The Workers' Lodging House
On December 27, 1961, Gijo attended the dedication of a workers' lodging house newly raised in Seoul.
With a subsidy from the national treasury, the city had spent 225 million hwan to build it for day laborers who had no home of their own. Two three-story buildings went up in Dodong, in Jung-gu, and another pair in Changsin-dong, Dongdaemun-gu, enough between them to house six hundred men. Every winter, laborers who came up to Seoul looking for work had nowhere to sleep and froze to death in tents pitched in the hills. It happened so often that the city had finally built something.
Gijo went out to the Changsin-dong house, the one standing on the site of an abandoned quarry. Cheongsan Construction had put it up, and because the building meant something, he attended the ceremony with Lee Man-ik. He went over the finished work with care, looking in on the barbershop and the bathhouse, then the dining hall, the reading room, and the recreation room. Last of all he stepped into each of the forty-five bedrooms and checked what had been laid on the bunks. The budget had run short, so there were no mattresses at all — only Japanese tatami mats spread in their place.
Even so, he thought, it was something. Before he met Sunrye he had drifted from job to job as a day laborer himself, and he knew how cruel a winter could be. He had carried a wooden A-frame on his back and hired his body out by the day, and even when he managed to fill his stomach, night always frightened him. He was afraid he would freeze before morning. He had seen men who actually had, come daylight, and so he counted it a genuine mercy that a place like this now stood.
He made for the dining hall last. The lodging house gave a free bed to laborers with nowhere to sleep, but a meal cost a hundred hwan — still better than buying a bowl of noodle soup. Gijo laid down twenty thousand hwan and took his meal at the Dongdaemun house. The 19,900 hwan he refused to take back in change, he asked them to spend on a hundred and ninety-nine meals for the laborers. Lee Man-ik paid five thousand hwan for his own bowl, and Dae-ik, who had come with them, put down a thousand.
They were eating in the workers' dining hall when Man-ik spoke.
"I wish the men who come here to use this place might at least be able to go abroad as emigrants."
Dae-ik agreed.
"I know. There was word a while back that emigration to Brazil was possible, and then nothing more. I can't tell whether anyone can actually go or not."
Gijo turned over what he remembered of the Brazil scheme. It was still only in preparation. The whole thing had begun when Colonel Jeong In-gyu, in Brazil for the World Military Shooting Championship of 1960, was injured during the matches and taken into a Brazilian hospital. The newspapers carried the story, the president of Brazil granted him an interview, and when the colonel said he hoped Koreans might come as agricultural settlers, the president agreed.
Back in Korea, Colonel Jeong founded an agency he called the Korea–Brazil Development Corporation and set about recruiting emigrants. The prospect was more than enough to stir people. Korea had few men with industrial skills, but a great many who knew how to farm. Even so, Brazil was no easy road. The government itself had not recruited anyone; the effort was being pushed along at the private level, and Seoul poured its energy only into sending war orphans and mixed-race children overseas for adoption. Emigration it left largely alone. Still, rumors went around that the Brazilian government and the Korean government would both pay a subsidy, and public interest came pouring in.
In a city where a workers' lodging house had to be built because most of the people who came looking for jobs could not even find a bed, most of those who wanted to leave had no settlement money and so could not go. Men interested in Brazil inquired at the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — the very offices that arranged overseas adoptions — to ask whether a subsidy would be paid, and received only the answer that nothing had been confirmed.
"Thailand seems a little better than Brazil, if anything," Dae-ik said. "But you need money to get to Thailand, so it's a shame."
Since the days of the Syngman Rhee government, Thailand had said it would take two hundred Korean immigrants a year. To go, though, a man needed either a connection already living there or a financial guarantor. In practice, emigration stood near zero.
"You're telling me. How fine it would be if a man could emigrate to some Southeast Asian country better off than we are — Thailand, the Philippines. Southeast Asia beats Brazil, clear on the other side of the world."
Man-ik was in agreement. One of his own relatives, he added, was hoping to go to Brazil, and he wished the government would give them an answer before long.
Gijo said to him, "Before long there will be countries besides Brazil willing to take our people."
He was thinking of West Germany, which would recruit miners and nurses. Even as he said it, Korea's reality seemed to him a thing to lament. In those days the common wisdom held that the poor ought to be sent off to rich countries so they could eat and live, much as a poor house sent a daughter out to work as a live-in maid. For the low-income there were no jobs, and no sign the economy would ever improve, so that each day of living in Korea must have been like living in hell. More than sixty thousand people had crowded the order desks because they wanted to buy a television; at the same time, twenty million could not properly manage a meal.
The memory of his previous life as a hired laborer rose in him, and he wanted a drink. The day was bitterly cold.
The next day was December 28. A call came through to the president's office, and Gijo took it. It was Dongdaemun Police Station.
"Do you happen to know a boy named Jeong Nam-un?"
It was a name he was hearing for the first time. He nearly said he did not — then thought it strange that a boy called Jeong Nam-un should be looking for him from a police station, and answered that he did.
"Would you come to the station and confirm it? Two boys made a disturbance at the lodging house yesterday, and one of them says you'll take responsibility for him."
"All right. I'll come."
He went straight to Dongdaemun Police Station. The story, once he heard it from the boy called Jeong Nam-un, was that the boy's older brother had been beaten by someone at the lodging house, and that Nam-un meant to sue the Dongdaemun workers' house over it. Gijo heard the police account as well. Jeong Sang-un, the older brother, had asked that his younger brother be allowed to sleep there and had been refused because the place was full. He had then begged them to let the boy sleep inside the building, even if it was only a corridor, and somewhere in the midst of it he had quarreled with a member of the staff and a fight had broken out. Sang-un, his face swollen fat from the beating, was locked in the holding cell.
From the look of it, Sang-un had taken a one-sided thrashing, and his younger brother, calling it unjust, had demanded he be let go. Gijo looked at the young man lying in the cell and thought he seemed about seventeen — the age Gijo himself had been when he was scraping by on day labor.
"Sir, please help us. They say they won't pay the hospital bill because my brother and I are alley trash. They beat a man half to death and then won't take the blame."
The boy swallowed his tears and pleaded. The words alley trash hurt Gijo in the chest. In those days the term meant the urban poor — ragpickers, taffy peddlers, shoeshine boys. Shoeshining, which orphans did in great numbers, carried an especially foul name. They were pitiful children, but because the need to eat dragged them into every kind of crime, they drew discrimination and contempt more readily than sympathy. Had Gijo drifted through Seoul, he would have been called the same.
"All right."
He told the police he would take both boys. The officer answered in a tone that seemed genuinely concerned for him.
"Don't pity trash like that too much, sir. They're a bad lot. They're old hands at robbing women and at petty theft. We'll give them a proper scolding here and let them go. I mean to send the little one off and put the older one in the National Land Construction Corps."
At those words Gijo's face went hard.
Early in 1961, under the Chang Myon government, the National Land Construction Corps that Chang Jun-ha had overseen was a quasi-official body, founded to relieve unemployment and develop the provinces. After the May 16 coup it became something else. The revolutionary government uncovered several thousand draft evaders and announced that every one of them would be inducted into the army — then found itself in difficulty when, during the period set aside for evaders to turn themselves in, the number swelled to 410,000. In the end it settled on a policy of putting the evaders into the Corps and letting the labor stand in for military service. But there were too many of them, and mixed in among them were pen-pushers unused to work — university professors, civil servants, journalists, teachers — so the output fell short of what anyone had hoped, and at the end of 1962 the Corps was dissolved. It never sank to the level of the later Samcheong Reeducation Camp, but handling so many people who had broken the law meant abuses and wretched treatment, and more than a few were injured, fell ill, or died.
"I'll take them. I'll give them work."
"Well... if you truly insist, sir, I won't stand in your way."
The police released Jeong Sang-un with a warning. Gijo took the two of them to a gukbap house — rice in a steaming broth — and fed them something hot before anything else. Sang-un's mouth was split clear to the inside, and eating plainly hurt, but he was so hungry he gulped the rice down. They finished so fast that Gijo ordered each of them another bowl, then sat in silence and only watched. On the second bowl the older brother scooped out half and pushed it toward the younger.
"My mouth hurts. I can't finish it. You eat."
The younger boy refused. The older one gave it to him anyway. When the meal was done, the brothers bowed their heads.
"Thank you, sir."
"Yes..."
Gijo meant to give them enough money to stay a few days at an inn. The weather was far too cold, and Sang-un, beaten black and blue, would need a warm place to lay his body. Before he handed the money over, he asked the boy who had sent for him a question.
"How did you know who I was?"
"You had me shine your shoes at Seoul Station once. You probably don't remember... You wouldn't take the change that time, and you gave me a lot of money, so I asked what sort of man you were."
Gijo nodded. He usually shined his own shoes, but on the road he often left them with a shoeshine boy. He thought that if a rich man like him polished his own shoes every time, pitiful children would have a harder time eating.
"You seemed like a kind man, so I thought you might help us, and I asked the police to call you. I'm sorry, sir."
"It's all right. You did the right thing."
He smiled, and the smile was warm. Even so, the road ahead of the two brothers was nothing but dark. No one could use the workers' lodging house for more than seven days. The place held so few, and so many wanted in, that there was no help for the rule. Gijo decided he would have to give them work they could keep doing, in a place where survival, at least, was assured.
"Both of you, come along to Cheongnyangni. There's a place there you can use for a bed."
He meant to pitch a military tent in one corner of the Cheongnyangni materials yard, put a stove inside, and have them sleep there.
"Mend yourselves there. Sang-un, you learn to drive."
"To drive?"
His eyes were too swollen to widen, but the light in them sparked.
"And you, Nam-un, go to school. When school lets out, clean the trucks at the yard and run errands for the drivers."
Told he would be given a job — and made into a driver, no less — Jeong Sang-un was beside himself.
"Thank you, sir..."
He pressed his younger brother's head down with one hand so the boy would bow as well, and poured out his own thanks.
"It's all right. It's all right..."
Gijo took them to Cheongnyangni. He gave them money for a bath and enough to buy a set of clothes each. While the two washed and went off to get the new clothes, he had a military tent pitched in a corner of the yard and left instructions: use the older brother as a driver's helper, and set the younger one to cleaning the yard buildings.
He returned to the company and prepared the afternoon's schedule. That evening he was due at the Korea–Germany Friendship Night. Saul Eisenberg was expected to attend, and Gijo was more than a little curious what sort of speech the man — who took Korea for an easy mark — intended to make.