O Won-chul
December 15, 1958. The great courtroom of the Seoul District Court.
Gijo watched the judgment on Lee Hwa-ryong beside an anxious Lee Seong-ryong. Five days earlier the prosecution had asked for three years. Today the sentence would be made final.
Judge Kim Taek-hyeon began to read the judgment.
The defendants have, with one voice, denied the assault that occurred on Chungjeongno on the fourth of October last. Upon the several proofs before this court, however, the fact of the offense is found established.
At the finding of guilt, Lee Seong-ryong clenched both hands and shut her eyes. The judge read on.
That men of violence should strengthen their organizations and act in a body is not merely a cancer upon society. It throws the order of law into confusion and sets honest citizens trembling with fear. If the roots of this violent cast of mind are to be pulled up, if decent citizens are to be given a sense of safety, and if society is to be restored to something brighter, then even for that cause alone they must be punished with severity.
The moment severe punishment left the judge's mouth, Lee Seong-ryong dropped her head.
Gijo looked toward Lee Hwa-ryong, standing in the dock. His face was unexpectedly composed, as if he already knew what lay ahead of him. The reading went on.
…The ringleader of the present Chungjeongno affair being the defendant Sim Jong-hyeon, it is Defendant Sim who shall be punished most heavily. The defendant Lee Hwa-ryong was not a principal mover in this incident. Further, his past merits in the struggle against communism being taken into account in mitigation, the court, this once only, shows leniency and pronounces a suspended sentence.
When the suspended sentence came down, Gijo and Lee Seong-ryong cried out. The Myeongdong men in the gallery, and Lee Hwa-ryong's family with them, rose as one and shouted Manse!, wild with relief.
A prosecutor shot to his feet and bellowed at the spectators.
"All of you—sit down!"
The gallery went quiet in an instant. The prosecutor turned back to the bench.
"Your Honor! I appeal—orally!"
He was lodging a fierce objection to the suspension handed down on Lee Hwa-ryong. Hwa-ryong's lawyer met the agitated young man with a slick, easy smile.
"Look here. If you're going to appeal, put it in writing. Why raise a row in open court? Is that any way for a prosecutor to behave?"
Stung by the sarcasm, the prosecutor had no answer for Kim Myeong-yun, counsel for Lee Hwa-ryong. Until a few months ago Kim had himself been a prosecutor at the Seoul District Prosecutors' Office; he had quit the post and hung out his own shingle, and he still carried the pull of a man fresh from the inside. The young prosecutor looked away from him and sat down.
When court broke, Lee Seong-ryong caught Gijo's hand and held it tight.
"Thank you, Yeongsu's dad. It's because you put your weight behind us that our Hwa-ryong came through safe."
"I didn't do anything."
He was telling the truth. He really had done nothing at all. But Lee Seong-ryong, and the rest of Hwa-ryong's kin with her, all seemed convinced the suspended sentence was Gijo's doing. O Won-chul, her son, who had sat through the hearing beside them, added his own thanks.
"President Lee, thank you. I'll be sure to repay what you've done for my uncle."
In 1957 he had given up his life as an Air Force technical officer and was working as plant manager at Sibal Automobile. Gijo shook the hand of a man who might one day become the control tower of economic development under the Third Republic.
"Not at all. If anyone's in debt, it's me. I owe your uncle more than he owes me."
When Gijo lowered himself in that modest way, Lee Seong-ryong turned to her son.
"Didn't I tell you? President Lee has always been this sort of man."
"Yes, Mother. Just as you said. Ha ha."
O Won-chul laughed as he said it. Gijo went with the Lees to Myeongwolgwan, and there everyone ate in high spirits, rejoicing that Hwa-ryong had taken a suspended sentence and walked free.
The man of the hour wore a bittersweet face. Not having to serve time had plainly lightened him, and yet the look of a man worried for his future was there as well.
"What's with the funeral face? Don't you go hitting people from here on. You've got a suspended sentence over you now. Land even one punch and it's a year in prison."
Lee Seong-ryong tossed the words at her brother.
"I know, Sister. Quit hounding me. I'm of a mind to do other work now."
He said it on a sigh.
"What work? Got something in mind besides swinging your fists?"
"I do. I've got something."
He poked through the dishes with his chopsticks.
"Then say it. What are you going to do?"
"Start a film company, that's what. I know actors, I know a director, and President Lee here is going to help me. Isn't that so?"
The whole Lee clan turned at once to look at Gijo. He and Hwa-ryong had never spoken of any such thing, but he didn't flinch. Around this time, Hwa-ryong was meant to start a film company anyway.
"That's right, that's right. Yeongsu's dad runs Cheongsan Heungeop, doesn't he? I hear Cheongsan Heungeop's got plenty of actors. Help our Hwa-ryong out a little."
She said it with a look that plainly meant look after my brother. Gijo said he would.
"Uncle, what are you going to call the company?"
"I'm thinking Hwaseong Film Company."
"Hwaseong Film?"
"Aye. One piece of my name, one piece of your ma's. She's the one putting up the money, see."
It was Hwa from Lee Hwa-ryong and Seong from Lee Seong-ryong, set together as Hwaseong.
"What kind of talk is that? When did I ever say I'd put money into you?"
"Don't give it, and I'll have to keep on as a gangster, Sister. Do that, and I end up in the lockup anyway."
He said it and, as if it were nothing, picked up a piece of food and popped it into his mouth. Shameless as he was, she was struck speechless—and in the end she never said she wouldn't invest. He was talking about washing his hands of the life and going into business. Doubtful as she was, she seemed to want to push him forward all the same.
Gijo ate and talked with the Lees, then stepped outside for a cigarette. He was smoking alone in the quiet when O Won-chul came out.
"Give me one too, if you would."
Gijo handed him a domestic Arirang.
"You smoke the local brand. A man like you could be smoking good foreign cigarettes."
"It's a new product, so I bought a pack. They say it's the first Korean cigarette to put in a filter."
It seemed to be Won-chul's first Arirang as well. Gijo lit it for him, and he turned the taste over carefully.
"Tastes a lot like Baekyang."
"Yes. They say it's just Baekyang with a filter stuck on."
"Still a long way from the imported stuff, but the filter softens it. Makes it worth smoking."
He drew on it with evident pleasure. They were smoking together when Lee Hwa-ryong and Attorney Kim Myeong-yun came out, and the moment his uncle appeared, O Won-chul dropped the cigarette he had going and ground it out under his shoe.
"Why come outside to smoke? You could light up indoors."
Gijo offered Arirangs to Hwa-ryong and Kim as well. Curious what a domestic cigarette tasted like, they tried them: inferior to the foreign brands, they agreed, but tolerable enough if you put up with it. Gijo looked at the three men smoking beside him.
In the history as it had originally run, O Won-chul became Park Chung-hee's foremost economic secretary. Lee Hwa-ryong produced some of the masterworks of 1960s cinema. Kim Myeong-yun spent the years from the sixties onward in the opposition, was received as an elder of the Sangdo-dong faction around Kim Young-sam, and remained in politics into the 1990s. Every one of them would leave his mark on the Republic of Korea.
"Wasn't that prosecutor bastard a joke today?"
Hwa-ryong meant the man who had jumped up in court shouting that he would appeal on the spot.
"Ah—Prosecutor Yu? He's short on experience, that's all. In his own mind he thought he could win. Ha ha."
Kim Myeong-yun said it, laughing.
"Didn't that prosecutor know a deal had already been struck?"
When Hwa-ryong asked, Kim glanced at Gijo, taking his measure.
"It's fine. You can say it. He's as good as family."
Once Hwa-ryong had vouched for him, Kim gave Gijo a small smile and went on.
"He probably knew, and did it anyway. The higher-ups will have told him this trial was already settled to come out this way. He just didn't like it. So he got angry and shouted. Most of them are like that when they're new. Ha ha ha."
What the man called a settlement, Gijo thought, was a bargain over the verdict itself.
The final result of the Chungjeongno Axe Incident trial cut against everything the street had expected. Lee Hwa-ryong of the Myeongdong gang and Sim Jong-hyeon of the Jongno gang received suspended sentences, while Yu Ji-gwang of the Dongdaemun gang was given eight months. People had been sure that Yu Ji-gwang, hand in glove with the Liberal Party, would be the one to walk out on a suspension. The outcome was precisely the reverse.
Think of what followed the trial, and a deal was not hard to suspect. The offer may have been this: Yu Ji-gwang goes to prison, and Lee Hwa-ryong takes a suspended sentence on the condition that he step away from the Myeongdong gang of his own accord—and if he refused, three years inside, with the organization blown to pieces. Whoever made that offer would have judged that a suspension could keep Hwa-ryong and Sim Jong-hyeon from running wild for three years.
Seoul was, in effect, a standoff between the Myeongdong gang and the Dongdaemun gang, the lesser outfits either allied with one of the two or holding a careful neutrality. Let the Myeongdong boss take his hands off the organization's affairs, and the city would fall to Dongdaemun of its own accord. To send only Yu Ji-gwang to prison while suspending the sentences of Hwa-ryong and Sim was, in truth, much like giving away the flesh to keep the bone.
"The prosecutors and the police have me marked. I've got no choice but to take my hands off the Myeongdong gang. From here on I have to put everything into the film company. President Lee, I'm counting on you."
Lee Hwa-ryong held out his hand.
"I'll be counting on you as well."
Gijo was the one in a position to help, yet he carried himself like the man receiving the favor. O Won-chul and Kim Myeong-yun smiled to see it. Gijo had a feeling that the three men gathered there that day would be bound to him for a long time to come.
Hwa-ryong and Kim, finished with their cigarettes, said they would go in first. Left alone with O Won-chul again, Gijo offered him another. The younger man hadn't been able to smoke in front of his uncle and his elders.
"Well. Fifty-eight is nearly gone."
He said it while sending the smoke high into the sky. Gijo knew he was building a domestic four-cylinder, six-seat jeep and pouring himself into localizing the parts. Some of the engine components, the tires, the headlights, the frame—he had already brought those home, and Gijo imagined he was running into no small share of trouble.
"How far have you pushed the localization rate these days?"
"Roughly fifty-six percent."
Gijo told him that was remarkable. O Won-chul scratched the back of his head.
"Still a long way to go. What we've localized lately—metal bearings, valve guides, clutch discs—the word is they don't hold up the way the old ones did."
The words metal bearings caught Gijo's ear.
"Cheongsan runs a bearing plant as well. What would you say to International Vehicle Works and Cheongsan doing business together?"
"I'd like that. You wouldn't happen to have a foundry, would you? We're making engine cylinder blocks, and durability is tripping us up there too."
"A few days ago we acquired a foundry in Yeongdeungpo. Word is it has the best technique in the district."
He had given Director Lee Yong-guk a free hand to buy up capable plants.
"That's good news. I'll speak well of a partnership with Cheongsan to President Choi Mu-seong. There's still so much to localize—carburetors, transmission gears, differential gears."
"I'll pay a separate visit to the company. If you'd just put in a word ahead of time."
"Understood. Our president will be glad to work with Cheongsan."
Gijo wanted badly to tie Cheongsan to International Vehicle Works, the shop that had developed the first automobile made in Korea. To build cars he would, in the end, have to bring technology in from abroad—but he had no wish to partner with a foreign firm without first having built a car himself. Going into an alliance after making even the parts with your own hands, and going in without that, would be as far apart as heaven and earth.
He had never imagined, back in the refugee days, that the bond Sunrye and Lee Seong-ryong had formed would grow into anything like this. That he should now be tied to O Won-chul—the man who would stand at the very peak of the technocrats under Park Chung-hee's government—was thanks entirely to his wife. To Sunrye.