The Crane
The car Frank was driving brought Ki-jo to the Yongsan landing—the very stretch of river where, in the future, Wonhyo Bridge would rise. It was one of the points where U.S. Army engineers were scooping riverbank silt with a crane.
Ki-jo stepped out and stood with Frank, watching the great machine dredge the riverbed. Frank, beside him, slipped a sheet of paper into his hand.
“An official letter from Harvard.”
Ki-jo took the copy and ran his eye down the page. Frank went on.
“Harvard means to take students from Korea, and they’re asking the American embassy to help with the visas.”
Ki-jo nodded.
“Officially it says they’ll accept undergraduates recommended by Ambassador Briggs. But down at the bottom it also says selection of the students is left entirely to one Lee Ki-jo, a Korean national. You see that?”
“Yes. So it does.”
“Briggs’s recommendation is only a formality. In the end, whoever you put forward gets in. One student this year, two next year—that sort of thing. Over the next four years they’ll take ten in all.”
Frank took off his sunglasses.
“How on earth did you get yourself into an arrangement like this with Harvard? I’m honestly curious.”
“I asked them to take exchange students in lieu of a cut on the price of the land.”
“You sold land to Harvard?”
“I did. Selling the land is how it came about.”
Frank let out an incredulous laugh and looked at him, then turned his gaze back to the riverbank where the big crane stood.
“Everything’s moving along just the way you planned. You’re going to fire bricks in those kilns by the water, aren’t you?”
Where he was looking, the small kilns of Cheongsan Brick were going up.
“That’s right. Low-priced brick will come out of kilns at ten sites in all.”
Frank whistled, impressed.
“You’re planning to carpet-bomb the brick market.”
Ki-jo was aiming higher than that. Not a carpet bombing—he meant to drop something on the order of a nuclear bomb into the market.
“What’s your goal?” Frank asked, watching the Han’s quiet ripples.
“My goal?”
“If all you wanted was money, you wouldn’t have gone into brick. You’d have lobbied the government and gone into the Three Whites, I’d think…”
Frank was naming the most profitable business in Korea in 1954. The Three Whites: flour, sugar, and cotton textiles. Every company of any standing in the country had already piled in. Flour was led by Daehan Flour Mills, with Chosun Flour and Cheil Flour beside it. Sugar was headed by Samsung—Cheil Jedang—with Dongyang and Samyang in its wake. Cotton textiles, too, were locked up by formidable firms in an oligopoly.
Ki-jo had no intention at all of entering the Three Whites. The producers there had built a cartel even more fearsome than the one in brick.
Korea Flour Milling Industry Association
Korea Sugar Association
Korea Textile Association
Those bodies were already formed, and they took in aid commodities that arrived from the United States at next to nothing and extracted outrageous margins. Because the goods had to be allocated by the government, collusion between politics and business was indispensable, and to protect those profits they shut any new firm out.
Better to do something else than step into the Three Whites. After the 1950s the trade would slide downhill anyway. If there was an opening left in it, it was only the seasoning business, which no one yet dared to produce.
Ki-jo turned Frank’s question over again. Frank had asked him his goal, and in the same breath why he wasn’t going into the Three Whites.
Is he trying to line up a loan for me…?
He warned himself not to drink the kimchi broth before the rice was on the table, and still he left the possibility open.
The United States was already planning to scale back grants to Korea and to support light industry centered on daily necessities. The Syngman Rhee government, by contrast, wanted chemical plants and power stations, and was asking Washington for loans that could produce industrial goods. The disagreement between the two governments would turn into serious friction. Rumors of a full withdrawal of U.S. forces would circulate, and an angry America would cut off aid oil for forty days.
For Korea’s economic development, Rhee’s government was right and Washington was wrong—but this was not the moment to argue the point. If he could only secure American credit, building an MSG plant would be a matter of time. Fifty or sixty thousand dollars would be enough to put up a Miwon factory.
Ki-jo answered Frank.
“My goal is to make enough daily necessities for Korea. I don’t need to make a fortune. I just want Koreans to be able to get, without trouble, the things they need to live.”
He had spoken entirely from an American point of view.
“Then you think the way we do.”
Frank nodded. Americans of that time sighed at Koreans who could not even make soap or toothpaste properly. They thought the Rhee government foolish for chasing heavy and chemical industry when it could not yet produce the most basic things of daily life.
“The bricks you’re making are daily necessities too, when you come down to it.”
“Yes, they are. And if I get the chance, I’d like to build a seasoning plant.”
“A seasoning plant?”
“Korea is desperately short of ordinary goods. The shortage of food is especially severe.”
“What does a food shortage have to do with making seasoning?”
Frank looked puzzled. True to a man in intelligence, he was logical, and the moment a question arose he asked it. Ki-jo was used to that. They had met once at the New Year, and he had taken the measure of the man’s character well enough.
“East or West, when you want flavor in food you use meat or vegetables.”
“Sure. You need a meat stock or a vegetable stock.”
“But Korea can’t even grow enough grain for its own people to eat, so it can’t dream of raising livestock for meat.”
“True. Meat animals only get raised where there’s a surplus of farm produce.”
“That’s why I want the seasoning business. Make a chemical seasoning, and you only need a little meat in the stock. It makes up for the ingredients you don’t have.”
At that, Frank nodded hard. It would take decades before Korea could raise enough cattle and pigs to put sufficient meat on its own tables. Livestock consumed far more grain than people did. The country was small, short of pasture, and could not properly grow even what its people ate, let alone grain for animals. In that situation, seasoning was a magic powder that saved the enormous resources livestock would otherwise devour.
“Seasoning… that wouldn’t be a bad idea either.”
Frank nodded again.
“Koreans eat a great deal of soup. In Western terms, it’s soup at every meal. Using a chemical seasoning is the only way to make that soup taste good while using less meat stock and less vegetable stock.”
“I see. It’s a good idea. It has value.”
Ki-jo marked the words. It has value. Was Frank looking for candidates to build daily-necessity companies on American government credit? He thought Frank might well report home that a seasoning plant in Korea had value. Washington, locked in a contest of wills with the Korean government over the nature of the loans, might choose to arrange low-interest money directly to private firms instead of lending to the state—to prove that it was right, and to pressure a Korean government that would not follow its lead.
It was with that calculation that Ki-jo had given Frank a calculated answer. He was interested in the seasoning business in any case. But he never let the word loan pass his lips. If he once showed that he was hoping for American government credit, his footing with Frank would tilt, all at once, into a relationship of patron and dependent. He wanted cooperation. He did not want a tie in which he asked favors and received grace.
Frank seemed to have ordered his thoughts while he looked at the Han. He swept his eyes upriver and down, then spoke.
“The Han looks badly short of bridges. A river this size ought to have six of them at the very least.”
Ki-jo nearly laughed out loud. The last time he had seen the Han, before he came back, there had been thirty bridges. Americans had not yet taken the measure of Korea’s potential. Give this people capital and technology, and they had every ability to catch Japan in short order—and still no one saw it. Of course, there were Koreans, too, who believed they could never catch Japan.
“We’ll have to build thirty bridges at least.”
Frank snorted.
“For thirty bridges, Seoul would need a population of ten million or more.”
“It might get there. I think it very well can.”
“Ha. President Lee, you are a powerful optimist. For that to happen, wouldn’t Korea first have to be able to make its own daily necessities?”
“Then we’ll make them. I can.”
Ki-jo answered with complete confidence. That was his appeal: give us the capital, and I will build whatever you like.
Ki-jo came back from the talk with Frank in a good mood. At bottom the two of them suited each other. Ki-jo was cautious and yet bold; Frank doubted everything, and yet, once reason convinced him, he knew how to back a man without hesitation. Something passed between them.
He had no sooner set a foot inside the office, still carrying the good of that conversation, than he felt something off. A strange fragrance hung in the room. The looks from his department heads and from the presidents of the firms he dealt with were not ordinary either.
I’ve smelled this somewhere before…
He searched his memory and came up with nothing.
“President Lee has a lot of fans, doesn’t he?”
“And a real beauty, that one.”
The client presidents tossed out a line apiece and laughed. Ki-jo tilted his head and went to his desk. A handkerchief lay on it—the one embroidered with the name Mi-hyang, the one he had thrown away the moment it was given to him. Only then did he understand that the scent filling the office was that woman’s perfume.
Why would she…
He remembered the day he first saw Mi-hyang. She had smiled brightly and fixed him with an intense look. She had played at being smitten, telling him how impressive he was, but Ki-jo had felt no feeling in her eyes at all. When a man and a woman fall for each other, heat gathers in the gaze. Mi-hyang’s eyes held only a cold, professional confidence. Some men, faced with a beauty wearing a look like that, might mistake it for love. Ki-jo did not.
“Mr. Shim?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would you pick up this handkerchief and throw it outside?”
He did not want so much as to touch it. At that, the client presidents raised a fuss.
“Ah, if you’re throwing it out, give it to me, Boss Lee!”
“Our President Lee has high standards, doesn’t he? A peerless beauty leaves her handkerchief and he treats it so cold. Heartless, I tell you…”
Shim Hansu hurried to the desk and picked the handkerchief up. Beneath it, a letter came into view. Ki-jo spoke so that the letter’s existence would not be made much of.
“Clear that away too. I’d like it burned with the handkerchief.”
“Yes, sir!”
Hansu had never seen that anger in his boss’s eyes. He snatched up the letter and went out to the back yard.
“Boss Lee, you’re really going to burn it?”
Regret lay thick on the client presidents’ faces. Ki-jo made no answer and went out the back door. Hansu, already there, was burning letter and handkerchief with a match. Ki-jo came up beside him.
“I’m sorry to put you to work like this.”
“Not at all, sir. I didn’t like that woman either. Strange, isn’t it? I like a pretty woman as much as the next man. She just felt wrong. Heh.”
Hansu laughed carefully, watching Ki-jo’s face. It eased Ki-jo a little to see that Hansu, too, felt an instinctive wariness toward the woman called Mi-hyang.
“If she comes again, I want you to take the lead and turn her out. I’m asking you.”
“Don’t worry, sir. She won’t get in a second time.”
Ki-jo watched the letter and the handkerchief burn high and could not shake the unclean feeling. For no reason he could name, he simply disliked the woman called Mi-hyang.