Busan Station
Knock, knock, knock.
Kijo was in the darkroom printing photographs when the sound reached him, and he drew back the blackout curtain hung across the door. He had only just finished rinsing the prints and hanging them on the line to dry.
Sunrye stood outside.
"You're all finished, then?"
"All done. Want a look at the grass pictures?"
They were photographs of the turf on the Seventh Division golf course. Sunrye laughed as if her husband had made a joke.
"I'll look later. Han-su and the others are waiting. Come on out."
"Ah. Is it time to eat already?"
Kijo did most of his photographic work at dawn. He would rise around five, develop the film, and make his prints, and the quiet of it settled him. He had been turning out pictures for six hundred people, which was why the turf photographs bound for Japan had been left until the very last.
"I'll wash my hands and be right there."
He dried his hands and stepped into the inner room. Han-su, Dae-ik, and Hyeon-su had been sitting at the low table, and they rose.
"Sit, all of you. Feels as if I dragged you over for breakfast for nothing."
Kijo took his place, and Han-su spoke.
"Hyeon-su's a Cheongsan man now. He's got to taste what the madam cooks. How can you call yourself Cheongsan if you haven't eaten her food? Ha!"
"That's right. Eat once at the elder madam's table and once at the younger madam's, and then you're a true Cheongsan man."
Dae-ik was agreeing with him. The elder madam was Sunrye, and the younger was Soon-young. The two of them often invited the staff home and fed them.
"There's hardly a thing on the table, and listen to you... Come on, let's eat."
Kijo lifted his spoon, and the others followed. For all his talk of nothing prepared, a nicely fried egg sat before each of their bowls, and the three of them wore the look of men who had been served a banquet. In the nineteen-fifties, when eggs were scarce, a fried egg was a side dish treated like a tonic.
Sunrye came in from the kitchen with scorched-rice tea.
"I'm frying another egg apiece out there, so eat up, and then eat again."
"Thank you, ma'am!"
They bowed as if in chorus, then lifted the eggs carefully with their chopsticks and brought them to their mouths. Watching the three bachelors of the Cheongsan office light up over a single egg, Kijo smiled in spite of himself. An egg, of all things.
He quietly slid the plate in front of him over to Hyeon-su. Hyeon-su started and tried to refuse, and Han-su spoke up.
"Eat your fill, Hyeon-su. You're off to Japan soon. Once you're there, you'll miss Korean food something fierce."
He was looking out for the younger man. Kijo had arranged for Hyeon-su to stay in the house where Han-su and Dae-ik lived, and the two bachelors who stood for Cheongsan had taken in the new one warmly. Han-su, who had dug the hardest into Hyeon-su's background, looked after him most of all, because he knew the young man's circumstances better than anyone. Han-su, Dae-ik, and Hyeon-su had all lost their parents. Sharing that grief, they lived together like brothers.
When breakfast was over, Han-su and Dae-ik left first for the office. Kijo took Hyeon-su back to the darkroom, showed him the dried photographs of the turf, and gave him his charge.
"When you get to Japan, deliver these to Mr. Oguchi Yasumasa before anything else. He'll get you hired at the Ajinomoto plant."
Kijo had already written ahead. The photographs and a report would go by hand, and he had asked that the man who brought them be taken on at the factory. Yasumasa's reply had come back agreeing, and the visa had been settled easily through Frank. When Kijo told him plainly that he meant to send someone to learn how MSG was made, Frank had been pleased and had put his weight behind it. Nothing stood in the way of placing Jeon Hyeon-su at Ajinomoto.
"You're confident in your Japanese?"
"Yes, sir. So many of the technical books come out of Japan that I haven't had a chance to forget it."
Kijo nodded. Hyeon-su belonged to the generation schooled under Japanese rule. Speak Korean in the classroom and a teacher beat you, then hung a placard around your neck that read Japanese Only, and you could not take it off until you informed on some other student who had used Korean. He had come through that wretched time.
Kijo slipped the thoroughly dried photographs into a document envelope, sealed it, and gave Hyeon-su the rest of his instructions.
"Be good to the older hands who are near retirement, and track down the ones who have already left. Don't be stingy with money where they're concerned."
"Yes, sir."
"Especially if you find a retiree in real financial trouble, you let me know. I won't begrudge a thousand dollars at a time."
Japan's income per person then ran somewhere between three and four hundred dollars. That was higher than Korea's, which had yet to reach a hundred, but only about a tenth of the four or five thousand an American earned. A thousand dollars was a great sum even to a Japanese. Still, Kijo added a caution.
"Just don't try to solve everything with money. You have to become close to them as one man to another. What matters first is that a technician is won by your sincerity and your character and comes to want to help you. The money can follow afterward, as thanks. It won't be too late."
"Yes, sir. I'll remember."
"The money will reach you after you arrive."
Frank had agreed to see to the delivery.
"Why not go up to Yeoncheon today and come back? You ought to see your grandmother, and pay your respects to your brother and his wife, before you go."
Hyeon-su was to sail from Busan for Japan in three days.
"I will."
"Take the truck that runs back to the plant from Cheongnyangni."
"Yes, sir."
And with that, Kijo finished the preparations for Hyeon-su's journey to Japan.
A few days after Hyeon-su left for Japan, word came from Oh Yang-soo in Busan. Yang-soo was working to launch Cheongsan Shipping, but he had run into several problems and was having a hard time of it. Kijo heard him out, then said he would come down himself and they could go over the details then.
He had known a shipping company would not be easy to get off the ground. Business in Seoul had forced him to leave the whole of it in Oh Yang-soo's hands for the time being, but it was impossible for Yang-soo to carry all that weight alone. Shipping was a large, tangled trade, and it turned on three principal parties. First was the carrier, the line that moved a customer's cargo to its destination in vessels of its own. Second was the shipper, who handed over his goods to be delivered. Third was the forwarder, the intermediary between the two. Insurers and banks wedged themselves into the gaps, and the government had a part of its own to play. Knowing that tangle, Kijo could already guess what was giving Oh Yang-soo trouble.
Since he was going to Busan to see him, he decided to take the family along. Work had left him no time with them, and he had yet to lay eyes on the ship Roberts had sent. He would settle Yang-soo's difficulties, see the ship, and spend a little time with his own, all in one journey.
At dawn on Sunday, the fourth of July, Kijo and his family boarded a Busan train at Seoul Station. Thirteen hours later they pulled in.
As the train entered the station, Sunrye started and turned to him.
"Oh! Busan Station..."
It was little more than a ruin.
"It burned last November. They still haven't rebuilt it..."
Living in Yeoncheon, where there was no radio and a newspaper was hard to come by, Sunrye had never heard of the great fire. The Busan Station she remembered from the day she last left the city was gone, burned away entirely. No wonder she was stunned.
"The Busan post office is gone, too..."
She said it with a pang.
Kijo, for his part, remembered the great Busan fire with a clarity no one else in the carriage could share. He had seen it with his own eyes, in the life that came before. The flames had started in Yeongju-dong, where the refugees lived packed together. Born among the shanties and the makeshift tents, the fire leapt outward in an instant, and the dry weather carried it. It burned through Yeongju-dong, Jungang-dong, Donggwang-dong, and Daecheong-dong. In a single night the heart of Busan, the station among it, was reduced to ash. He had stood with his family and watched the city blaze the whole night through, and Sunrye had been just as shocked then, and just as heartbroken.
They climbed down into the disorder of the station, where a temporary building had been thrown up, and set off toward Bumin-dong, where Oh Yang-soo lived. Once they were past the burned quarter and into streets that still kept their old face, Sunrye's expression eased a little. The days before the Korean War seemed to rise in her—the time they had come to Busan empty-handed and scraped through—and she gazed out over the city, lost in the feeling of it. Yeongsu, seeing again a place that was as good as home, began to brighten too.
They were nearly at Yang-soo's house when Kijo stopped before a house with long, deep eaves. It was the very one. On their first day in Busan the rain had come down in sheets and they had nowhere to go, and he had gathered little Yeongsu into his arms and ducked under those eaves with Sunrye.
The memory was just as sharp for her. She drew Yeongsu in under the eaves and turned to him.
"Do you remember, dear? We stood right here, just like this..."
She was smiling, but tears stood in her eyes.
"How could I forget? I had Yeongsu in my arms, like this. Up you go."
He scooped up Yeongsu, grown so much bigger now, and set his back flat against the wall.
"Do you remember what I said then?"
"You were smiling with your whole face. You said, Even so, I can't tell you how glad I am that the family hasn't been scattered, that we're still living together. I'd rather live like beggars than be parted. Let's not separate. Let's go on together. That's what you told me."
She had it word for word. Shame sent the blood to Kijo's face, and Sunrye burst out laughing.
"And it turned out just the way you said. We weren't parted, and we didn't become beggars."
"I... suppose that's so? Ha."
Yeongsu, who had no memory of that day, looked from his mother to his father, utterly at a loss.
At last, Yang-soo's house. Kijo opened the gate and stepped in, and the family came hurrying out to welcome them.
"You made it, Kijo. No—I suppose I ought to call you President now."
"What kind of talk is that, Brother? Call me the way you always have."
"Shall I, then?"
While the two men had each other by the arm, Sunrye and Yang-soo's wife, Jeong-hui, caught one another in an embrace and broke down, overcome with joy.
"Sister, I've missed you..."
"You came, Sunrye. Thank heaven. Thank heaven you've done well."
After the greetings, the two families sat on the broad wooden floor of the hall, peeling Korean melons that had been chilling in cold water, and talked.
"Just now, when I saw my little sister come in through the gate with her husband, the old days nearly undid me. Remember? You came to return the umbrella you'd borrowed from my husband..."
"Come now. Listen to her, hauling out ancient history."
Yang-soo chided Jeong-hui, and Kijo stepped in.
"Not at all, Brother. I'll never forget how grateful we were when Sister gave us those rice balls. Even now, the sight of one brings that day back. I can still taste them."
"It's true, Brother-in-law. She slipped me two pieces of yakgwa on the sly—those honeyed cakes—and she said a mother has to eat well if she's going to have milk for the baby, so don't you give them to your husband, you eat them yourself..."
Sunrye could not finish. Her voice broke.
"There, you see? You had to go and start on the old stories..."
Yang-soo scolded his wife again, and Sunrye wiped her eyes.
"It's all right, Brother-in-law. They're memories we can smile about now."
After the recollections had poured out and supper was done, Kijo and Yang-soo said they would take a short walk and stepped outside. The moment they were clear of the house, Yang-soo shared a light with him and turned to business.
"Hard finding seamen, and hard finding shippers. Nowhere near enough men who've sailed a deep-sea freighter."
Kijo nodded. During the war nearly every vessel had been requisitioned, and with hardly any trade to speak of, almost no one had experience on an ocean-going freighter. He had expected as much. Even Yang-soo, who had worked as a pilot in Busan Harbor, would not find a crew easily.
"Our ship's too big, isn't it?"
"Right you are. I'd wager we're the only ones in Busan with a twelve-thousand-ton freighter. But bigger isn't simply better. A hull that size needs that many more hands, and it drinks that much more oil. The ship your brother-in-law was given only pays her way if she's loaded heavy and sent on a deep-sea run."
Kijo nodded.
"Shippers are hard to come by too, aren't they?"
"What do you expect? Who's going to trust cargo to a ship that can't fill out a crew? And dried fish and scrap iron bound for Japan—a small boat will do for that."
"For now, keep gathering men. Offer good terms. Let word get around that Cheongsan pays well. Before long our ship will be running to America and back."
"America?"
"Yes. Tungsten exports are going to resume."
"That so? Well, that's a mercy, then. Still, the ships bound for America... a Japanese line will take that work, or an American one, won't they?"
"Korea Shipping Corporation might take it on."
"Korea Shipping's got nothing over five thousand tons, far as I know. You don't cross to America in that. But why bring them up all of a sudden?"
Yang-soo thought a moment, and then his face lit with understanding.
"Don't tell me you mean to charter our ship out to Korea Shipping?"
Kijo nodded.
"I'm thinking of a proper mix of time charters and bareboat charters."
"So you'd sign short, and fill out the missing crew with Korea Shipping's own men. That what you're saying?"
"Yes. We have to fill those berths somehow. And among the men who sail our ship, some will come over to Cheongsan if the terms are right, won't they?"
"True enough. So there was a way after all."
When Kijo laid the solution out, Yang-soo felt as if a weight had lifted clean off his chest.
"I should have talked it over with you long before this. Let's head back in. We'll have a drink."
At the edge of the neighborhood, Kijo and Yang-soo turned and walked home.