Land, Capital, and Labor (1)
Lee Ki-jo had come from 2019 prepared to live a twelfth life, but the Korea of 1953 was anything but tractable. Of the three things a man needed in order to build wealth—land, capital, and labor—he had been able to secure the land, and a vast extent of it. The other two would not stand behind him, and so the land could generate no wealth at all. He held the ground, yet he had neither the capital to develop it nor the labor to work it.
Had it been the 2000s—or even as late as the 1960s—he could have sold off part of the land, or left it with a bank as collateral, and raised the cash to develop the rest. In 1953, with the war barely over, no such thing was possible. To lay eyes on a bank at all, a man had to go fifty kilometers to Seoul, and even then there was not a clerk who would glance at collateral lying north of the thirty-eighth parallel.
If he could so much as muster labor, he might reclaim the wasted plain of Eundae-ri and farm it in earnest from the following year. That, too, was beyond reach. In the summer of 1953, hard upon the armistice, no one was willing to cross the thirty-eighth parallel and settle on former northern land with North Korea all but on the doorstep. And it was no use imagining that Lee Ki-jo, Yang Soonrye, and their four-year-old son could tend nearly four hundred acres by themselves.
“I’m going down to Deokjeong-ri for a bit.”
He said it to his wife.
“Go carefully.”
The trip would be fifty kilometers there and back, every step of it on foot.
“It may take three or four days. Look after Yeong-su. And at night, be sure you bar the door.”
“I will. Go safely.”
Soonrye knew he was going in search of people to break the land, and she did not press him for the details. Instead she drew a little cloth pouch of pin money from inside her skirt and pressed it into his hand.
“Have a bowl of makgeolli with them while you talk things over.”
“Thank you.”
Ki-jo looked at her with a tender warmth and smiled.
He walked for six hours and came at last to the Deokjeong-ri where he had once lived. He had left the house at five in the morning; by the time he stood before Deokjeong Station, it was already nearing noon.
He went into the station and sought out the stationmaster first. After the war ended, the man had returned to his post at Deokjeong Station.
“Well, I’ll be—look who it is! Ki-jo, you’re alive! Is the child growing well?”
“Yes, sir. Your family came through safely, I hope?”
In the days right after the war, asking after one another’s survival was the whole of a greeting.
“Starting over as a tenant, are you? I heard the land you used to work has changed hands. They say the whole family was wiped out by the People’s Army, and some relative took the fields…”
“No, sir. It isn’t that.”
“Ah… then you’ve come to the right place.”
The stationmaster brightened as he said it. He assumed Ki-jo had come looking for a porter’s place, unloading freight. They happened to be short of hands, and the timing seemed fortunate.
“I only came to pay my respects, sir.”
“Is that so? You don’t need work?”
Instead of answering, Ki-jo made a request.
“Stationmaster, might I borrow a suit?”
“A suit?”
If he meant to gather people, his clothes had to be good. He wanted to look clear and prosperous, like a man who had recovered a great estate.
Ki-jo explained his circumstances.
“You got your grandfather’s land back? Congratulations! Even when the world turns upside down, a lucky man lives—and fortune finds him besides.”
As it happened, the stationmaster had a suit set aside at the station. He had attended a Railway Bureau function at Seoul Station that day and come straight back to his duties.
“You’re about my height, so the length ought to be close enough. Mind you, people are hard to come by these days… You know how it is. The young men were all dragged off to the war and died, and half of those who left Deokjeong still haven’t come back. Nothing left but the old.”
“Yes, I know, sir. I’ll just step over to the barbershop.”
“You do that. But have you eaten?”
“Yes, sir.”
Ki-jo went straight to the barbershop near the station and had his hair and beard cut. He even had pomade worked through his hair, and he returned to Deokjeong Station neat and trim. When he put on the suit the stationmaster had lent him, he looked for all the world like a young landlord, crisp from collar to hem.
“Can a man look this fine? Hahaha.”
The stationmaster regarded him with open satisfaction.
“Thank you, sir. May I borrow the clothes for a few days?”
“Wear them as if they were your own, and don’t think twice about it.”
Ki-jo went first to the tenant farmers working under the new landlord.
They were conservative men who disliked any gamble that might overturn a life, but the rice-rent the new landlord had laid on them—the yearly measure of grain a tenant paid for the use of the land—was so harsh that resentment ran deep.
“If you come to Yeoncheon, I won’t take a grain of rent the first year. And the second year, I’ll take only seven-tenths of what you’re paying now.”
Ki-jo’s offer was extraordinary. Endure this one year of breaking the ground, and the next year they could keep every grain of rice they harvested; from the year after that, they would owe only a fair rent.
Word spread through the neighboring villages that a young landlord out of Yeoncheon was seeking tenants on generous terms. People who had been searching for some hope, now that the war was over, came flocking. They trusted Ki-jo, who had been a tenant himself, and they trusted the name he had made in Deokjeong-ri.
Among them was a Mr. Kim who had worked beside him at Deokjeong Station, and whom Ki-jo had called elder brother. Ki-jo sat with him on the wooden platform of a makgeolli house, and they talked over cloudy rice wine and kimchi.
“Brother, I’m so glad to see you alive again.”
“I’m glad too. I was born with enough luck to survive from the days of Japanese rule and scrape along somehow, but I always wondered where you’d vanished to, with that little boy of yours.”
“Brother, would you think of working with me?”
Ki-jo asked it as he poured makgeolli into Kim’s rough earthenware bowl.
“Ah, the truth is I came looking because I’d heard about you. I’m only grateful you’d say such a thing. To a cripple with a ruined leg like me…”
“What are you saying, brother? It doesn’t hinder you in the fields at all. A lucky man like you ought to be at my side, so I can borrow a little of that luck myself. Hahaha.”
“Thank you, Ki-jo. Truly…”
For four days Ki-jo went about Yangju and took pledge after pledge. He drew no line of age or sex among those who promised to work his land. A man in his sixties who had lost his children in the war, a woman who had lost her husband, a child who had lost both parents—if they had the will to live, he took them all.
When at last he had found every hand he needed, Ki-jo returned to Deokjeong Station and gave the suit back to the stationmaster. In return for the loan of the clothes, he offered the man a thousand-hwan note. It was the last of the money he had brought to Yangju to hire people, what remained after the spending was done.
“I don’t need it. You’ve got land and no money, haven’t you?”
The stationmaster remembered the state Ki-jo had been in when he arrived four days earlier, and he had heard by rumor the terms the man was offering. He understood the situation exactly.
“Put that money away, I tell you. When you’ve made good later on, buy me a drink then.”
Ki-jo bowed low. He was so grateful for the stationmaster’s kindness that the bow strained his neck.
“I can tell at a glance, from the look of them, when someone comes looking for work. If a person like that arrives at Deokjeong Station, I’ll send them your way.”
“Thank you, Stationmaster…”
Ki-jo bent at the waist before him, twice, and then a third time.
“A train goes up to Yeoncheon today. Take it when you go home. I’ll speak to the conductor.”
“Thank you, sir. When I succeed, I’ll be sure to come and see you.”
“Heh. Listen to you, talking like a man bound for the far ends of the earth—and you live three or four stations off. You’ll succeed soon enough.”
Ki-jo was grateful for a kindness that asked nothing in return, and curious, all the same, about the reason for it. The stationmaster had always been good to him. From the first day Ki-jo had come looking for work, the man had never spoken a single stingy word. He was about to ask when the stationmaster spoke first.
“Look after Soonrye.”
“Sir?”
“I never said this to you or to her, but Soonrye is a distant relation of mine. Whenever she passed in front of the station, I used to think how uncannily she resembled my father’s cousin. I looked into it—and isn’t she that cousin’s own child?”
Ki-jo was astonished. Had he never returned to live this life again, it was a thing neither he nor Soonrye would ever have known. He could not begin to guess how many times removed the kinship ran, but even blood that thin was a glad thing to come upon far from home.
“Thank you, Stationmaster. The next time I come to pay my respects, I’ll bring my wife.”
“No, no. Nothing of the sort… Soonrye won’t remember me. I only saw her face once, when she was small.”
Ki-jo took the train the stationmaster had told him of and went back to Yeoncheon. A week later, labor began to move onto his land.
The tenants who had come on the strength of his promise took one look at the plain of Eundae-ri, little better than wasteland, and sighed before they did anything else. They could not see how such ground was to be reclaimed in time to farm it from the coming year. But if they only turned the soil well, the rice that came up next year would be entirely theirs, and so they put their strength into the work.
Unlike other landlords, Ki-jo labored beside the tenants and sweated with them. Soonrye was forever busy preparing the between-meal food, so that her husband and the tenants would not go hungry. With their son Yeong-su she packed mixed-grain rice and kimchi into baskets, balanced the baskets on her head, and went searching from one stretch of the fields to another, sharing the food out.
The tenants thought well of the landlord’s young wife, too—modest, and kind of heart. And the little boy was so bright-eyed, and so proper in his manners, that respect and affection gathered around the whole of Ki-jo’s family.
The village of Eundae-ri that Ki-jo had founded was a good place to live, save for how near it stood to North Korea. Perhaps that was why. People began to crowd into Eundae-ri, and little by little the village grew.