New Year's Morning

From early on the morning of February 4, 1954, the first day of the lunar year, villagers began coming to call at Ki-jo's house. He seated the elders who had come to offer their New Year greetings on the warmest part of the heated floor and made his own bow to them. Landlord though he was, he and his wife were ill at ease that people of such years should have to come and pay their respects.

Into the hand of every neighbor who found the house, he pressed a small paper envelope.

"What's this, Chief?" Kim Seogwang, come to offer his greetings, turned ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the envelope over in his fingers.

"Aspirin. If you're in pain, or if a fever comes on, please try it."

"Aspirin?"

"A remedy for pain and fever. Swallow one tablet at a time with water, and do not take more than three in a day. And if you have a wound, it is best you not take it at all."

With his weekly wages from the 7th Division, Ki-jo had gone to the U.S. Army PX and bought aspirin in quantity. Yeoncheon had no hospital and no pharmacy. When a head ached in Eundae-ri, there was nothing for it but to clench one's teeth and endure. He had portioned the medicine out at home, about twenty tablets to a household.

"Thank you, Chief. American medicine—that must be precious stuff. You bought it with what they pay you at the base, didn't you?"

"On the base it goes for a good deal less. It isn't so expensive."

"Feels like all we ever do is end up owing you, Chief. The whole village is grateful, and sorry for it. Same with you finding us that digging work under the American professor."

The digging was the work of helping Professor Movius excavate the ground around Jeongok-ri. The contract with Harvard had been signed, and twenty thousand dollars had been delivered into Ki-jo's hands. The people of Eundae-ri labored under the professor for twenty-five cents a day—what a dozen eggs cost in America. Cheap wages, from where Movius stood; a large sum, from where Eundae-ri stood. The labor was light besides, and the villagers felt they had come into a windfall. An excavation meant taking up the earth slowly and with care, so the relics would not be harmed, and that very slowness promised work that would last.

The twenty thousand dollars Harvard had paid him for the land, Ki-jo deposited in a bank in Seoul. No sooner were the dollars in the account than the branch manager attended him as reverently as if he were waiting upon the king.

"Should you receive any more dollars hereafter, we would be most grateful if you continued to place them with us."

And with that he brought out a gift in honor of so large a deposit. A bicycle.

"I sent word to the head office, and the president forwarded a Japanese bicycle, with instructions that it be presented to you."

It was not new. It was secondhand, and yet nearly as good as new. That same day Ki-jo rode it from Seoul all the way down to Eundae-ri, and there he gave it to his brother-in-law, Ma-ryang.

"No more borrowing Professor Kim Moon-hwan's. You ride this."

"Is it really all right for me to take it, Brother?"

"Of course. The moment the bank put it in my hands, I knew it ought to go to you."

"Thank you, Brother."

A bicycle of his own made Ma-ryang as glad as a child. Watching him, Ki-jo thought, In the fifties, a bicycle was as good as a private car to ordinary folk.

Only after he had received every last villager did he sit down with the family to tteokguk, the rice-cake soup of New Year's morning. The broth was as thin and plain as ever. He missed, as he always missed, the deep savor of MSG.

"Brother-in-law, you said you'd be going to Japan before long, didn't you?"

"I did. After the holiday, General Martin said he would send us. I expect we'll go by transport plane."

"Then what about your work for the Army?"

"We're going under General Martin's orders. Civilian employees do as the American military tells them."

"I see. I envy you, brother-in-law."

Soon-young nursed a fierce longing for anywhere beyond Korea. That her husband and her brother-in-law were bound for Japan left her simply envious.

"Dear, while you're there, could you bring back a bolt of cotton cloth?" Sunrye asked.

"You'll make clothes?"

"Yes. Yeongsu is shooting up, and his things are all worn out."

"All right. I'll be sure to buy it."

In those days Japanese cotton, its thread spun and its cloth woven on the newest machines, was far finer than anything made at home. That Sunrye should set her heart on it was only natural.

"Brother-in-law, buy the cotton—and buy silk, too. So Sister and I can each have a silk hanbok made."

Soon-young's notions ran on a larger scale than her sister's.

"Enough of that foolishness. Brother isn't going over there to enjoy himself." Ma-ryang cut her short.

"He's right. What's all this harping on silk hanbok? Your husband put it very well."

"Why not? We're going to be rich, aren't we? A brick factory going up, the land sold. Next year the rents start coming in, don't they? And a silk outfit is too much to ask? We'll be driving our own car one of these days, just you watch."

With that particular optimism of hers, Soon-young was seeing the future exactly as it would unfold. Ma-ryang and Sunrye, though, looked at her as they might have looked at a heedless child.

"All right. My sister-in-law has a point. If I can find the time, I'll buy a bolt, so you and your sister can have silk made up."

"Thank you, brother-in-law. I knew it—you're the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠only one who understands me!"

She looked at Ki-jo almost as she might have looked at a father.

When the meal was done, he pasted two sheets of paper to the door, sticking them fast with cooked rice.

He was endlessly fond of the letters. Yeongsu had penciled them himself and colored them in with the crayons General Martin had given the boy.

"Yeongsu. From this spring on, I have a feeling wealth and good fortune are going to come pouring down."

"Father, they say there's a phrase. A gentleman loves wealth, but he takes it by the proper path."

Ki-jo started. The boy had come out with words he himself did not know.

"What does it mean?"

"It's what Zigong said. A gentleman may love riches, but there is a proper way he must follow to acquire them."

"Where did you read that?"

"Yeongbae's father said it was an old book he had at home, and he gave it to me. It was called Hyeonmun."

"You read it yourself? And you understood it?"

"Yes. So many of the characters were ones I knew that it read easily."

Every time he took the measure of Yeongsu's mind, the astonishment struck him fresh. He saw, too, that in his eleventh life, too pressed by the mere business of keeping them fed, he had never truly given the boy the attention he was due. A child this bright, and I never knew. A heaviness rose and filled his chest.

He walked out to the edge of the village with Ma-ryang, and they smoked. They tried their Japanese on one another, calling the feel of the language back into their mouths.

"Brother. This fellow Oguchi—can we trust him?"

"He's a graduate student at Tokyo Imperial University, studying East Asian history. Conscripted under the Japanese, he says, and stationed in Pyongyang."

"So that's how he came to speak our tongue."

"While he was posted in Pyongyang, they say he fell hard for a kisaeng there."

Ma-ryang nodded.

In the course of bargaining with MacLean, Ki-jo had drawn all the closer to Oguchi. The man's full name was Oguchi Yoshinori. Oguchi was grateful that Ki-jo had preserved his dignity to the very last, and Ki-jo was glad of the chance to make connections in Japan. Perhaps it was simply that, in his eleventh life, he had lived all the way to ninety. He no longer hated Japan as he had hated it in his youth. There were practical reasons as well. Whatever he set his hand to from here on, machines and materials alike, a great deal of it would have to come out of Japan. Even Professor Kim Moon-hwan was already drawing on his own Japanese acquaintances to procure parts for the brick factory. Korea in the 1950s had no industrial foundation whatsoever. A man might wish to buy domestic goods and find there was nothing domestic to buy.

"Oguchi lives in Tokyo, I'm told. We'll impose on him there, within reason."

"An American officer is coming along too. Will that be all right?"

"He won't be difficult. Whatever we buy, I doubt he'll look too closely."

When the time came to bring the MSG home, Ki-jo meant to change the sacks—shift it into fertilizer bags and the like. An American officer was no customs man. He would never tear a sack open to see. He had been given nothing more than the duty of escorting the two of them. The man who would matter, when they bought in Japan, was Oguchi. However serviceable their Japanese, neither Ki-jo nor Ma-ryang could ever know the ground as a Japanese knew it. They would need his help.

As he grew friendly with Oguchi, he had come to know the man's circumstances as a matter of course. He seemed to come from a family of better than middle means. His parents kept a rice shop handed down through the generations, and in Japan, where the price of rice had always stood high, they must have laid up a fair fortune. From the moment he heard that Oguchi had gone in and out of the kisaeng houses in Pyongyang, Ki-jo had thought the man must be comfortably off. So he had asked whether, when he later had cause to visit Japan, it would be all right to presume on him, and Oguchi had agreed without hesitation.

"The Americans said they would purchase the fertilizer and the pesticides. We concentrate on grass for the golf course, and on MSG."

"Understood."

"It has to be good grass. Of everything we're building, the golf course is what will catch the eye."

"No way to bring the sod itself, I suppose?"

"No. We have to buy seed. And a variety that stands up to winter. Grass is weak against the cold to begin with."

Ma-ryang nodded.

When they had finished talking, Ki-jo rode out to the brick factory on the bicycle, Ma-ryang at the pedals. He put six hundred aspirin tablets into Lee Bongok's hands.

"If a worker falls ill and it looks mild, give them this. If it seems worse, send them to a hospital. And never give it to anyone with a wound."

"Understood, sir."

Bongok was carrying out a plant manager's duties admirably. He gave her, as well, beef he had bought at the American base. It was a pitiful amount for three hundred people, but enough to lend a pot at least the feeling of soup with meat in it.

Professor Kim Moon-hwan had gone up to the family house in Seoul to keep the holiday. Ki-jo stepped into the Hoffmann kiln, its form by now nearly complete, and looked around the interior, his mind on the coal he would bring up from Incheon.

Lee Seong-sun, who had sold him the ground, still had no notion that a staggering quantity of coal lay buried beneath it. Once the coal came to light, Seong-sun might resist him fiercely. There was an answer to that. All that would be left to Lee Seong-sun was to strike the earth and repent. Even so, he would be paid no less than three million hwan for the land. As consolation, that ought to be enough.

He was walking the works alone, turning this and that over, when Bongok came up to him.

"Sir, the workers have prepared a gift for you."

"A gift?"

"Come outside a moment, if you would."

He stepped out of the factory, and there was what they had made ready for him.

"When did you ever make a thing like that?"

"Lumber was lying all over the American base, so we brought some of it back. Borrowed a little paint, too."

"Thank you. Truly. It's a splendid sign."

Ki-jo bent at the waist and bowed to the workers, and applause broke over him.

"Sir, please take this as well."

Bongok held out a nameplate in both hands.

"Ha—the factory isn't even finished, and already a nameplate. Thank you. I'll put it to good use."

The New Year's gift the refugees had made for him moved him deeply. He could feel the hope they were hanging on the brick factory, and the loyalty. A strange feeling. Not once did it occur to me that I might meet people like these.

One by one he looked into the faces of all whom his return ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠had bound to him. People he had not even known existed, in that eleventh life; people he might have passed in the road and never thought to notice. They were tied to him now, and tightly.

He made the promise standing before two hundred and eighty-nine workers. They clapped ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and raised a cheer, and he swore to himself that he would keep it, however he must.

The factory yard was still full of the sound of hands when a car drew up near the gate. The man who stepped out was an American in sunglasses and a trench coat.

Frank.

Ki-jo knew him at a glance.