The Industrial Exposition

On April 20, 1962, the Industrial Exposition opened inside Gyeongbokgung Palace. It had been meant to open on the fifteenth, but the preparations ran long, and the gates swung wide five days late.

The Cheongsan Group threw every affiliate it had into the fair. There had been expositions in the 1950s as well, and Cheongsan, with nothing worth showing, had stayed away. Now it was the largest exhibitor ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠on the grounds. Three-wheeled trucks and motorcycles, power tillers, transistor radios, televisions, fertilizer, bearings, Cremoa, Miwon, ramen, matches, yeontan briquettes, refractory brick—Cheongsan laid them all out and let the display declare how far the house had come.

Chairman Park, walking the fair, took a keen interest in the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠pieces Cheongsan had set out under the open sky. They were CKD goods—complete knock-down kits, parts brought in from abroad and assembled at home—but the three-wheeled trucks, the motorcycles, and the power tillers made in Korea were the most advanced machines the country could then produce. Kijo attended him and explained the machines as they went.

"What's this?"

Chairman Park pointed at a motorized bicycle built by Kia Industry.

"A bicycle with an engine mounted on it, sir. It isn't on sale yet. We're testing it with a single-cylinder engine imported from Japan."

"No different from a motorcycle."

"It can't match a motorcycle for range or for power. It drinks less fuel, though, and it costs less."

"Pedals on it, too."

"Yes, sir. If the fuel runs out, you can pedal."

"Not bad."

Even things that still looked clumsy, a little crude to the eye, drew a favorable word from him. It was an age when the mere fact of making something in Korea was welcome in itself.

"This a light truck? You planning to sell it?"

His eye had caught Kia Industry's concept car—a pickup Kim Chul-ho, president of Kia, had built by stretching a jeep chassis out into a cargo bed and reinforcing the rear leaf springs. The method was not far from that of the Sibal, Korea's homegrown automobile, but the difference lay in the face of the thing. They had taken off the jeep's boxy look and worked the sheet steel into curves, so that it no longer read as a converted jeep. Curving plate was cutting-edge work in Korea then, and Chairman Park ran a hand along the panels, checking whether the curves had come out true. He looked at the chrome-plated rims of the headlights.

"The plating done here?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well done."

The plating was still short of real skill, but he seemed satisfied even with the rough surface.

"Didn't you say you'd made a Korean water pump?"

"Yes, sir. It's set up at Gyeonghoeru."

"Let's have a look."

Ignoring every other company's display, Chairman Park left the exhibition grounds for Gyeonghoeru Pavilion, a little way off. On the pavilion's pond sat water pumps, these too made by Kia Industry. He studied them closely.

"The two aren't the same shape. What's the difference?"

"One is a gear pump, the other a vane pump. The gear type is easy to build and strong, but if the water carries much debris, it breaks down readily."

"And the vane pump?"

"It stands up to debris and it lasts, but it's harder to make."

"Costs more, too?"

"Yes, sir."

Chairman Park nodded.

"A lot of farmers have come to look around the fair. Give them a demonstration."

At his order both pumps were started together. With a bright rap of engines they drew up the water of the Gyeonghoeru pond and threw it out in strong jets. The spray broke into fine droplets and made a rainbow, and the citizens and farmers who had come to watch let out a cry.

Chairman Park, taking in the cool rush of water, asked, "Still a long way from selling these?"

"No, sir. We're already in mass production."

"Is that so."

It was the season when the barley ought to have been coming on strong, and for want of rain the crops were withering the length of the country. Chairman Park could not take his eyes from the pumps. At last he turned to Kijo.

"Come to the Blue House in a couple of hours."

"Yes, Mr. Chairman."

After Park had gone, Kijo made the round of the exhibits, talking up the goods, and then went in to the Blue House.

The Chairman was on the sofa, going over papers. He greeted Kijo warmly.

"Come in. Sit."

When Kijo had taken the seat opposite, Park asked, "What does one of those pumps cost?"

The answer was not an easy one. Cheaper than a Japanese machine or an American one, yes—but still dear. And what the Chairman had open before him was a budget. The frown gathered between his brows, as he stared at it, said plainly enough that the country had no money. Even if the government wanted pumps by the hundred, it would not have the means to buy them. Gauging the Chairman's position, and what was in his mind, Kijo spoke.

"We can supply the government on a ten-year installment."

Park turned it over, then nodded.

"Can you make me about a thousand?"

"We can. And if a pump fails inside of ten years, we'll repair it free of charge. The product isn't perfect yet. We've also developed a pump that can be run off a power tiller. Those, Cheongsan will send into the countryside on its own."

"I'm grateful."

The gratitude on his face was real.

Beside the table lay page three of the Dong-A Ilbo. Kijo's eye went to it.

He had looked the papers over that morning. Every one of them, save the Hankook Ilbo, had taken the same line against the exposition. The charge was plain enough: the rain the fields needed had not fallen, this was the season to be out at the work of farming, and yet the government had opened an industrial fair in Seoul and was urging farmers to come and look. A cartoon in the paper made a caricature of Chairman Park. A man in sunglasses showed a machine to a farmer; behind them the sun glared in the sky, and on the ground the crops were dying of drought. Anyone could see who the man in the sunglasses was. The accusation was that he put industry first and had no care for the countryside.

These days the papers took their cuts at Chairman Park often enough. They had done the same in the original history. There was censorship before publication, but nothing so strict or so fine as it would become late in the Third Republic, or under the Fifth. When trouble broke later, the way of it was soldiers storming a newspaper office in a rage, pistols out, an editor seized by the collar and shaken. The press had lain low for a little while right after May 16, and then, by degrees, found its critical nerve again; and with prior censorship abolished on top of that, the attacks on the Chairman only grew hotter. The barley hump was coming on—that hungry stretch before the harvest—and a government with no real answer to the drought had opened an industrial exposition. For the papers, it was prime game.

Some of the tightness seemed to have left him. Chairman Park spoke.

"I'm a little empty. Shall we try the ramen? An aide brought a few packs back from the fair. I'd like to see what it tastes like."

"Of course."

At a word from the Chairman, two bowls came in. Kijo ate with him and talked.

"Edible enough."

Park rendered the verdict after noodles and broth alike.

"It will taste better yet."

"Mm. I saw in today's paper that a day's wage in the country is two hundred hwan. You said one ramen is a hundred, didn't you? A man can work himself to the bone from dawn to dark and just barely put a smear of food in two mouths."

Kijo nodded. Two hundred hwan would buy two packs of ramen, or not quite a doe of barley—under a kilogram and a half. A day's labor let the large households of those years just scrape through a single day's eating.

"Ramen is still a little dear."

"If people buy it and eat a lot of it, can you bring the price down? At the fair they were saying it has more calories than the same weight of noodles."

Set against noodles, the nutrition was nothing to boast of, but the calories were higher. This was an age when no one could spare a thought for a balanced diet, and it was the calories the Chairman seemed to have fixed on.

"Of course. Make more of anything, and the price comes down."

Kijo added another word.

"I'm thinking of giving the badly made ramen to the countryside."

"Oh?"

Park's interest sharpened.

"What do you mean, ramen made badly?"

"Noodles that don't set square in the mold, or that break. We've crushed the broken ones fine and put them up in clean sacks."

In the eighties and the nineties, ramen plants would break up the noodles that had gone wrong, bag them, and send them out as dog feed. For a food company to give away off-grade goods instead of destroying them was not, strictly, the right thing. But it was an age with so little to eat that there had been no help for it.

"Tell me something. If I turned the aid flour over to Cheongsan Foods—the flour we received in relief—could you bring the price of ramen down further?"

With the barley hump ahead of him, the Chairman seemed to be thinking of relief as well. Kijo could not take the offer as it stood. It would look like a special favor to Cheongsan, and he had to turn it another way.

"If the government will supply the flour, we'll donate sound ramen to the countryside."

"Free?"

"Hardly anyone knows what ramen is yet. It won't sell well in any case. Call it advertising, and I'll scatter it."

"Yes. When you're hungry, anything tastes good—and food eaten in a hungry time is not easily forgotten."

Park nodded, with the look of a man pleased by what he saw. But Kijo had not said it to win the Chairman's approval. The spring drought of 1962 was the first of its kind in twenty-two years. The barley hump and the dry spell had fallen together, and the whole nation was in difficulty. That was why he had told Kia Industry, well ahead of time, to build water pumps, and why he had ordered the bad noodles crushed and stored clean.

"You always seem ready for a natural disaster. It was the same with that typhoon."

At the praise, Kijo said, "The noodles will go soggy. Please, eat."

"Ah. So they will."

In a good humor, Chairman Park took up his chopsticks with a slightly exaggerated flourish.

When the bowls were empty, the terms were settled. Kijo would deliver a thousand pumps to the government on a ten-year installment, interest-free, and with flour supplied to him he would make ramen and give it to the government. It was a loss from one end to the other. An ordinary businessman would have refused it. For Kijo, certain that the work still ahead of him would succeed and bring in great money, it was not a hard decision. He did not think in terms of earning more first and giving it back to society afterward. His view was that people ought to be helped when they were at their hardest. Time and the hour wait for no one—that was the philosophy of a man who had lived more than one life.

He left the Blue House, returned to the fairgrounds, and told Kim Chul-ho of the order for a thousand pumps. He told Lim Dae-hong as well: the government would supply flour, and ramen would be given away. Lim did not oppose the free gift. Unlike in the original history, he had been through hard suffering of his own, and his old distaste for charity and donation seemed to have worn away.

"Sir. Apart from the gift of ramen, I would like us to open a tasting stall in front of Seoul Station. It would put the noodles in front of the country people coming up for the fair."

"An excellent idea. Please see to it."

Lim knew that with food, flavor was flavor, but publicity mattered just as much.

Kijo went on to the Hankook Ilbo and settled the line of the next day's pieces. They would run two editorials side by side: one cheering the effort at industrialization of which the exposition was the emblem, and arguing that Korea could very well become a nation built on industry; the other hoping the government would answer, and answer effectively, for the villages suffering under drought and the barley hump. He believed that the world was changed not by people who only criticized with their mouths, but by people who kept a hope and worked without a word.

He was resting a moment in the publisher's office when Yeom Hong-seok, of the culture desk, knocked and came in.

"Sir. That student, Hwang Sok-yong—he's already withdrawn from school. I went to the house. They say he's run away."

Hell. A step too late. So his wandering had already begun.

"I'm sorry to ask it, Mr. Yeom, but go down to Jeolla and bring that student back."

"Jeolla, sir? Even his parents don't know where he's gone."

"He'll have left without a penny, so he'll have made for Jeolla, where there's farming to be had. He'll drift wherever the whim takes him, hire on as ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a day laborer, and earn his travel that way."

"Understood, sir. It may take quite a while."

"However long it takes, bring him back. You've read the boy's writing, haven't you? Isn't the gift remarkable?"

Reporter Yeom agreed. In 1960, while Hwang Sok-yong was still a student at Gyeongbok High School, the April 19 Revolution had broken out. He had gone into the demonstrations, and when his friend Ahn Jong-gil was shot dead by the police, he had published a posthumous collection of the boy's poems. In 1961 his story Day of Release had won a national high-school literary contest and drawn notice. The culture reporters, too, had read what the high-schooler Hwang Sok-yong wrote, and marveled that work like that could have come from a boy of his age.

"Yes, sir. I'll find Hwang Sok-yong, whatever it takes."

"Take plenty for expenses. Buy him a drink, and talk him around."

"Thank you, sir."

Kijo had given a special charge: bring Hwang Sok-yong in. He meant to haul the future great writer up to Seoul and set him serializing fiction in the Hankook Ilbo. He wanted to meet, in person, the young Hwang Sok-yong just setting out on a writer's road. He felt a kinship with a man who had lived a life as wide and various as his own, and he had an ambition besides—to gather writers of real gift and raise the Hankook Ilbo into the finest platform for popular literature in the country. Hwang wrote down what he had met with his own body. The prose was neither pedantic nor difficult. Kijo liked writers who wrote that way.