Japanese Encephalitis
Japanese encephalitis swept through August of 1958. There had been outbreaks in 1949, 1952, and 1955, but 1958 was in a class of its own—severe enough that the government ordered the schools closed at every level.
Ki-jo's family hung a Japanese-made mosquito net, and the four of them slept together inside it. Pregnant Sunrye worried less for herself than for Yeongsu and Yeongeun. Afraid her little son and daughter might be bitten, she kept the door shut even in the daytime and shut herself into the stifling room, searching the walls for any mosquito that might be clinging there and striking down every one she found with a fan.
Ki-jo gave out the Japanese nets he had secured in advance to people close to him, and at Sunrye's request he set one aside for Kim Jong-pil as well. He knew that Park Young-ok, Kim Jong-pil's wife, had been coming to see Sunrye more and more often of late. The two women seemed to suit each other with no calculation in it, their hearts simply of a kind.
One late-summer morning Ki-jo opened his eyes and carefully slipped out from under the net. He tucked its edge down into the bedding so no mosquito could find a way in, then stepped out into the yard and stretched. He was looking up at the sky when Han-su came out of the house next door. The moment Han-su saw him, he bent at the waist in greeting and came over.
"Did you sleep well?"
"I did. And you, Han-su?"
"No. The heat didn't break until after midnight, so I tossed and turned."
It was an age when nearly everyone was asleep before midnight. But the tropical nights had been so relentless that sleep itself was hard to come by.
A moment later the sound of a propeller reached them from far off. Growing steadily louder, a transport plane passed low over Jongno.
"Huh... why is that plane flying so low?" Han-su said, following it with his eyes.
"Looks like they're spraying from the air," Ki-jo said, and watched until the plane slipped out of sight.
As the encephalitis worsened, the government threw the full weight of its administration into killing mosquitoes. Civil servants and ordinary citizens were sent down every alley with machines on their backs, laying smoke or spraying DDT into the puddles. Along the main roads, trucks and jeeps passed trailing disinfectant fog, and the children were forever busy chasing the fogging trucks. Parents, convinced the chemicals were good for the body, made no effort to stop them from breathing in the fumes that poured out with the exhaust.
They tried aerial spraying from airplanes as well as this campaign on the ground, but the work from the air was, in truth, mostly for show. Insecticide scattered from that height spread too thin to ever reach the ground. The point was to demonstrate that the government was laboring to kill mosquitoes; the practical effect was slight. Even so, when planes passed overhead trailing poison, a great many people thought, Well, Dr. Rhee is trying, at least.
As the sound of the plane faded, Ki-jo and Han-su drifted naturally into talk of work.
"We can't run the night work because of the mosquitoes, so the schedule has fallen badly behind."
Ma-ryang, Seo-gwang, and Shim Han-su had lately been out in Yeongdeungpo, supervising construction of the logistics base. Ki-jo knew the delay was of his own making; he had forbidden night work himself. Even the U.S. military, with encephalitis running wild, had banned outdoor training and was hanging mosquito nets in the barracks—he was not about to sacrifice people merely to hurry the completion. But Han-su was the man living with the job, and Ki-jo could see the slipping schedule burning him as the money poured out.
"Manager Shim. Even if it costs more, that's all right. Please see that we finish this with no one hurt."
"Understood, sir."
Ki-jo talked idly with Han-su a while longer, then went back inside. Sunrye had come out from under the net and was in the kitchen cooking the morning rice. He slipped beneath it again and fanned Yeongsu and Yeongeun where they slept, dead to the world.
Through August, Ki-jo went often to the Yeongdeungpo site. Getting a foothold there carried real weight. In the 1950s the district was nothing short of the mecca of Korean industry. In a country whose industrial base was still frail, the six major industries—metal, machinery, chemicals, ceramics, textiles, and food processing—were all crowded into Yeongdeungpo. To do business in that place was to be able to meet nearly everyone in Korea who made things.
Most of the plants were light industry, though there were metalworks and machine shops of a sort as well. Ki-jo made a point of getting on familiar terms with their owners and worked to turn acquaintance into friendship. It bore directly on the bearings business he was treating as his priority. In the end he even had his eye on acquiring Yeongdeungpo firms that had been accumulating technical skill since the Japanese colonial period. If, sometime from the late 1950s through the middle of the 1960s, companies appeared that could not outlast the slump and went under, he meant to drop everything and rush in to buy them.
The man who drew close to him in the midst of those efforts was, of all people, Baek Nam-il of Taechang Textile. Baek Nam-il was the grandson of Baek Yun-su, famed as the richest merchant in Seoul. His grandfather had been a great trader who, generation after generation, ran a silk-goods licensed shop in the Yukui-jeon, the Six Licensed Stores of Jongno. He stood overwhelmingly first among the merchants of the city—rich enough to leave Park Seung-jik, founder of the Doosan Group and a distant second, far behind. Importing every kind of silk from Qing China and selling it as a monopoly, he made a fortune.
After the grandfather and the eldest uncle died, Baek Nam-il's father, Baek Nak-seung, inherited the company in the 1930s, and he was a remarkable man in his own right. He cultivated the military police of the Japanese Kwantung Army—the hardest of the hard-liners, and the unit said, even within the Japanese military, to harbor the most lunatics—and smuggled cotton cloth into Manchuria. Thanks to those military police, no firm but Taechang Trading dared move textiles in. Even Japanese giants such as Marubeni and Itochu could sell goods there only by going through Baek Nak-seung.
He piled up an enormous fortune on that smuggling, and with the money bought Japanese cotton-spinning firms, among other things, until he stood as one of the most successful businessmen of the colonial era. After liberation he was just as adept at his ties to power. By backing Syngman Rhee with money, he was able to become the first man who could truly be called a chaebol. Rhee, having taken political funds from him, turned over the vested Yeongdeungpo plant of Goryeo Textile and gave him Joseon Machinery as well. Through the Korea Development Bank he lent him fully five million dollars in foreign exchange, and even granted the right to sell red ginseng to affiliates of the Taechang Group.
Was it the father's blood? After Baek Nak-seung died, Baek Nam-il inherited the family business in 1956 and carried on a close relationship with the Rhee regime. Whenever a furor over government favoritism broke out in the fifties, Baek Nak-seung's name was sure to be mentioned. In the end, after the April 19 Revolution, Baek Nam-il himself would be branded an illicit accumulator of wealth and have his entire fortune confiscated by the state—but for the moment he was still at his height. That such a man enjoyed seeking out Ki-jo, still only a second-league businessman, just to talk, was unexpected.
"President Lee, let's go have bulgogi today."
Ki-jo followed him to a traditional restaurant the man knew well. They ate and talked of this and that, and every time they met, Ki-jo found him faintly astonishing. He did not seem like a man living in the same era. Perhaps because the family had been staggeringly rich since his grandfather's day, he had gone through life without ever learning what hardship was—and perhaps that was why there was no crease of bitterness in him, only an open, breezy cheer.
"My youngest brother is two years younger than you, President Lee. There's hardly any difference, and yet I can't fathom how two people can turn out so unlike..."
Baek Nam-il, who had been picking at the bulgogi, rinsed his mouth with beer and went on.
"Forgive me for putting it this way, but I wish you were my little brother. Brothers running a business together—think how fine that would be..."
Ki-jo could roughly guess why he said it. The man himself was cooperating with the regime for all he was worth to keep the business alive, while the youngest, close to Ki-jo in age, was roaming overseas and comfortably practicing art on the family's money. That, Ki-jo supposed, was how he saw it.
"The boy's name is Nam June Paik. The rascal's off studying in West Germany just now."
So that was it. Baek Nam-il of Taechang Textile was the older brother of Nam June Paik, the video artist.
"What's he studying over in Germany?"
Baek Nam-il gave a short laugh.
"Studying? Please. Even while Father was alive he enrolled himself in the aesthetics department at Tokyo University because he felt like it, and the moment he graduated he bolted for Germany to study music. I swear, it leaves me speechless... ha."
"Ha. I'm sure your brother will do great things in time."
Ki-jo took the younger man's side. Baek Nam-il shook his head.
"Don't even start. Heaven's luck was with our family. Before the war broke out here, the whole household had already moved to Japan."
In all honesty, Ki-jo envied them: so much money, and not a single hardship, the fires of war having passed them cleanly by.
"That boy was already mad for pineapple back then. An age when even the Japanese didn't know what the fruit was."
He took a swallow of beer and started in on his brother again.
"Before the war, Father went to Hong Kong on orders from His Excellency President Syngman Rhee. To buy weapons. Taking Nam June along was the mistake. He put the boy in a school there, and I think that's where the child caught a wild notion in his head. Running around with foreign children."
He seemed convinced his brother had been spoiled by foreign ways and seized by the idle fancy of art.
"Look at him and he always seemed like someone who had stepped out of reality. A man ought to live in the world as it is, the way you and I do, President Lee, but that boy always seemed to be off on the far shore. Heaven knows when he'll grow up..."
Clucking his tongue, he offered Ki-jo a piece of advice, almost in passing.
"President Lee. I say this only because you feel like a younger brother to me—you ought to lay out a little political money yourself."
"I don't have the money. I'm borrowing from Hyundai Construction just to put up the warehouse."
Ki-jo laid the hardship on a little thick.
"Come now, what a stifling thing to say. Among the companies doing well these days, who does business on his own money?"
Baek Nam-il laughed, a big unguarded laugh, and began to explain how the firms on top actually operated.
"A capable businessman, I'll tell you, is a man who wins the rights to put up a factory and who gets his loans from the bank without any trouble. Attach yourself to the government, line up the right backing, and all of that becomes possible."
Ki-jo only nodded. He knew it already.
"Look at Samsung, competing in the seasoning business."
He offered Samsung as his example.
"Watch what Samsung does and all you can do is marvel. Eighty percent of the shares in Hanil Bank, more than half of Choheung Bank—Samsung's. Samsung has swallowed half of the four big commercial banks."
Ki-jo nodded. In the years before banking and industry were required to be kept apart, from 1954 through 1956, the government had auctioned off the shares of the commercial banks. Only companies and individuals nestled close to the regime were in a position to bid. Lee Byung-chull swept the bank stock up clean. He understood perfectly well that the banks would become Samsung's pipeline of cash.
"And look. With the banks gripped tight in Mr. Lee Byung-chull's hands, the loans come easy. And what did he do with the banks' money? Founded companies hand over fist."
Samsung would come to hold Hanil Bank, Samsung Trading, Cheil Jedang, Cheil Wool, Hankook Tire, Anguk Fire & Marine, Geunyeong Trading, Hankook Machinery, Pungguk Distilling, Joseon Brewery, Cheonil Securities, Dongyang Textile, Hyosung Trading, and more besides.
"Look at the others, too. Samho, Gaepung, Daehan Flour, Lakhee, Dongyang, Kukdong. Banks, insurance, textiles, coal mines, steel—there's nothing they don't have. That's how business is done. With other people's money, you buy the assets that will become your own."
Listening, Ki-jo smiled a bitter smile. Just as the man said, Korea's chaebol stretched octopus arms on borrowed money. Of the ten largest in the Korea of the 1960s, seven were sprawling conglomerates rather than firms devoted to a single trade.
Having held forth with such heat, Baek Nam-il let out a sigh.
"I'd like to do as Samsung does, or Samho, or Gaepung. But I can't tell how much better I'd have to treat the government before they'd hand me favors like those..."
He smacked his lips. The look on his face said he was daunted—that someone out there lobbied the government even more skillfully than he did.
"I find that strange myself, truly."
Ki-jo agreed, and as he listened he poured another round into Baek Nam-il's glass.
"Well, the truth is, neither of us is really ignorant of the method, are we? You carry money to the Liberal Party and offer it up. At every election you give them money and tell them to win, and whenever there's a wedding or a funeral you pay a call and hand cash over."
Baek Nam-il drained the last of it together with him and broke into a wide grin.
"Let's pull together, those of us doing business in Yeongdeungpo, and make something of it. We'll say those people got ahead by giving better bribes than we do—and we'll work hard and get out in front of them on real ability. Wouldn't that do it?"
"It would."
Ki-jo nodded. Baek Nam-il spoke as though he himself never offered a single bribe, but it is the way of people to see the next man's faults as larger than their own.
After lunch with Baek Nam-il, Ki-jo headed for the Bando Hotel. He had an appointment with Park Hee-jun, who was leaving for America the next day.