After the Typhoon Passed
A week after Typhoon Agnes had raked the eastern flank of the peninsula and passed on, Gijo came back to Seoul. There had been no profit in it, and no public praise, yet he was satisfied. He had saved lives and helped the poor, and to his mind he had done what needed doing.
On his first day back he sat down with the damage tallies printed in the papers.
Dead: 120
Displaced: 50,000
Property damage: 12 billion hwan
Set against the Agnes he remembered, the dead had fallen by more than half, the displaced by ten thousand, and the losses by more than four billion hwan. It was a result he could live with. All he had spent was some twenty million hwan, and against that outlay the damage he had kept from happening was enormous.
The day after his return, President Chung Ju-yung — out on the Hangang Footbridge job — came to Cheongsan headquarters and took him to task.
“President Lee, what is this? You went south and did the work for nothing?”
“Yes, President Chung. I wanted to be paid for it too, but things on the ground were so desperate I had no choice.”
“Aigoo... You should have gritted your teeth and held on... The Assembly will be putting a plan together any day now and sending budgets down to the provinces... You might have waited until then.”
“That proved harder than it sounds.”
Scratching at the back of his neck, Chung Ju-yung asked it almost offhand.
“How much did you spend?”
“About twenty million hwan.”
“What?”
Chung shot up as if he’d been stung.
“That kind of money would pay off the debts Hyundai Construction is carrying...”
Gijo knew exactly why the sum stung. Hyundai had landed a string of government jobs and was working them hard, but the profits were thin. The standing rule was that thirty percent of any state contract went as tribute to the Liberal Party, so the firm could only pay down its debts at a crawl. It was the same reason the five big builders who lived on government work had picked up the nickname of the Liberal Party Five.
“I did this one for nothing,” Gijo said, composed, “so the next time there’s recovery work, won’t they give it to Cheongsan?”
Chung, who had been boiling over, seemed to feel the awkwardness of it. He cleared his throat.
“All right. Well. If you look at it as paying in advance, you’re not wrong, President Lee. When the government lets the recovery work, let’s take it on together, Hyundai and Cheongsan. Ha ha ha!”
Watching Chung laugh it off with that thick-skinned cheer, Gijo laughed with him.
August was just seeming to draw to a close when, on Friday the thirtieth, Dae-ik knocked at the door of the president’s office at Cheongsan headquarters.
“Come in.”
The moment Dae-ik stepped inside, he spoke with his face a little flushed.
“President, we’ve had word from the Ministry of Home Affairs.”
“Home Affairs?”
“Yes. They’ve sent word that you’re to come to the minister’s office.”
“Hm...”
Gijo had a bad feeling about it.
“I suspect they may be calling you in to give you another commendation.”
Cheongsan’s doings in the south were no small thing, and Dae-ik seemed to be guessing that the minister meant to praise Gijo the way Minister of Transportation Lee Jong-rim had done.
“Shall I draw up a citation of merits ahead of time? Write down everything Cheongsan has done in the south and I expect it’ll run past ten pages. Ha ha.”
Dae-ik laughed brightly.
“No. Dae-ik.”
Gijo rose from his chair with a heavy face.
“I’m going over to Home Affairs. If anyone comes looking for me, don’t say I’ve gone to see the minister.”
“You’re going alone?”
“Yes. This one I should do alone.”
He did not take Dae-ik, who was as good as his secretary. He went by himself.
Minister of Home Affairs Jang Gyeong-geun started in with a roar the moment the sun-blackened Gijo stepped into his office.
Gijo had known, from the moment Jang sent for him, that something of this sort was waiting. The minister was taking a savage beating in the press and in public opinion. The man charged with looking after the people’s lives had failed to prepare for the typhoon, and the charge that he cared nothing for relief or recovery was pouring in from every side. Gijo had no illusion that he himself would be a welcome sight.
“What — are you planning to run for the House out of North Gyeongsang next year? Well?”
“No, Minister. I have no interest in politics whatsoever.”
He had done nothing wrong, but he bowed his head to Jang all the same, and politely.
“A man with no interest in politics spends his own money scattering food to people? And I’m supposed to believe that? Don’t talk nonsense!”
“I will absolutely never stand for election, so please don’t be angry, Minister.”
“You really won’t run for the House? You mean that?”
“Yes, Minister.”
There was sincerity enough in Gijo’s voice that the excited Jang cooled his temper and coughed once or twice into the quiet.
“A young man ought to dream big... Did a little scolding from me knock the spirit out of you like that?”
What?
The tone had changed without warning, turning suddenly coaxing, and Gijo lifted his head to look at him.
“I suppose President Lee is still young and doesn’t know how these things are done. That isn’t the way to go about it.”
“What do you—”
“Come now. Don’t play the innocent when you know perfectly well how the world works. Do it the way I tell you.”
Jang told his secretary to bring a cup of tea, then laid out for Gijo, in painstaking detail, the method of securing a Liberal Party nomination for the House.
“Chairman Lee Ki-poong holds the nominations. Twenty million hwan or so should do it. If you’re too shy to put the money in his hand yourself, I can step forward in your place... Ahem.”
Gijo had expected a dressing-down. That the minister would try to sell him a nomination had never entered his dreams, and the sheer absurdity of it left him blank. He had no mind to run for the House in any case — and if he handed twenty million hwan to Jang Gyeong-geun, half of it would stick to the man’s fingers. An equivocal answer would only leave the door ajar, so he shut it.
“Minister, there is no chance I will ever run for the National Assembly. If the Democratic Party comes to me, or the Progressive Party, I will refuse them all. Please take me at my word. I will not run as an independent either.”
Spoken so flatly, it did something remarkable to Jang’s face. The look said he was wondering whether he had just been pumping a dry well.
“You truly have no mind for an election? It’s next May. If you don’t start preparing now, you’ll be too late.”
“I’m nothing but a petty merchant. The reason I did the work down south was the hope that if the government later lets flood-recovery contracts, they might throw a little my way. My construction firm is new. I doubted the government even knew we existed...”
At that Jang nodded, and smiled as if he understood at last.
“Well, I’ll be... You’ve only been running a construction company a short while, so you simply didn’t know. In a case like that—”
He went on to explain, by the method he himself knew, how a man won government work. That, too, came down to passing money through the Liberal Party to the Minister of Reconstruction.
“That’s how the thing is done. And here I’d taken President Lee for a man who knew his business — turns out you’re a proper greenhorn. Ha ha ha!”
Jang laughed.
With the misunderstanding cleared away, the minister boasted of the National Citizens’ Units he had built, and went so far as to advise that if Gijo ever felt the stirrings of politics, he should fund the units and get his face known.
For the better part of an hour Gijo endured the scolding and the counsel. Only after he had offered the empty promise that he would support the units with all his heart was he allowed to leave the minister’s office. He could bring himself to say it because he knew Jang Gyeong-geun would soon be gone. The man had organized the units with enough success to win Syngman Rhee’s favor, and still, under the lash of public opinion for his feeble answer to Typhoon Agnes, he would be dismissed on the twenty-seventh of September. For a minister with a month left, that much sugar was easy to spread.
Even as he walked out, Gijo was calm. This was simply how one lived in the fifties — an age when the man in the wrong was the one who raged, and a good deed was something you got cursed for.
On the way back to Cheongsan headquarters it came home to him that the government had not the slightest interest in the flood-prevention work, or the recovery construction, he had carried out in Gyeongsang.
It’s all the same, in the end...
The taste of it was bitter. He swallowed it anyway, and accepted the world as it was.
Just as he had sensed, once the outcry against a government that had failed to hold back the floods grew loud, the authorities went and did something that had nothing to do with the problem. All across the country, on the same night, they staged an event they called the Night of Civic Consolation — a government production meant to comfort the citizens who had labored at reconstruction and recovery. Outdoor stages offered circus turns, tightrope walks among them, and the comic dialogue of the duo Jang So-pal and Go Chun-ja.
Citizens who had gone the whole summer without a single good thing crowded the grounds just to see that much, and for a little while a comedian’s patter was comfort enough. Such was the life of ordinary people in the 1950s.
Gijo took his family to watch the show, and felt it all over again: he really had come back to the fifties.
September was drawing quietly to a close, and the government was just beginning to breathe easy, when a farce from August was laid before the world.
Late in August, while Gijo was throwing himself into the flood-recovery works across the south, the affair of the fake Lee Kang-seok — a man who had turned up in Yeongcheon, Gyeongju, Andong, and Bonghwa in North Gyeongsang — became known through the papers.
The impostor had toured the disaster districts passing himself off as Lee Kang-seok, the young man who could claim Syngman Rhee, first in the land, as his adoptive father, and Lee Ki-poong, second in the land, as the father of his blood. Had he stopped at the impersonation, it would have been bad enough. He made fools of the agency chiefs wherever he went, and he took their money besides. The government was thrown into confusion. The public could only gape.
From the thirtieth of August through the first of September, the fake Lee Kang-seok went about North Gyeongsang talking in this vein.
“I am Lee Kang-seok. My father is summering in Jinhae, and in his place I have come to inspect the storm and flood damage, and to inquire in secret into the corruption of public officials.”
“This is an undercover inspection. It must not be told to a soul. My father has said that whoever leaks it will be dealt with severely.”
On the strength of those words he was feasted at exclusive gisaeng houses. He took his sleep and his meals in the official residences of the local chiefs, and he took their money as well. The sum came to 465,000 hwan, and it was not money simply given. It was bribes laid out by police chiefs, civil servants, and generals hungry for promotion — and as they pressed the cash on him they boasted of how hard they had crushed the opposition in the last election, and how they had toiled for the Liberal Party.
The mayor of Gyeongju, the instant he laid eyes on him, fluttered into a panic.
“How has one so noble come all alone!”
He bundled the impostor into a jeep, treated him to a tour of Bulguksa, and bought him souvenirs. Whenever the fake Lee Kang-seok moved, soldiers and police escorted him. Agency chiefs had commemorative photographs taken at his side, or posted sleepless watches outside his lodgings. It was bedlam.
The man who finally stopped the impostor swaggering through the flood country was the governor of North Gyeongsang, Lee Geun-sik. He had seen the real Lee Kang-seok with his own eyes, and he knew the fake at a glance.
Perhaps because of the credit he earned in the arrest, he rose to Minister of Home Affairs in place of Jang Gyeong-geun, who stood accused of failing to mount a proper response to the floods. The appointment of Lee Geun-sik came dressed with a reason: that he had thrown himself into the recovery of typhoon-ravaged North Gyeongsang and achieved great results.
The Liberal Party and the Syngman Rhee regime had always been a closed circle, beating their own drum and passing the same men from chair to chair, and Gijo could only laugh. They had always been like that.
He was still failing to keep a straight face at this comedy of state when Kim Doo-han came to call. Kim did not come to Cheongsan headquarters alone.
“Mr. Lee! I have brought a guest!”
Behind Kim Doo-han, as he came into the president’s office, stood Cho Byeong-ok.
Ha... well. This is going to be a nuisance...
Gijo could guess well enough why the two of them had sought him out. Even so, he put on a smiling face and welcomed his guests.