Sorting Things Out
It was a November dawn, and the air had begun to turn unmistakably cold. Gijo was in the darkroom as usual, at work on his photographs. He set a light against the film he had developed the day before, burned the image onto a sheet of paper, and slipped the paper into the developer. Little by little, the pictures Sunrye had taken rose into view: Yeongsu laughing where he sat before the crocks in the yard, a flower Gijo could not name, clouds adrift in the sky, and last of all Gijo himself, frame after frame.
They were the photographs Sunrye had taken over the past month. To see Yeongsu as he was on the ordinary days Gijo himself had missed, and to see the landscapes and objects Sunrye had found beautiful, struck him with a freshness he had not expected. The work was nearly finished when Sunrye knocked on the darkroom door.
Gijo stepped outside and greeted the four directors waiting for him in the yard. All of them had come except Oh Seok-mun, who had gone down to North Jeolla to carve the granite cauldrons.
"It's cold. Let's go inside. We can talk over breakfast."
Gijo and the four directors began their talk over spoonfuls of the beef-bone soup Sunrye had simmered for them.
"Seoul's gone quiet again these days," Seo-gwang offered. "The moment the ROK-U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty took effect, all that restless feeling among the people settled in a single stroke."
"The National Assembly's as noisy as ever, though," Han-su said, pinching salt into his soup. "They're at each other's throats in there. I hear it's the fuss over Dr. Syngman Rhee's Third-Term Constitutional Amendment."
"I'm just glad our government and the Americans are on good terms again," Dae-ik put in. "Oil's coming in, and the dollar's coming down. When the United States cut off aid oil in October, the buses didn't last two weeks before they stopped running. That really was frightening."
Even with the oil supply cut, the trucks at Gijo's place had kept running without a hitch. There was fuel enough stored at the Cheongsan plant, and since spring he had been gathering oil and stacking it at the yard in Cheongnyangni, so there had been no trouble at all. When the dollar rose he had sold off what he had collected in Myeongdong for a handsome profit, and he had paid Lee Seong-sun, owner of the Incheon coal yard, in full. Whether the oil was cut off or the dollar rose and fell, Gijo's businesses never stopped. They sailed steadily on.
Gijo spooned rice into the soup and ate, listening in silence to what the directors had to say. He had something urgent to tell them, but he had no wish to announce it in the middle of a meal.
When they had finished, he came to the point.
"The brick plant is about to go into its off-season. You all know we'll have to take up other work while the brick business rests, yes?"
At that the four directors answered yes.
"While the business is idle, I'll be placing each of you where you fit and leaving the work in your hands until next spring."
At the word that there would be a reshuffling, their faces grew serious.
"First, I'm entrusting the seasoning plant in Busan to you, Director Kim."
Seo-gwang started. After Gijo had returned from his Busan trip with Ma-ryang, he had taken it for granted that the Busan plant would fall to Ma-ryang.
"I'm the one going to Busan?"
"Yes. I'll be counting on you, Director Kim. Dae-ik will be going with you."
Dae-ik started as well. He had always assumed he would stay at Gijo's side and assist him there. But Gijo judged the two of them the right men for the Busan venture. The affable Seo-gwang paired with the meticulous Dae-ik, he thought, would be a help in doing business down there.
Next came Han-su and Ma-ryang.
"Director Sim will stay in Seoul with me, and Director Jang will go to Incheon and take charge of running the match factory."
Han-su was surprised to find himself the one keeping Gijo's side. Ma-ryang, on the other hand, had expected the match factory all along. He was already going back and forth to Incheon to look after it, and since people from the Cheongsan brick plant were being moved over to the match works, he had thought the post ought to go to him, the man with the most ties to them.
The four directors accepted Gijo's decision without objection. There was something unexpected in it, but they supposed he had his reasons, and that was enough.
"It will be hard on all of you, but Director Kim and Director Seong, who are going far, will have the worst of it. Still, once Director Oh Seok-mun comes back with the granite cauldrons and Hyeon-su, who's been in Japan, joins you, the Busan team will be the largest of all, so bear with it a little."
Seo-gwang and Dae-ik understood then that the heaviest charge had fallen to them, and the knowledge weighed on them. Of Cheongsan Development's five executives, three were being concentrated on this one venture. Count Jeon Hyeon-su, who was as good as an executive in the making, and four people would be given over entirely to the seasoning business.
With that, Gijo finished sorting things out. Cheongsan Construction, the radio communications arm, and the shipping line were already in the hands of specialist presidents, so there was no particular need for the head-office directors to step in. At Cheongsan Shipping, President Oh Yang-soo had gone to the Korea Shipping head office in Busan and closed the contracts for chartering and forwarding, and Gijo himself had finished both the tungsten export contract with Korea Tungsten and the agreement covering groundbreaking for the tungsten chemical-processing plant. Now he meant to split off the trucks that had belonged to Cheongsan Brick, place them under the newly founded Cheongsan Transport, and start the hauling business in earnest.
"Ah, and one more thing. We're going to tear down all of our company buildings in front of Gwanghwamun and put up a new headquarters. A five-story concrete building will go in."
At the announcement the four directors let out a burst of admiration. Raising a five-story concrete building in the Seoul of those days was no easy thing.
"So when we come back to Seoul in the spring, we'll be working in some grand building? President?" Seo-gwang asked, his eyes lighting up.
"Yes. There are so many companies bearing the Cheongsan name now that they ought to be gathered in one place. Overall management will be easier that way, I think."
"Hold on. How many companies do we have already? Cheongsan Development, brick, construction, communications, shipping, seasoning, matches — that's seven."
"Transport will be included as well."
"Eight, then? Shouldn't we be building eight floors? Ha ha."
When Seo-gwang hammed it up, Ma-ryang put in a word. "And how's anybody supposed to work on the eighth floor? Climb up and down all day and it'll feel like you're out hiking a mountain."
"Oh. Is that right? Didn't think of that. Ha ha." Seo-gwang scratched the back of his head and laughed.
Gijo, like Seo-gwang, would have liked to build higher still. But an elevator was out of the question, so he had given it up. Anything past five floors, he judged, was greed.
At the word that a five-story company building was going up, the four directors' faces flushed. They were men of a time when a company's rise was taken to be one's own. The thought of leaving a single-story house under a tile roof to work, come next year, in a five-story concrete building delighted them as if they had been given a new home.
Gijo went in to the office with the directors, then set out for Incheon with Ma-ryang. He dropped Ma-ryang at the match factory along the way and headed on to Hanjin Trading. Going straight up to the president's office on the third floor, he exchanged greetings with Cho Choong-hoon.
"Hyung, I'm here."
"Gijo. Good, you're here. I was about to come looking for you anyway."
Gijo had been back and forth with Choong-hoon often, drawing the tie between them closer still. They had come far enough that he called Choong-hoon, ten years his senior, hyung.
"What's that you're carrying? Rice?"
"Yes. I brought it so you could have a taste."
He set the two sacks of rice he had carried into Choong-hoon's arms.
"You gave me some last time, too. We shared the rice harvested at Eundae-ri with the employees, and it went down well."
"This rice came in from Japan."
"Japanese rice?"
"Yes. A Japanese variety I brought in by asking an acquaintance who deals in rice over there."
He had brought in tasting rice and seed through Oguchi Yasumasa. Choong-hoon looked over the two kinds of rice in the sacks and asked, "Are the two different?"
"Yes. Varieties called Norin No. 1 and Norin No. 22."
"Hmm. The grains are a little different, but they're both plump. Look like they'd cook up well."
"The taste was decent."
"But why bring rice in from Japan?"
"I brought in seed from the acquaintance as well."
"You're going to plant Japanese rice at Eundae-ri?"
"No. For now I've left the seed with the agricultural research institute and asked them to cross the two."
"Is that so? Put the two together and a different rice comes out?"
"Yes. That's generally how a new variety gets made, I understand."
What Gijo had brought in were the parent strains of the rice that would appear in 1956 under the name Koshihikari. If the institute succeeded in developing the new seed, he meant to grow it at Eundae-ri from then on.
"You really do a bit of everything, don't you. How many companies do you have already? I don't have hours enough in the day just concentrating on transport." Choong-hoon laughed, a broad, easy laugh.
"Hyung, how's the U.S. Army hauling business these days?"
"Oh, you know. In the Seoul-Incheon area alone there are more than fifty transport companies the size of our Hanjin. We're all at it until our noses bleed. Ha ha."
This was still before Hanjin Trading had made a name for itself. Choong-hoon was locked in a hard fight with his rivals.
"Even so. When the oil aid was cut off in October, I got through the crisis thanks to you. Scored a few points with the U.S. Army. I'm truly grateful."
Gijo had shared the oil he had stockpiled with Choong-hoon. He had a clear reason for pressing oil and rice and one thing after another on the man. He knew the history of Hanjin's rise by heart, and he knew that helping Choong-hoon at this moment would come back to him later as an enormous profit. Hanjin had the most ideal business model for weathering the 1950s and the 1960s. It was a transport company, yet in effect it was no different from an export firm: the trucks ran inside Korea, but they earned American dollars from the U.S. military. Even the future giants — Samsung, LG, Hyundai — were nothing more than domestic companies through the fifties and sixties. There had been nothing much worth exporting, so it could not be helped, but Gijo believed that a business which brought in dollars was the thing truly worth doing, for himself and for the country alike.
1955 was fast approaching, and he judged that now was the best moment to go into partnership with Choong-hoon. In November 1956 Choong-hoon would sign a transport contract worth seven million dollars in all and earn seventy thousand of them, one percent of the haulage. It was a six-month contract, and in those days the only company that could make seventy thousand dollars in half a year was Choong-hoon's Hanjin Trading.
"Hyung, as I promised before, I'll lend you thirty Cheongsan trucks."
"Thirty? When we made our contract early this year, your company had only two trucks, didn't it?"
"They're trucks with nothing to do while the brick business is idle anyway. If I charter them out to you, Hyung, it's good for me too."
"No — you don't have to charter them to me, do you?"
His own affairs were piled past his eyebrows, yet Choong-hoon made a show of declining. It was just like him. He never let himself sound as if he needed anything in business.
"If not you, Hyung, who would I lend them to? You've got more than fifty competitors. If I lent trucks to some other company and yours went under, what would I do then?"
"Ha ha. Listen to you. You could just start a transport company yourself."
"I already have."
"You have?"
Choong-hoon's face changed. If Gijo went into transport, he would be a formidable competitor.
"Then why... are you thinking of chartering trucks to Hanjin?"
"Hyung, if you and I run our companies separately, we'll only end up cutting into our own flesh. Between the two of us, we've got more than fifty competitors to get past, haven't we?"
"That's true enough..."
"If you'll take the sales, Hyung, I'll provide the trucks."
At Gijo's word that it would profit them both, Choong-hoon accepted the offer of partnership readily.
"All right! Let's do it together. Thank you, little brother!"
Choong-hoon caught Gijo's hand, grateful.
"As it happens, there's a rumor the U.S. Army is going to turn canned beer over to Korean operators this time."
"Canned beer?"
"Yes. It looks a little like bait, but it's an opportunity too."
"Bait?"
"U.S. Army canned beer is easy to divert, isn't it. There'll be outfits hauling a thousand that skim off about a hundred, claiming they burst while being moved."
In truth, thefts of military goods were hardly rare on the Incheon docks, and men often leapt onto trucks running with military cargo to snatch what they could. There were even companies that had set out from the start to skim U.S. Army supplies a little at a time. In that climate, handing over canned beer was like entrusting fish to a cat. Beer was as good as cash: the moment you diverted it, you could sell it off before anyone blinked.
Choong-hoon made that point as well. Canned beer, he said, was something the U.S. Army had once entrusted to Korean firms, only to take the hauling back into its own hands after delivery accidents grew so frequent. For that same army to give the work to Korean firms again looked to him like an intention to sort jade from ordinary stone properly this time.
"So let's try hauling the canned beer right. The volume of freight the U.S. Army contracts out is only going to grow. Shouldn't we show them which outfit is the model?"
"Gladly, Hyung."
Gijo and Choong-hoon shook hands, of one mind. Then, to Gijo, who was smiling broadly, Choong-hoon asked, casual as anything, "Say. You wouldn't happen to have some dollars on you?"
"Dollars?"
"Yes. The truth is, that's why I was going to come to Seoul to see you..."
Choong-hoon had never once brought up money. When he suddenly spoke of dollars, Gijo found himself curious what the man meant to say.