One Year Younger
On the first of January, 1962, the government formally set aside the Dangun calendar it had used until then and adopted the Western calendar as its official reckoning. Dangun year 4294 would be the last the state ever counted.
It changed its rule for age as well, resolving to count by completed years — the so-called international age. Conscription and the age for entering school would henceforth be calculated on that basis. Everyone was pleased not to grow a year older overnight, and yet people labored to refigure the year of their birth by the solar calendar.
Gijo knew that even if the government made international age its official standard, people would go on using Korean age all the same. Old habits are hard to break.
After breakfast that morning he took the family out to deliver calendars printed by Cheongsan Group. They went from house to house, greeting the neighbors and presenting calendars marked with both the Dangun year and the Western year. The neighbors were abashed, and grateful, that Gijo had brought the calendars himself. He was not doing it to gather thanks, or to polish his name and the company's. He was doing it to educate his children.
He held that the first step in learning to live among people was not to look past the neighborhood elders, but to greet them first. Love and manners learned inside a house were not enough. Courtesy had to be practiced out in the lane, in a bow to the grown-ups who lived there.
Yeongsu and Yeongeun, who had learned this earlier, greeted the neighbors with easy familiarity. Going about with their mother and father and handing out things to eat, they were already well used to the world. The youngest, Yeongjun, followed his parents and his older brother and sister and made his greetings too. But when Gijo had the boy greet someone on his own, the sight was so unlike the other two that laughter rose in him. Yeongsu tried to bow with the utmost care, determined not to make a single mistake. Yeongeun was bashful, and no sooner had she offered her greeting than she fled behind her mother and father. Yeongjun, without a moment's hesitation or shame, sang his greeting out bold as anything.
The neighbors who saw it broke into wide smiles and praised him.
"That youngest boy has the makings of a general."
"A fine, spirited child."
Gijo and Sunrye laughed as well, wondering how children out of the same womb could turn out so different.
Through the three days of the New Year holiday he spent the precious time with his family, taking them to an akgeuk — one of the musical dramas still beloved in those years — and to other small outings. When the holiday ended he went in to the company, held a brief opening ceremony, and stepped into his office. He had hardly sat down when, from the building of the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction near Cheongsan headquarters, a military band's playing of the national anthem gave way to the sound of Chairman Park's speech. It was the Council's own New Year ceremony.
Listening, Gijo wondered when Chairman Park would make good on the promise he had made to Kennedy. Two weeks had already passed since Kim Jong-pil left for the United States, and he was faintly uneasy about what effect the great changes Park meant to set loose in 1962 would have.
The Chairman's momentous announcement came on the ninth of January. He called domestic and foreign correspondents to the National Assembly and delivered an emergency address to the nation.
From the very first words, everyone in that room listened with breath held back and tension drawn tight across their faces. Gijo heard the address over the radio.
Kennedy's demands had been reflected in it, but not followed to the letter. Park seemed to have judged that a sudden guarantee of political freedom, and the immediate release of the politicians under detention, did not fit the reality of Korea — and a blanket release of political prisoners was not something he meant to grant.
The next day, through Chang Key-young, Gijo was able to hear what the reporters who had been in the room had witnessed of the mood.
"They say Kim Jong-pil, the KCIA director, looked deadly serious."
Chang let him know that Kim Jong-pil had been present. Gijo understood then that Chairman Park had chosen not to make the announcement while his political partner was in America, but to make it the moment the man came home. Even in reaching a grave decision alone, it seemed a choice meant to soften the shock of it.
"The director looked rattled himself. He'd gone off on that overseas tour and only just got back, and the Chairman came out with an announcement like that — so I gather even he hadn't really known."
Chang went on, filling in the atmosphere of the announcement in detail.
"Reporters asked whether Chairman Park meant to run in the presidential election himself, and he told them every soldier who had taken part in the revolutionary government would go back to his proper post, or leave the service."
"Which means...."
"That he means to run. Holding the general election first was a shock, I'll grant you, but I think he used his head there too. He said he'd hold the election in December, and only loosen political activity around autumn — and on short notice, at that. Looks to me like the soldiers mean to get ready for the general election in the meantime."
"What do you make of it, hyung-nim?"
"Of what?"
"Of Chairman Park running, and the revolutionary camp going into party politics."
"I'm for it. You've seen how the old politicians carry on, haven't you? There's no hope in that crowd. A new force has to jump in and blow a fresh wind through the game. I think the soldiers have done well up to now. I hope they keep on that way."
It was like Chang Key-young — the man who would enter the cabinet of the Third Republic as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Economic Planning Board — to look kindly on the military government.
After the emergency address, economic measures poured out of the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction one after another. Tax exemptions for American citizens and American firms continued to be pressed forward, and new laws were enacted and announced: a Special Act on the Establishment of National Industrial Complexes, a Bonded Processing Trade Promotion Act, and a statute that would let Japanese firms take commercial loans, or trade on a stable footing, even without the opening of diplomatic relations.
Such speed was possible only because the Supreme Council held the power of legislation. Had so many bills been left to a National Assembly, the ruling side and the opposition would have fought over them for a good year at least. It was the military government's greatest advantage — efficiency — showing itself plain.
And every one of those laws was something Gijo had proposed, or was bound up with a venture he himself was driving.
A few days later, another public notice went out.
The moment the second round opened, applicants surged in even greater numbers than the first, just as expected. Gijo met the rush with a newspaper advertisement of his own: Cheongsan would sell televisions on twelve-month installments, interest-free. At once the street in front of DBC was packed solid with people come to apply.
Kim Seogwang, who had charge of the sales, was astonished to see more than five thousand people mob the place for two hundred and fifty-eight sets.
"Will you look at this. They wouldn't buy all through the fifties, so why are they pouring in now...."
Muttering to himself, he seized a loudspeaker, climbed onto a chair, and shouted at the crowd.
"The televisions Cheongsan is selling are not the latest models! They're leftover stock we bought in the fifties!"
The moment he shouted, cries rose from here and there that nobody cared.
"These days, if you haven't got a TV, even a private car won't get you treated like a rich man! But have a TV and no car, and the neighborhood still takes you for rich!"
"We came knowing all that, so just draw the lots fair and square!"
At the words that they had come knowing, Seogwang climbed down off the chair.
Strange, this.... Something's going on.
As he shook his head, Shim Hansu, who had been sent to assist him, spoke.
"Hyung-nim, they say Cheongsan's sets are so much cheaper than the ones the government sells that if you win the draw, you turn around and resell. You can get the same price as a new government set. More than twenty thousand hwan, just for sitting there — so people are swarming like they're buying lottery tickets."
"That so? Twenty thousand hwan is a man's monthly wage. No wonder they swarm...."
Scratching his head, Seogwang asked him.
"Hansu. Does any of this make sense to you? You know as well as I do, televisions were never this popular."
"I couldn't say. Maybe it's just the fashion. The house in front bought one, the house next door bought one, so our house had better buy one too — something like that? These days I hear even folks living in a single rented room are buying a TV."
"Fashion? Well, our people never could stand to miss a trend."
"They say the government took in sixty-five thousand applications to buy a set. On the fees for the forms alone, they made six and a half million hwan."
"That's something. Maybe we ought to have sold application forms like the government. Hahaha."
Seogwang remembered the days when he had quietly sold smuggled televisions from the fifties at Dongdaemun Market, and it struck him how very much the world had changed.
When he left work that day and went home, he started at the money his wife held out to him.
"What's all that money? Did your savings club pay out?"
"What savings club? The neighbors came — their relatives, too — and left it here. They say it's a deposit."
"A deposit on what?"
"They want the televisions Cheongsan's selling. They each put down ten thousand hwan and went, saying they'd pay ten percent first if we'd pick them ahead of the others."
"And you took it? The president said we'd sell them by a fair drawing."
"I tried not to. But they threw the envelopes down and walked off. What was I supposed to do?"
She sounded aggrieved as she said it.
"Aigoo, I'm finished. The president's going to take me for some crook who pocketed bribes. Hand that money over, right now!"
Seogwang stuffed the envelopes into his bag and went around with his wife, giving the money back. Some people took it without a fuss. Others were wounded by the way he handled the thing.
"Ah, can't you do me this one favor? It's not as if we've known each other a day or two!"
"You and I are close, hyung-nim, but this is a television Cheongsan is selling. Cheongsan doesn't do business that way."
"Didn't you say you were the department head with the real say around there? You can't even slip out one TV?"
"The reason I've got any say at all is that I worked with a clean conscience, hyung-nim."
"So you're saying I haven't got a conscience? Why shame a man like this?"
"Ah, I don't know! Hurt feelings or not, it can't be helped!"
Seogwang tossed the envelope back and walked out.
Only after every last deposit had been returned did he come home and fling himself down on the floor, arms and legs spread wide. Yeongbae rubbed his father's legs as he lay there.
"Father, work wore you out, didn't it?"
Looking at his eldest, Seogwang felt the boy was steady enough that he had no cause to envy Yeongsu, the president's son.
"Yeongbae. I don't care if you never get into a fine middle school. Live healthy and bold, just as you do now, and that's enough. A man needs only one firm spine, and he can live in grand style."
"Yes, Father. Even at school they say that if nothing else, my character is something to behold."
"That's it, you rascal! Whose son are you? Hahaha!"
Seogwang sat bolt upright, pulled the boy into his arms, and thumped him on the back.
This is the taste of raising a son!
He was proud to the bone.
"Father, wait just a moment."
Yeongbae slipped from his embrace, went toward the kitchen, and came back carrying a basin of warm water.
"What are you bringing a basin into the room for?"
"I want to wash your feet."
He fetched a chair, sat his father down, peeled off the socks, and lowered the feet into the warm water. When he worked up a lather and began to wash them, the twins — the second son and the third — crowded in to help their brother. Yeongbae stopped them.
"Today this hyung will wash Father's feet. You two do it tomorrow, and the day after."
At those words, the fatigue and the anger heaped up in Seogwang melted clean away.
"Well, now.... What honor is this...."
He looked at his three sons, and there was nothing in him but happiness. It was an age when a son with a filial heart was the finest thing a man could have.