat in Myeongdong. And I'll buy him a coat while we're at it... With that thought he left the room at Jang Hoon's side. Going down the stairs together, he spoke.
"Director Jang. While we eat, tell me about retaking Seoul and restoring the bombed-out districts. You said there wasn't enough manpower in the city then?"
"There wasn't. No able-bodied men were left in Seoul. They had all gone. Stay, and the People's Army would drag you off. The city had nothing in it but women and the old."
"So how did you solve it?"
"People came up toward Seoul in great numbers from Chungcheong, Gyeongsang, and Jeolla. There was nothing to live on where they were, so they meant to hire themselves out hauling loads on A-frames, if that was all they could get."
"Didn't you need a river-crossing pass to get over the Han in those days?"
"You did. A lot of people died trying to slip across and into Seoul in secret. In the end we decided there was no way to rebuild the city except by putting those people to work, and Seoul City Hall registered them as cleaners."
"Cleaners?"
"Yes. Officially the title was 'war-site clearers.' It was a legal road by which able-bodied men south of the Han could enter Seoul. There were no wages, though. We put them on the restoration of the ruined districts only about half of each month, and we didn't call them for the other half. They had to have work they could eat by, too."
Kijo enjoyed talking with him. Before the regression, Jang Hoon had been a teacher he met only in books; after it, he had become a good teacher still. Every sentence the man spoke was a piece of the Republic's history that had never been written down. They talked all the way to Myeongdong, and there they ate breakfast together.
Kijo began the last day of 1958 by eating breakfast twice.