Korea Entertainment Co.
From the beginning of January, Ki-jo threw himself into the hamburger business. Whatever answer came back from Ray Kroc, he was prepared to go it alone if he had to. He bought a lot for the shop and hired the people who would staff it.
He split the hires evenly between former houseboys and college graduates. The houseboys could talk easily with the American GIs, so he put them on the counter; the graduates he sent to the kitchen. He had them learn to make hamburgers from a hotel chef Cho Choong-hoon had introduced. More than half the college men were unemployed the moment they graduated, so filling the roster was not difficult.
Working from the McDonald's store plans and manuals that Park Hee-jun's younger brother, Park Hee-soo, had sent, Ki-jo trained the crew. On the future site he raised a temporary building, laid the interior out exactly like an American store, and put them through simulated service. Out front, the floor staff greeted imaginary customers at a counter knocked together from plywood. In the kitchen they practiced assembling hamburgers by the manual, standing before make-believe equipment stacked out of wooden crates.
Watching the drills himself, Ki-jo could not help but marvel.
Everything in it is built to save time...
A McDonald's kitchen was designed so the crew's paths never crossed, and a man could work with the fewest possible motions.
He was still laying that groundwork when an answer arrived from America. Ray Kroc wrote that he would give the plan his active support, and asked that from now on Ki-jo contact him directly rather than go through Park Hee-soo. Ki-jo read it as a declaration that Kroc meant to look after the Korean venture himself.
A single store in Korea would hardly do much for the man's business, yet Ki-jo could feel the attention being turned on him. Here was an Asian in a backward country, asking to buy the rights for Korea, China, and Japan, and offering to prop McDonald's up with money if it ever fell into trouble.
Who is this fellow, making claims this outrageous? Maybe I ought to watch him a while.
That, it seemed, was the curiosity he had managed to stir.
If only there were such a thing as an international call...
Ki-jo wanted to speak with Ray Kroc, but it was not realistic, and not simply because an overseas call cost too much. In the 1950s, even the president, if he wished to telephone America, first had to book the call at the telephone office and then appear there at the appointed hour to place it. Even when the line connected, the sound was so poor that a real conversation could not be counted on. Astonishingly, international service this wretched would drag on into the mid-1970s. Korea, later spoken of as a powerhouse of information and communications, would circle at this same sorry level for a long while yet.
Unable to reach Ray Kroc by phone, Ki-jo wrote him a letter that set out conditions in Korea in careful detail. He hoped to build a bond between them, but he also believed he had to tell the man as much as he could about a country Kroc knew nothing of. Ki-jo had once read the autobiography with keen interest. It described, at length, the trouble Ray Kroc ran into every time he carried a McDonald's franchise into another state. Leave dry California for a climate wholly unlike it, and the french fries might go tasteless, or the hamburgers fail to taste as they should, because the chain's methods of storage and cooking had been tuned to California weather.
So Ki-jo explained that a Korean summer was extremely hot and humid, and a Korean winter bitterly cold and dry. He added that the country's energy situation was very bad. McDonald's ran its fryers and its meat grills on gas, and in Korea, he wrote, cooking with gas was impossible. He offered a way around it. The fries would have to be made in an electric fryer, and the meat grilled over coal briquettes and charcoal; would Kroc send kitchen equipment built for that?
He sent the letter off and settled in to wait. On January 19th, it was not a letter that came. Lim Hwa-soo did.
Lim Hwa-soo strode into the president's office at DBC with his shoulders squared. He had climbed to the de facto leadership of the Dongdaemun Faction, and a film released in '58 had been a hit; he was living through the finest hour of his life. A sheen lay on his face, and his eyes were full of confidence.
"Little brother, you've been busy, I see. I hear you're living all day out in front of the Yongsan base these days," he said, crossing his legs on the sofa and lighting a cigarette.
"Yes. I'm planning to open a shop for the GIs."
"A hamburger shop?"
"Yes, that's right."
"Ha ha—you've been running big business all this time, and now you want to peddle little meat buns? What's that about?"
"I'd like to broaden the ways I earn dollars."
At the answer, Lim Hwa-soo leaned toward him and clapped him on the shoulder.
"You want to make real dollars, sell women. The woman trade."
He grinned, slick and easy, and held up his little finger, waggling it.
Invited to try his hand at prostitution run like a business, Ki-jo had nothing to say.
"That isn't something I could..."
"Come now. Would this brother of yours recommend it for nothing? I'm telling you, the money's sweet. If you're worried about eyes on you, put up a front man and run it from behind him. We'll stand one of our boys up as the owner. How about it? Doesn't that sound all right?"
Ki-jo decided he had better turn the talk.
"Brother, before that—last year you had that great success, You Never Know a Person's Fate."
You Never Know a Person's Fate, which Lim Hwa-soo had produced the year before, was an anti-communist comedy. It had been a box-office hit and had even received a commendation from the government.
"That picture? It did tremendous business. Those bastards at the Chosun Ilbo trashed it as a worthless entertainment flick, but an entertainment flick is supposed to be worthless. That's what makes it fun. Ha ha ha."
Lim Hwa-soo had a gift for producing comedies. The Fatty and Skinny series, played by the duo of Yang Hun and Yang Seok-cheon, was the flagship product of Korea Entertainment Co., the company he ran.
"But why that film?"
"I was wondering whether DBC might run it as a weekend serial."
"No. Not that. Yang Hun and Yang Seok-cheon are busy." His face had gone hard.
"It won't do?" Ki-jo asked again, putting on a look of disappointment, though he had known it would not.
"Between their shows, the musical-revue troupe, and shooting pictures with me, they haven't got the time. A new Fatty and Skinny is about to open."
"Already? Didn't a Fatty and Skinny picture come out last fall?"
"Comedies, you shoot them quick. The new one opens for Lunar New Year. Fatty and Skinny Go to Nonsan Boot Camp. I figure this one does pretty well too."
"Congratulations in advance, Brother. I'll be sure to go and see it."
"Ha ha, it'll do fine. It's a hard picture to fail with."
Lim Hwa-soo smoothed the hair he had oiled and combed neatly back, drew a sheaf of tickets from inside his coat, and held them out.
"On January 31st we're holding a special preview at the Kukje Theater. Bring people."
There were ten.
"Thank you, Brother."
"Bring the family. It'll be fun."
"Of course. It's a picture you made."
Ki-jo was smiling wide, but Lim Hwa-soo's kindness did not sit easily with him. He did not believe the man had come all this way merely to hand over a few preview tickets.
"Listen, little brother..." Lim Hwa-soo eased into it.
"Yes, Brother."
"That outfit Lee Hwa-ryong runs. Hwaseong Film."
Just as he had thought. It was Hwaseong Film that had brought him.
"Ah, yes. Please, go on."
"He isn't badgering you for actors, is he?" Lim Hwa-soo's eyes had gone soft on the surface and sharp underneath.
"No. And even if he asked, I wouldn't be sending any his way."
Satisfied, Lim Hwa-soo broke at once into a guffaw.
"Ah, good. If you ever hear from that Lee Hwa-ryong, you tell me. I'll handle it." He patted Ki-jo's shoulder as he said it.
Ki-jo smiled.
"Thank you, Brother."
"Well, I'm busy, so I'll be getting up. These days I'm so busy there's no time for a long talk."
Ki-jo knew why he was busy.
Three days later, on January 22nd, the Korean Anti-Communist Youth Corps would be launched. With Syngman Rhee as its president and Lee Ki-poong as vice president, it was a youth organization under the Liberal Party, a vast body of two million members across eighty-nine cities and counties. It existed to aid Syngman Rhee's campaign in the presidential election of 1960, and it was thick with hoodlums and gangsters. Lim Hwa-soo would become its Jongno District commander.
Ki-jo saw him to the door, then came back to his chair and let out a sigh.
He could not lightly cross the will of a man whose power, knotted together with the regime, had reached its height. If Lim Hwa-soo said not to supply actors to Lee Hwa-ryong's company, then he would not.
After the Chungjeongno Axe Incident, the Dongdaemun Faction had become, in effect, the organization that ruled Seoul. With the Anti-Communist Youth Corps raised on top of that, Lim Hwa-soo's strength had grown three or four times over. Not even the police could lay a careless hand on the Corps, for it was Syngman Rhee's own household guard. As its Jongno District commander, Lim Hwa-soo was, for all practical purposes, the king of Jongno.
In a heavy mood, Ki-jo wished 1959 would pass quickly. It was hoegwang banjo—the last flare of a dying light. Even as the Liberal Party regime hurtled toward catastrophe, the men enjoying power in its orbit had grown stronger than ever. Whatever they demanded, he had no choice but to grit his teeth and endure for about a year.
He summoned Won Tae-sik, department head at Cheongsan Heung-eop, explained the situation, and told him not to send actors to Hwaseong Film.
"Understood, President. I'll see to it," Won Tae-sik answered, crisp and ready.
"And that other matter you ordered—the couple, Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee."
"Ah. How did that go?"
"Miss Choi Eun-hee has accepted. She says she'll join Cheongsan Heung-eop after she talks it through with her husband one last time."
"That's good news. Ha ha."
Ki-jo had already given orders to bring in Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee, the star couple of director and actress. The two of them were living out so cruel a fate that he pitied them, and he meant to scout them and keep them safe. Choi Eun-hee's life, especially, grieved him.
During the Korean War she had been abducted from Seoul and hauled north, then had miraculously escaped and made her way back. She had fled the North for free Korea and spent the war touring in morale shows for the ROK Army—only to be raped, in humiliation, by ROK soldiers. Afterward she was dragged into a prosecution for adultery. When she married Shin Sang-ok in 1953, her former husband, Kim Hak-seong, brought charges. But the earlier tie had been only a common-law union, never entered in the family register, and she had left because she was sick of Kim Hak-seong's violence, so the court acquitted her.
From then on she worked steadily in film, until in 1978 she was kidnapped in Hong Kong by a North Korean agent and taken to the North. A few months later Shin Sang-ok was abducted in Hong Kong as well. In 1986 the two of them sought asylum at the United States embassy in Austria and succeeded in defecting from the North, yet for more than ten years they could not come home, and only in 1999 did they return. He had wanted them under his roof so he might spare them that unspeakable ordeal.
Ki-jo sat with the thought a moment, then spoke.
"For now, give the two of them a contract payment and settle it by word of mouth."
"Only a verbal contract?"
"Yes. See that neither the terms nor the fact of it leak."
"You mean keep it secret."
"Yes. Hide the contract for about a year, and ask them to work hand in hand with Hwaseong Film."
"Understood, President."
"And the same for the actors we bring in from here on. Have them work at Hwaseong Film that way. Be very careful the secret doesn't get out."
"I will, President."
Ki-jo sent Tae-sik out and sighed again.
"Bear it. Just bear it. This year will have its good things too," he murmured, and looked at the calendar.
Four hundred and fifty-five days remained until the downfall of the Liberal Party.