A Field of Asuras
Jangchungdan Park lay along the northeastern slope of Namsan. Kim Doo-han stood at the lectern where the speakers of the political rally would take their place and looked down over the grounds.
The guards assembled by the Democratic Party were stringing a cordon of straw rope, a safety line meant to keep the crowd from pressing too close to the platform. Kim Doo-han, who had taken charge of the detail, gauged the distance and bellowed.
"Push that rope back! They're too close!"
He was remembering the advice Kijo had given him the day before.
"Keep as much distance as you can between the platform and the crowd. They're going to turn out in force."
Kijo had said it when Doo-han went to borrow the amplifier. Once the gap between the safety line and the platform had been widened, Doo-han checked the set lent by Cheongsan Radio Communications. Kijo had handed over the expensive equipment without a moment's hesitation.
"Assemblyman, I don't mind if the machine is damaged. Should someone happen to break it, please don't be too hard on them. A thing can come to grief when it's put to good use."
"Mr. Lee, this Kim Doo-han will give them a firm warning, so there's no chance of anything breaking. I'll use it well and bring it back. Ha ha!"
Doo-han was grateful for the openhanded way Kijo gave. He went over to the Democratic Party man who would run the amplifier.
"Handle it so it doesn't break. It's a precious piece of American equipment."
"Yes, Assemblyman. Don't worry. I worked with these in the army."
"And don't let anyone else lay a hand on it. Not under any circumstances."
"I won't even let them look at it, Assemblyman. Ha ha."
With every preparation made, lunch arrived from a nearby house serving seolleongtang, milky beef-bone soup, and Doo-han ate with the men of the guard. While they ate, he watched some thirty men gather and settle themselves in front of the straw rope. They looked faintly suspicious, but coming early to claim the front was an ordinary enough thing. There were few loudspeakers, so from farther back the orators would be hard to hear, and plenty of people wanted a close look at the famous politicians.
Doo-han watched them and tipped back his broth.
Three in the afternoon.
The political rally hosted by the Committee for the Defense of National Sovereignty began. Democratic Party Assemblyman Jeon Jin-han came forward as the first speaker and opened his address.
Seated up on the platform, Kim Doo-han kept a careful watch on everything around him. The Liberal Party had surely sent its disruptors, and yet there was still no sign of interference. The two hundred thousand packed into Jangchungdan Park listened to Assemblyman Jeon Jin-han with held breath. Through forty minutes of speech, applause broke out again and again, and the moment it died the park fell silent. No one meant to miss a word from the eloquent Assemblyman Jeon, the man who had authored the Labor Standards Act of 1953.
When he finished, applause like thunder rolled across the grounds, and the next speaker, Assemblyman Cho Byeong-ok, mounted the platform.
For five minutes nothing went wrong. Each time Cho Byeong-ok brought a passage to a close, applause burst out, and when it faded the quiet returned—until, all at once, someone shouted.
"Louder!"
At the cry that snapped the thread of the speech, discontent erupted through the crowd.
"Kill that bastard!"
The word was extreme, but no one truly meant death by it. In those days the Liberal Party never failed to plant hecklers at a Democratic Party gathering, and the people, taking the man who had shouted for more volume to be one of them, were only trying to cow him.
Doo-han stepped in to seize hold of the mood and ordered the rally guards to caution those who had grown heated. For a moment the grounds seemed to have settled. Then Cho Byeong-ok began again, and this time a stone came flying.
"What is the meaning of this!"
Cho Byeong-ok, who had very nearly been struck, roared—and from beneath the platform came a shameless retort, the guilty turning the charge around.
"And what of it?"
At the thugs' shout the crowd surged. People pointed at the thirty-odd men clustered before the straw rope and cried out.
"Grab that bastard!"
"Kill him!"
From that moment the rally grounds frayed into disorder, and the commotion began in earnest. One of the thugs picked a quarrel with a young man standing beside him.
"What the hell are you!"
"What do you mean, what am I?"
"Then why are you starting something!"
"When did I ever start—urk!"
The thug seized the young man by the collar, flung him aside, and kicked him. When people tried to stop the assault, the other thugs punched and slapped whoever stepped in. In an instant the ground directly beneath the platform was pandemonium, and the men who had been picking fights at random tried to climb onto the stage. Rally guards and Democratic Party members blocked them, grappling and shoving while shouts flew back and forth.
In the midst of it, some seven hundred unidentified men closed around the platform and began hurling glass bottles and stones at the politicians seated above.
Kim Doo-han at once moved Assemblymen Jeon Jin-han, Cho Byeong-ok, Jang Taek-sang, and the others to safety behind the platform, then planted himself across the stairs. The guards and the party men had already been driven off those steps by thugs whose numbers had swollen all at once. Careful that his legs not be grabbed, Doo-han stood a little back from the edge and shouted down.
"You bastards! Where do you think you're climbing!"
When Kim Doo-han sealed the head of the stairs, the thugs flinched. It was one man against seven hundred, but those who actually found themselves face to face with him did not dare rush in. The presence of the man who had once been the strongest still lived in him, and since he had become a National Assemblyman a fair measure of dignity had settled over him as well.
Down below, they shouted to provoke him.
"Pig! Come down here!"
"Hey, fatso! Let's settle it down here!"
They insulted him and jeered, but not one of them stepped forward first to shove him aside or strike. While Kim Doo-han bought time this way, citizens and Democratic Party members went looking for the police. In a Jangchungdan Park packed with two hundred thousand people, not a single officer was to be seen.
"What in the world is this...! Why are there no police!"
"Over there! Way off in the distance—standing with their hands behind their backs, just watching!"
The citizens were dumbfounded by police who washed their hands of the whole affair.
Meanwhile the thugs, having failed to take the platform, went for the microphone amplifier, doused it in gasoline, and set it alight. The man guarding it tried to beat the flames out, but a fire started with gasoline was never going to die.
"Those... rotten bastards..."
Rage burned through Kim Doo-han as he watched the amplifier go up. But he could not abandon the assemblymen on the platform to go down, so he held his post and swallowed his fury.
A short while later Yu Ji-gwang came up the very stairs Kim Doo-han was holding.
"Out of the way, pig! Before you drop dead."
One hand thrust into his suit pocket, Yu Ji-gwang threatened him. Kim Doo-han had already been caught once by that pistol trick of his at the National Assembly, and he was not about to be caught a second time.
"Little brother. Go on and pull it this time."
Kim Doo-han clasped his hands behind his back and thrust out his belly, and Yu Ji-gwang faltered.
"Looks like you need a beating."
The words were vicious, but they were only words. He could not put a bullet into Kim Doo-han's stomach in broad daylight before two hundred thousand people, and he had no confidence he could win if they fought one against one. His frustration boiled over.
"Quit turning my stomach and get down here!"
"Hey, you. Know when enough is enough. You've done this much—Lee Ki-poong will say you did well."
Kim Doo-han had struck the nerve. Yu Ji-gwang drew his hand from his pocket.
"You pig bastard. Keep this up and you'll die!"
"Then let me die doing what's right, you wretch. Let's not live filthy."
Beaten in both cause and strength, Yu Ji-gwang came down off the stairs, pointed at the press photographers who had been capturing the violence, and shouted.
"Grab those bastards! Smash the cameras!"
A game of tag broke out between the photographers and the gangsters. The crowd opened lanes for the fleeing reporters and deliberately collided with the thugs, shielding the journalists as they went. Judging that he had reached his limit, Yu Ji-gwang gave the order to withdraw. One by one the gangsters ceased their violence and fled in tight order toward Chungmuro.
The excited crowd was shouting to give chase when two detectives came running toward the platform, blowing their whistles. What they did, absurdly enough, was arrest a student from Hongik University who had been putting out the fire on the amplifier.
"Hey! Why are you taking that student!"
People tried to stop them, but the detectives loaded the student into a jeep and were gone.
The absurdities went on. Police who entered the park belatedly arrested people bleeding from the gangsters' blows, and mounted officers who had ridden in threatened the crowd—the victims themselves. How badly they wanted the gathering dispersed was written all over them.
The figures who had taken refuge behind the platform came back out onto it. Jang Taek-sang, with no microphone, shouted at the top of his voice.
Assemblyman Cho Byeong-ok shouted as well.
Then and there, the assemblymen and the crowd raised three cheers—long live democracy. When the people cried out as one, the police drew back again. Still seething, swallowing their rage, the crowd streamed out of Jangchungdan Park.
Kim Doo-han and his aides loaded the burned amplifier onto a jeep. The thought of returning that blackened machine to Kijo drew a sigh out of him.
How did the country come to this... I don't see any sign it's going to get better...
Doo-han pulled a crumpled cigarette from his trouser pocket and set it between his lips. Mounted police entered the park, gone desolate now that the crowd had drained away, and passed through it as if they were out for a stroll.
When the burned-out amplifier was returned to him, Kijo was not the least bit surprised. Instead he took the shamefaced Kim Doo-han to a bar and comforted him.
"Assemblyman, don't tell yourself you lost to those men. People know perfectly well who is in the right and who is in the wrong."
Two hundred thousand people had witnessed the terror committed in broad daylight at Jangchungdan Park. They would tell their friends, their families, and everyone they knew the whole outrageous story of what they had seen. Kijo knew how the aftermath of that violence would fall. What the affair would shrink was not the opposition, but the party in power. People would condemn the Liberal Party for having gone too far, and the Liberal Party's push to force malign political laws through the National Assembly would be brought up short.
Ahead of the general election of 1958, the party was working to rewrite the election law in its own favor and to strengthen the statute on defamation. The design was to make it difficult for opposition candidates and independents to stand for the Assembly at all, and to hang a defamation charge on anyone who criticized the Liberal Party even slightly, so that the election would be annulled. That was why Kijo had warned Doo-han to be careful, yet had not moved to help him in earnest. It was a game in which the one who lost would win, and the one who won would lose.
But no amount of comfort could lift Kim Doo-han out of his dejection.
"Mr. Lee, I feel as if I became an assemblyman for nothing... If I were still the one holding Jongno, when the Dongdaemun gang turned that rally into a pandemonium I would have brought my brothers and beaten the lot of them senseless..."
Kim Doo-han let out a heavy sigh.
"Assemblyman, a scene of pandemonium is a field of asuras. Do you know what an asura is?"
"I don't know it well. An evil god, isn't it?"
"Yes, that's right. Originally it comes from a religion called Hinduism. In Buddhism, they say, an asura is regarded as a being caught in the cycle of reincarnation."
"Reincarnation?"
"Yes. If an asura goes on committing evil, karma accumulates, and it is trapped in the wheel of rebirth."
"Then an asura would reincarnate forever. It never chooses anything but wrong."
"Yes. Because of the evil it commits itself, it can never break the cycle. From the Buddhist point of view, a truly pitiable being."
"Heh heh. Men who do nothing but evil, dying and waking only to do evil again... that isn't any good either..."
"An asura is punished even while it lives, I hear. There's a tale of one that had a precious daughter stolen by another god, fought in a fury, and lost."
"That's karma, right there! Ha ha ha!"
"Yes. An asura is a being that suffers too. Man or god, do evil and you are punished. I believe that."
Talking with Kijo, Doo-han felt his heart grow a little lighter. Do good, and blessing follows; do wrong, and punishment comes. Live long enough and you see that the saying does not always hold—and yet to deny it, and to live by that denial, makes the world feel unbearably hopeless. Little by little, Doo-han took on the optimism Kijo gave off.
"I'll wager this. Those men will suffer beyond anything the price of the American amplifier they ruined could measure."
"If that's so, I should have asked them to smash my car as well. Let them suffer twice over. Ha ha ha!"
Kijo smiled.
A few years on, a history in which good was rewarded and evil punished would come to the Republic of Korea. People would see with their own two eyes that those who had done wrong received their due, and the sight would gladden them. Such relief would pass far too quickly. That was the pity of it. Still, it would come.
Kijo raised a cup with Doo-han and watched the man's strength return, little by little.
Summer was drawing near. Calling to mind the disaster that would befall them in the summer of 1957, Kijo thought that set beside it, the violence at Jangchungdan Park was nothing at all. He was already preparing, busily, for the calamity soon to arrive. It was work that had to be done, however hard it proved.