The Fake Lee Kang-seok

"Mr. Lee, introductions are in order. This is Mr. Yuseok."

Kim Doo-han was presenting Cho Byeong-ok.

"A pleasure, Mr. Yuseok. I am Lee Ki-jo."

Ki-jo shook Cho Byeong-ok's hand.

He showed the two men to the sofa, and only when he himself had sat down last did Cho Byeong-ok speak.

"It is an honor to meet, face to face, the Mr. Lee whose name has gone out on the strength of such admirable work."

Ki-jo's feelings toward the politician Cho Byeong-ok were a complicated thing. The man had come out of the independence movement and done what no one could deny, and yet Ki-jo judged that his course after liberation had been nothing to admire. It was one of history's ironies. There were men who had been pro-Japanese before liberation and who, once the country was free, sinned no further against nation and people — who even rendered real service. And there were men who had fought for independence before liberation and who, afterward, fell often enough into wrongdoing of their own.

Under the U.S. military government, Cho Byeong-ok had risen to command the police of the entire country, and he was the man who drove the hard-line suppression of the Jeju April 3 Incident. When the uprising broke out, he sent the Northwest Youth Corps to the island and helped see to it that even the innocent were massacred. Early in the incident, he had not hesitated to say as much.

He lived out the years after liberation as a pro-American, anti-communist nationalist. Appointing pro-Japanese policemen and shielding them, he went so far in his conduct that even his old record in the independence movement came under suspicion.

The man who stood at the opposite pole was Kim Ik-ryeol. A former second lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army, Kim Ik-ryeol took the measure of what was actually happening on Jeju and moved at once to put the brakes on a policy of nothing but harsh suppression. Commanding the 9th Regiment on the island, he wrote out his will, went alone to a partisan stronghold, and even opened negotiations so that ordinary people on Jeju might be spared harm. The effort ended in failure when the police and the Northwest Youth Corps burned a village and massacred its innocent residents. Cho Byeong-ok, for good measure, succeeded in branding Kim Ik-ryeol a communist and driving him out.

Such were the years after liberation — a time of confusion in which no man could be weighed simply by whether he had once collaborated with the Japanese. What mattered more was how rightly he lived through the age, by the conscience and the judgment he possessed.

"The reason I brought Mr. Yuseok to see you, Mr. Lee, is this."

Kim Doo-han came to the purpose of their visit.

"While you were out doing good across Gyeongsang, do you know what happened? That fake Lee Kang-seok went about playing Lee Kang-seok, and didn't he lay the true face of this country bare for everyone to see?"

The press was exposing the spectacle of police, soldiers, and county magistrates fawning on the fake Lee Kang-seok in hopes of getting ahead. Public opinion spent less breath condemning the swindler than pouring scorn on the bureau chiefs who had made every disgraceful display imaginable, all to score points with the Liberal Party and with Syngman Rhee.

"If the officials of this country had cared for the people even as much as you have, Mr. Lee, would a fake Lee Kang-seok ever have taken them in?"

Kim Doo-han pressed the compliment home.

When Ki-jo answered, modestly, that he had only happened into such work, Cho Byeong-ok stepped forward.

"Mr. Lee. I want you to come forward."

"Come forward in what?"

"In next year's general election, please stand in North Gyeongsang, where the Democratic Party is weak."

In North Gyeongsang the Progressive Party was stronger than the Democrats. The rough map of the 1950s ran thus: the ruling party in the villages, the opposition in the cities. In the cities the opposition was strong; in the countryside, the Liberal Party. In Seoul the Liberals had come near to being wiped out. In the populous rural districts, by contrast, the Liberal Party held the upper hand whether one looked to Yeongnam or to Honam. North Gyeongsang was the exception. Support for the Progressive Party ran high enough there to threaten Democrats and Liberals alike in earnest. Even in the 1950s, Daegu and North Gyeongsang were not yet the holy ground of conservatism.

Once again, Ki-jo refused him outright.

"I have no interest in politics. I don't say this because I dislike standing as a Democratic candidate. Liberal, Progressive, or independent — I will never run in an election to the National Assembly."

He was repeating what he had already said before Jang Gyeong-geun, Minister of the Interior.

Cho Byeong-ok's face showed how keenly he felt the loss. He had plainly come believing that Ki-jo had only to run — in Yeongju, Yeongcheon, Gyeongju, Pohang, anywhere Cheongsan had made itself felt — and election would follow.

"Mr. Lee, for this country's sake the Assembly needs even one more admirable man like you."

Cho Byeong-ok tried one last time to win him.

"The opposition is split, and it cannot gather the people's support into one place. This is precisely the hour when a fresh and able candidate like yourself ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠must come forward."

"Assemblyman Cho, forgive me, but I care for neither the Democratic Party nor the Liberal Party."

Ki-jo said it plainly.

"Then which party do you support, in an age like this?"

"When there is no party I wish to support, I believe that not voting is also a choice."

"So you are a man of the both-sides-are-wrong school. In a case like that, would it not be better to judge who is worse, and lend a hand to the one who is a little less bad?"

"I'm sorry, but I don't see it that way. I believe I can carry out the service I want to do, and do it with a clear conscience, only if I stand on neither side."

"Then you mean to go on with what you did in Gyeongsang?"

Cho Byeong-ok was not so different from Jang Gyeong-geun. Told that Ki-jo could go on serving and ask nothing in return, he looked as if he could hardly credit it. Ki-jo found himself wondering whether this was the limit of the 1950s, an age still ignorant of any corporate duty to contribute to society, or the limit of a politician who could see the world in no terms but political ones.

"If the country falls into hardship again, I mean to go wherever I am needed and help. Gyeongsang, Jeolla, Jeju — it makes no difference to me."

The moment Ki-jo happened to say "Jeju," Cho Byeong-ok's brow creased.

"Well... your spirit is admirable, and yet it pains me to think we have let a rare talent slip away. Ahem..."

Cho Byeong-ok looked as though he disliked the very word Jeju.

Ki-jo received Kim Doo-han and Cho Byeong-ok with every courtesy. They did not think as he did, but he heard them out, agreed where agreement was honest, and let the hours pass.

After they had gone, he sat at his desk and thought about Cho Byeong-ok. The man had once suspected Shin Ik-hee, presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, of being a communist. Standing for the Second National Assembly, he had denounced his rival, Cho So-ang, as a communist as well. He had even mobilized the police to terrorize Cho So-ang's camp — and lost the election to him all the same. During the war Cho So-ang was abducted to the North, and when he became active there the government classified him as a man who had crossed of his own will, a finding later shown to be false.

Cho Byeong-ok, working himself into hysterics over communism, would die in the United States two months short of the April 19 uprising of 1960.

There was little about the man that Ki-jo felt any need to turn over. He himself had lived through the 1950s hardly knowing what an ideology was, and his place was with the ordinary people sacrificed to ideology. Such a man was never going to look kindly on Cho Byeong-ok, who had urged on the hard-line suppression of the April 3 Incident. He ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wished him nothing more than that he might spend what life remained to him decently, and then be gone.

And so September passed.

The scramble to recruit Ki-jo, waged by the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party alike, had failed. Nor did anyone take an interest in the flood-prevention work he had carried out in plain view. It was brushed aside as the private good deed of one wealthy man, and there it ended.

The public and the government were far more intent on the trial of the Fake Lee Kang-seok Incident.

Word of the mayor of Gyeongju crying out to the impostor — "How is it that one so precious comes all alone!" — spread everywhere, and precious personage became the catchphrase of the day. In court the fake Lee Kang-seok defended himself with gusto and turned into a star.

When the rather handsome fake Lee Kang-seok let fly these satisfying lines from the dock, the public went wild for him. A crowd of a thousand packed the Daegu courthouse for a look at him, and spectators even seized the judge's private entrance. The robe of the judge trying to push through them was torn, more than half the furnishings and chairs inside the courtroom were smashed, and the Daegu court suffered the worst disorder since the day it had come into being.

The student council of Seoul National University championed the fake just as hotly. These were the same students who had resisted so fiercely that, after Lee Kang-seok was entered in the family register as Syngman Rhee's adopted son in March of 1957 and then abruptly transferred into the College of Law that April, they had walked out of their classes in protest. When the fake declared that the real Lee Kang-seok had slipped into the law college by greasing palms, they treated the impostor as a man of intellect.

From the stand he also testified to the outrages committed by the genuine Lee Kang-seok.

"Once, in Seoul, I saw Lee Kang-seok slap a military policeman across the face and throw his weight around, and nothing whatever came of it. All I did was imitate him."

The story of Lee Kang-seok striking a military policeman had been tucked, in early August, into a small boxed item at the foot of the Dong-A Ilbo. The Dong-A Ilbo alone had been brave enough to print the senseless conduct of Syngman Rhee's adopted son.

Ki-jo smiled at the photograph of the "fake Lee Kang-seok" in the paper.

Kang Seong-byeong, who had passed himself off as Lee Kang-seok, was a figure who stood for the late 1950s as they spun out of their minds. People went wild for Kang Seong-byeong, and Kang Seong-byeong said to the Syngman Rhee government every word they themselves had not been able to say. He was nothing short of a righteous bandit of the age. He would serve a comparatively short sentence of ten months and walk free the following August.

As October drew near, Ki-jo found himself looking up at the night sky more and more often.

On an evening gone cool, he lay with Sunrye, Yeongsu, and Yeongeun on the low wooden platform in the yard, gazing at the sky, and spoke.

"That black night sky is the true color of the universe. Climb about twenty-five miles off the ground, and there you are — in space."

"Father, what's in space?"

"Nothing people have made. Not yet. The sun, the moon, and the stars are there, and nature made those."

"Has nobody ever been to space?"

"Not yet."

Yeongsu had been staring a hole through the night sky. At that, he spoke.

"Father, I want to go to space. And I want to be the first."

Ki-jo laughed, a full open laugh.

A pity, he thought. That wish of Yeongsu's was never going to come true. In a matter of days the Soviet Union would send humankind's first artificial satellite into the sky. A few years after that, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin would become the first human being to travel in space.

When Ki-jo only went on laughing, Sunrye, lying beside him, spoke.

"The eldest son of this house can go on a school picnic before he goes to space. Your father said he'd bring a bus to the school."

"Wow! Really, Father?"

Yeongsu threw his arms around Ki-jo, delighted.

"That's right. Father will escort you all the way to Manguk Park in Incheon."

At the request of the principal of Gyodong Elementary, where Yeongsu went to school, Ki-jo had agreed to provide buses for the first-graders' picnic. The destination was Incheon's Manguk Park, the Park of All Nations, where a statue of MacArthur stood. The statue had gone up on the fifteenth of September, 1957. The government declared that it was raised to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠honor "MacArthur, benefactor who saved the Republic of Korea, and guardian of free mankind."

Whatever sort of man MacArthur had been, it was true he had rendered great service in the Korean War. Set against that, though, it was a shame that Korea had no statues of her own independence fighters, or of her great men. There was not yet a statue of King Sejong, nor of Admiral Yi Sun-sin, even in Seoul. The only one standing was Syngman Rhee's, on Namsan.

On the second of October, a weekday lodged between Armed Forces Day and National Foundation Day, Ki-jo drove a jeep away from the front of Gyodong Elementary. Ten buses followed, and the long column stretched all the way to Incheon.

Riding with him was Kim Seogwang, head of the parents' association at Gyodong Elementary.

"Chairman, all I've ever heard is General MacArthur this, General MacArthur that, and I've never once laid eyes on him. Getting to see him with Yeongbae — even I'm excited."

"Haha. Are you, now?"

Ki-jo laughed. Seogwang sounded for all the world as if they were off to see the living man, and not a statue.

"Do you know which of them is older — Dr. Rhee, or General MacArthur?"

Seogwang answered.

"Why, Dr. Rhee would have the years on him, surely."

"Correct. Dr. Rhee is five years older."

Ki-jo smiled, eyes on the road as he drove.

"Then which of them dies first?"

"Hmm... they say there's no order to the way a man goes, but still, wouldn't the older one, Dr. Rhee, go first?"

This time Seogwang was wrong. Ki-jo, who could not hand him the right answer, only smiled and let it pass.

"Director Kim, did you know Dr. Rhee and Britain's Prime Minister Churchill were born four months apart? Dr. Rhee is the younger by four months."

"Were they? You're about to ask me which one lives longer, aren't you?"

"I am."

Seogwang thought it over, then said,

"If they're practically the same age, it'd be nice if they went together. Haha."

This time Seogwang had it right. In 1965 Syngman Rhee would follow about five months after Churchill's death. Churchill, born four months earlier, would depart five months earlier, and by a curious chance the two men would have enjoyed almost the same span of years allotted them.

A moment later Seogwang spoke, as if ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠something had just come back to him.

"Didn't Dr. Rhee curse Churchill once? Called him a senile old coot, too."

"You remember that?"

It had been in the days when Syngman Rhee released the anti-communist prisoners of war, the better to throw the armistice talks into chaos. Churchill had called Rhee a traitor, and Rhee had called Churchill an old man and sneered, asking whether this was still the Britain of the Opium War.

"Hearing you tell it, Chairman, the two of them were friends."

"And old men, the both of them."

"Think fellows like us can live as long as they did, Chairman?"

"Of course. We have to last until Yeongsu and Yeongbae are married and have children of their own, and until those grandchildren are married off in their turn."

"Chairman, Yeongeun and our Yeongbae..."

"Hey! You bastard!"

Ki-jo shouted it at an American army jeep that had cut out and blown past him. They had even hung a sign in English announcing that the buses were carrying schoolchildren, and the American still couldn't bear to wait — he overtook all ten buses, and Ki-jo's jeep with them.

Having cursed the jeep, Ki-jo turned to Seogwang.

"What was it you were saying just now?"

"Ah — nothing, Chairman. I didn't say a thing."

Seogwang shut his mouth. In his heart he had wanted to bind himself to Ki-jo as an in-law and live long years side by side with him. But perhaps an in-law was reaching too far.