Fists in Politics (1)
Back from Byeokje, Kijo set about helping Lee Ik-heung and Kim Doo-han with their elections.
He went down to Yeoncheon first and urged the people of Eundae-ri to throw their weight behind Lee Ik-heung, the Liberal Party candidate. The man was the tide of the hour, he told them—back him hard, and even if they saw no gain, at least they would take no loss. Yeoncheon was recovered land, territory wrested back from the North, and true to the Liberal Party's strength in the countryside, the party stood high in local favor. The Democratic Party had not even bothered to field a candidate. Yeoncheon was already Lee Ik-heung's in all but name.
Kijo made the same case to the hands at the brick factory. They were displaced people to a one, and they favored the Liberals as well.
"I'll tell you straight. We're from the North ourselves, but northern folk run harder than southerners. Those communist Reds, harder still. Go soft the way the Democratic Party or the Progressive Party does, and this country flies to pieces."
Ironically, people born in the North were sterner toward the North they had fled than anyone else. Jang Seokgu, village chief of Eundae-ri, and Lee Bongok, who ran the plant, threw themselves into helping him. As promised, Kijo supplied fertilizer, pesticide, and cattle, and agreed to donate Cheongsan brick to the schools of Yeoncheon County. The brick went into new schoolhouses for Yeoncheon Elementary and Jeongok Elementary, the largest schools in the county. It ended up looking as if former Minister of Home Affairs Lee Ik-heung had made the gift himself, but the brick was going into classrooms for children, and whose name stood on the donation hardly seemed to matter.
Having propped up the Yeoncheon race with goods and materials, Kijo came up to Seoul and met Kim Doo-han. The moment Kim Doo-han saw him walk into the campaign office, he lit up as if he had been handed an army.
"With Mr. Lee on our side, this election's a sure thing too! Ha ha ha!"
Watching that delight, Kijo felt anything but easy. The office was nothing like it had been four years before. Then it had been packed with gangsters—blind to politics, maybe, but bound together by loyalty and fire. This time it was full of operators. Progressives and reformers who had grown old in the political game filled every corner, and Kijo doubted they were reading the public mood at all.
Most of them leaned so hard on ideology that they could not hear what ordinary people wanted. They were deft at propaganda and agitation, but they had no idea what sort of politician the common folk were actually hoping for. He watched in silence how they worked. The pamphlets and strategies they turned out sat a long way from those hopes, crammed with pledges that sounded noble enough—opening North-South talks for the sake of peace, strengthening workers' rights—and would do an election little good.
He could feel, too, that the people in the office were not glad of him. Among men of the labor and peasant movements, a businessman was an unwelcome thing. How hard Kijo worked for his employees' welfare while running his company meant nothing to them. He was only an exception: a mutant sprung up among the mass of exploiting capitalists, and therefore nothing but a hindrance to the fight between labor and capital.
When he had seen enough of how they worked, he asked Kim Doo-han to step out for a drink, just the two of them. That evening, in a tavern in Jongno, they shared the liquor while Kijo set his thoughts in order.
Unlike Lee Ik-heung, whose victory was assured, Kim Doo-han, running in Jongno-eul, was headed for defeat. Feeling in the district was not kind to him. He had practiced politics in bold, broad strokes and had fought, as he believed, with all his might for democracy, but his personal missteps were many. He misspoke constantly, talked in the rough tongue of his gangster days, ran up tabs he never paid, and could not keep any dignity about him. And he confused people.
At bottom he was deeply conservative and fiercely anti-communist, yet because he stood against the Liberal Party he kept company with progressives and reformers. The Democratic Party, moderate-conservative beside the Liberals, would have suited him far better, but the Democrats kept their distance from a man with so dark a past. So an irony took shape. On anti-communism he stood close to Syngman Rhee's regime, while the company he kept was progressive and reformist, and with them he shared ground only in the labor movement. People could never quite pin down what kind of politician Kim Doo-han was.
Above all, his street fight of 1956 had been poorly received. When Liberal Party fraud in the August 1956 local council elections passed all bounds, seventy-two opposition lawmakers formed the Committee for the Defense of Popular Sovereignty and took the struggle into the streets. It was the first demonstration by National Assembly members in the history of the Republic, and the man at the very front was Kim Doo-han. Standing at the head of the column, he won real credit for breaking the police line—but the sight of him grappling with officers in the street dragged his standing down. Moderate citizens wanted stability, not a fight. However just and splendid the cause, when politicians kept brawling, to the public eye it looked like nothing more than a factional squabble.
His thoughts settled, Kijo spoke plainly.
"Assemblyman, if you want to be reelected, run independent, the way you did last time. The Labor-Farmer Party will never do."
He was pointing at the single thing that most damaged Kim Doo-han's chances: his party ticket. Kim Doo-han meant to stand on the nomination of the Labor-Farmer Party, a progressive party built on labor unions and farmers' unions. It had been founded for the welfare of workers and peasants, but people did not look on it kindly. From the name alone, the Labor-Farmer Party called to mind the Workers' Party of the North. To those who shuddered at the word communist, it sounded like a leftist party, and few could even tell the two apart. A Labor-Farmer candidate was more than enough to stir the wasted-vote instinct. It was easy to conclude that the party had no chance anyway, so backing it was pointless.
But Kim Doo-han, given this frank counsel, only laughed it off.
"Mr. Lee, that's a hard thing..."
Kijo knew why he insisted on running as a Labor-Farmer candidate. Loyalty. Jeon Jin-han of the Labor-Farmer Party was his political mentor. During the refuge in Busan, it was through Jeon Jin-han that Kim Doo-han had learned of workers' rights and opened his eyes to the world. He had watched Assemblyman Jeon help draft the Labor Standards Act, and he had seen refugees in the temporary capital of Busan worked to the bone for starvation wages. That, it seemed, was why he clung so stubbornly to the banner of the party where his teacher stood.
"Mr. Lee, if we make a song like last time and campaign on it, won't that do? Let's raise a wind, the way we did in the '54 election."
He was captive to an old success, and he meant to repeat the old way of stumping. It pained Kijo to see it.
"Assemblyman, the world has changed. When you were elected, it was 1954. The war had just ended, and people wanted a new age and new men. That's why a lively campaign song drew a response."
"Hm..."
Kim Doo-han brooded. He threw back the drink Kijo had poured, and after a long silence he spoke.
"Still, a campaign song has to do more good than no song at all, doesn't it?"
Seeing that he could not let go, Kijo felt the election was already over. Maybe it was the gangster in him—he was sunk too deep in a political fight built on principle. Kijo understood it well enough. Watching the Liberal Party's tyranny up close had set the man's sense of justice ablaze. But an election was an election, and he ached for him all the same. Just as Kim Doo-han would not abandon his loyalty to Assemblyman Jeon, Kijo did not want to cast aside his own loyalty to Doo-han.
"All right. I'll make you a song."
"Thank you, Mr. Lee."
Kim Doo-han seized his hand in a palm like a cauldron lid. Kijo smiled at him and offered a few pledges.
"Say you'll build consumers' cooperatives and credit cooperatives, and put real cooperatives to work for ordinary people."
"I will. I'll put it in my platform."
"And promise this as well—that Assemblyman Kim may be good with his fists, but if he becomes a lawmaker this time, he won't be brawling."
"All right. If Mr. Lee says do it, I follow, no questions. Ha ha ha!"
Kim Doo-han swallowed the advice whole. But Kijo did not believe the pledges would survive. The Labor-Farmer members packing the office would never take his ideas. If he helped Kim Doo-han organize a consumers' cooperative, he could supply it cheaply with the goods bound for Cheongsan Store; if a credit cooperative were formed, he could join it himself and put money behind it. The moment he offered to take part, though, the Labor-Farmer members would oppose him. That much was obvious. They wanted cooperatives made by pure workers and farmers, not ones with a capitalist like Kijo in them.
He took Kim Doo-han's defeat as a given and turned over what it would mean.
This time, Doo-han will learn something from it...
A loss, he thought, would be the making of a novice politician. Watching other politicians from outside the Assembly he had fought so fiercely in would serve him later, and the image he left as a lawmaker of the Third National Assembly—a fighter who had stood against the Liberal Party—would protect him in the years to come. Even through the political storms of April 19 and May 16, it would keep a former gangster safe. If he won this time, there was no telling what reckless thing the charging, stumbling Kim Doo-han might do as a sitting lawmaker when April 19 and May 16 arrived. Having his political career cut here might prove a blessing in disguise.
A few days later, as promised, Kijo wrote a campaign song and sent it over. He reworked the lyrics of Na Hoon-a's Hometown Station and Song Dae-gwan's The Day the Sun Rises and passed them to Kim Doo-han, who was thoroughly pleased. Kijo only dropped by the office now and then to encourage the staff and hand over a discreet envelope of cash, and even so Doo-han never complained that it wasn't enough. He seemed to have noticed himself that the campaign workers helping him didn't much care for Kijo.
Time passed that way, and on April 10, twenty days before the National Assembly election, Lee Ki-poong finally made his move. Kijo had been watching carefully to see what trick he would pull.
For a start, Lee Ki-poong had Icheon locked up as a Liberal Party no-nomination district, and he carried on as if the party had abandoned Icheon in Gyeonggi Province. Then, twenty minutes before the deadline on the last day of candidate registration, he completed his filing. What followed was astonishing. Yeon Yun-hee, who had received the Democratic Party nomination and registered early, canceled his registration and vanished without a trace. The Democrats raised suspicions at once, saying their own candidate had withdrawn without consulting the party and then gone missing.
When word of Lee Ki-poong's registration got out, Lee Jeong-jae's campaign workers stormed the office, occupied it in protest, and pulled out again within an hour. Lee Jeong-jae himself canceled his candidacy at once. And so the Icheon district fell into Lee Ki-poong's hands. There was far too much that did not sit right, and Lee Jeong-jae had been trampled without a fight.
Afterward Kijo heard that Lee Jeong-jae had gone to Lee Ki-poong to protest and come away badly used. Kwak Young-joo had seized him, threatened to have him arrested on the spot, and ordered him to take his hands off the Dongdaemun gang. The source of a rumor like that was easy to guess. It would be Lim Hwa-soo, the new top man of the Dongdaemun faction. Lim Hwa-soo needed the people around him to understand why he had become head of the gang. He would have wanted it known that Lee Jeong-jae had fallen from the powerful men's favor and become a kite with its string cut, so that he himself had had no choice but to take the boss's seat.
For a while after that, Lee Jeong-jae was not to be seen even in Dongdaemun. Rumors spread that he was locked in the basement of Jongno Police Station, or that some unknown gunman had shot him and he was hovering at death's door. All of it was idle talk. Kijo had been summoned by Lee Jeong-jae, and he was on his way to see him.
Riding in a jeep with a man Lee Jeong-jae had sent, he headed for Mount Bugak, where Lee Jeong-jae had shut himself away. The house sat in so lonely a spot that he seemed to have chosen it on purpose. Afraid of Lee Ki-poong's revenge, he had planted himself where a car could hardly reach. The jeep stopped at the foot of the mountain, where the road gave out.
"From here, you'll have to walk."
Lee Jeong-jae's man said.
Kijo climbed down from the jeep and set off along a footpath empty of people, toward Lee Jeong-jae.
