Fathers
The last night of February.
Ki-jo sat writing a letter that set down Mac O's hamburger sales. The shop was not yet an official McDonald's franchise, but he meant to report the figures to headquarters in the United States. From the opening on February 5 through the 28th—twenty-four days—they had taken in $7,200. Five or six hundred customers a day, on average. Enough, he judged, to prove the business to Ray Kroc. Keep the sanitation mishaps in hand, and the rest would take care of itself.
Profit was another matter. The fine ingredients coming out of the American base were expensive, and with forty people on the payroll the labor costs ran high. Ki-jo didn't mind. Running Mac O had never been about making money.
He looked over the daily sales graph he had sketched in pen and smiled, satisfied. Mac O's numbers were still climbing. When the letter was finished he sealed the envelope and crossed from the side room into the main bedroom.
"All finished with your work?" Sunrye asked.
"All done."
Ki-jo slipped under the quilt, and Sunrye turned out the light. The two of them drew the covers up and talked quietly in the dark.
"Is Yeongja managing the work all right?"
Yeongja was the fourteen-year-old girl who had come into the Lee house as a maid.
"Don't even ask..."
At that, Ki-jo rolled toward her. "Why? She doesn't get along with the children?"
"It's not that. Yeongja's a good girl, and she works hard. It's just..."
Sunrye told him what had happened after Yeongja received her weekly pay. So the girl could keep up her schooling, Ki-jo and Sunrye sent her to class in the mornings and had her help with the housework only once she came home. But from the day after they handed her seven thousand hwan for the week, Yeongja's entire family had turned out in force and set to work around the house.
"Her mother and father come in the morning to work?"
"Yes. The child gets seven thousand hwan a week, and they say they feel bad that she only works in the afternoons, so her mother and father come in the mornings. They clean, they do the laundry, they cook—everything. I tell them not to, but if they stop, Yeongja has to do it all herself, so I can't very well tell them to stop..."
"Is that so."
Ki-jo understood how her parents felt. Seven thousand hwan a week came to nearly thirty thousand a month. Their eldest daughter was bringing home what amounted to a grown man's wages. They would have been startled, and ashamed before the house that employed her. While she was at her studies, they must have wanted to earn that money themselves, even if it meant doing the work in her place.
"When we interviewed Yeongja, her father said he wasn't well. Does he come too?"
"Yes. He says he's been feeling a little better lately, and that he'd like to work in his daughter's stead. He comes every day, offering to run errands if nothing else."
"Give them something to do. If we don't, they'll be uneasy—afraid we might let their daughter go."
"All right, I will. Shall I ask them to make some tofu? Yeongja's mother seems to have a good hand in the kitchen."
"Do that. The two of them ought to work well together."
"I will."
Sunrye loved that her husband could read what people felt. She watched him quietly in the dark, and before long a low snore reached her. He drove himself all day and was dead asleep the moment night came. She stroked his cheek. Ki-jo had sunk into sleep, gone to the world. Sunrye kissed his cheek and closed her own eyes.
The next morning Ki-jo set out for Seoul Stadium in Dongdaemun, to attend the ceremony marking the March First Movement. Lim Hwa-soo, Jongno district commander of the Anti-Communist Youth Corps, had put his name on the list of attendees.
Going was no bad thing. It was a ceremony with weight, and given the chance, Ki-jo had long wanted to see for himself an occasion that was not open to just anyone. He arrived at the stadium and made his way to the section assigned to the residents of Jongno. Even among them he sat at the very top of the stands. Policemen stood at five-meter intervals directly behind him, and when he looked down, the students who had been turned out for the day packed the field from end to end. The boys wore black school uniforms, the girls white.
Syngman Rhee arrived, and the ceremony began. It moved through the order of events without a hitch, and then Rhee's speech started. On the fortieth anniversary of the March First Movement, the address blazed hotter than usual. The repatriation of Koreans in Japan to the North was in the air as well, and he lashed Japan without mercy, stirring the crowd's anti-Japanese feeling. Drives against Japan were his particular gift.
Ki-jo took the stinging sun and fanned himself without rest. Looking around, he saw people listening in deadly earnest. Such were the times. They were full of anger.
When the long, tedious speech at last ended, the whole assembly rose, sang the March First song together, and shouted manse.
The event over, Ki-jo headed for a tearoom near the stadium, the place he had agreed to meet Lim Hwa-soo. The moment he stepped inside, the famous film actors caught his eye. Kim Seung-ho, Kim Jin-kyu, Yoon Il-bong, Joo Sun-tae, Choi Moo-ryong, Dokgo Sung, Lee Ye-chun, Heo Jang-gang—the greatest stars of the day, a lineup so lavish it was almost hard to breathe. All of them were exclusive players for Lim Hwa-soo's Korea Entertainment Co., or actors living under his sway. Every one of them sat rigid at attention around him.
"Over here, President Lee."
Lim raised a hand. As Ki-jo came to the table, Lim made the introduction.
"You know the president of DBC, don't you? He runs Cheongsan Heungeop too. A younger brother I look after."
At the words younger brother, the actors greeted Ki-jo with elaborate courtesy. They rose, took his hand in both of theirs, and shook it. He returned the greetings and sat down.
He had barely taken his seat when Park No-sik came hurrying into the tearoom, bowed a full ninety degrees to Lim, and apologized.
"I'm sorry, Commander. I stepped out to the restroom..."
"Sit down, you bastard."
Lim scowled, and that was all it took. Park No-sik, sweat pouring off him, dropped into the chair beside Ki-jo. Seeing how anxious the man was, Ki-jo offered his hand and introduced himself in a low voice.
"Lee Ki-jo. President of DBC."
"A pleasure. Park No-sik."
They shook briefly. Once everyone he had summoned was present, Lim came to the point.
"You all know there's a founding ceremony for the Anti-Communist Artists Corps on March 19?"
"Yes, sir," the actors answered as one.
"Mind yourselves until then. Let one rumor of a scandal or an affair get out, and you'd better be ready to die."
"Yes, sir."
Ki-jo found himself glancing at Choi Moo-ryong. Of everyone there, his dealings with women were the most tangled.
"And from now on, treat President Lee Ki-jo well. He's a man who'll be helping you in all sorts of ways."
Helping them? With what?
Ki-jo was dumbfounded. At Lim's one-sided announcement the actors looked his way and dipped their heads. He bowed in return, a gesture that they might look after one another.
"I've got another function, so I'm leaving first. Sort out the ranking among yourselves. I'm off."
Lim stood, and they all stood with him. They kept their heads bowed until he was entirely out of the tearoom. Ki-jo could only pity actors who didn't dare twitch in front of the man.
With Lim gone, their faces eased, and they looked at one another. Ki-jo turned to Kim Seung-ho, the oldest man there. By years in the profession and by age, he was the elder brother of the gathering. Sure enough, Kim spoke first.
"Forgive me, but might I ask what your relationship is with Commander Lim?"
"Brother," Lee Ye-chun said, "the Commander just told us. He's a younger brother the Commander cherishes."
"Ah. Right... so he did." Kim Seung-ho laughed, sheepish.
Kim Seung-ho, the greatest star of the age, was caught in Lim Hwa-soo's grip and could not move. Forever being hauled to Liberal Party rallies to speak from the platform, he would later pay dearly for it. On the day of the April 19 Uprising he would flee the demonstrators, and when they failed to catch him they would descend on his house and burn it to the ground. That year his son, Kim Hee-ra, was fourteen.
Ki-jo's eyes slid to Kim Jin-kyu, seated beside him. Kim Jin-kyu had a soft, intelligent air rare among the actors of the fifties. He would star in The Aimless Bullet, widely called the finest Korean film of that decade, and in The Houseguest and My Mother, a masterpiece of the sixties, and like Kim Seung-ho he was helpless before Lim Hwa-soo. Lim had beaten him once, claiming he had broken his exclusive contract. Yoon Il-bong, Joo Sun-tae, Choi Moo-ryong, Dokgo Sung, and Heo Jang-gang, all of them in that room, had been sworn at as a matter of course, and each had taken a beating or two.
"Good to meet you, President Lee." Heo Jang-gang offered his hand.
He was the character actor who had coined the line "Nothing to do—how about a little kiss?" The man was so exactly the image of his son, Heo Jun-ho, that Ki-jo smiled. The older Heo Jun-ho grew, the more he would come to wear his father's face.
Ki-jo looked around at the rest of them as well: Lee Ye-chun, father of Lee Deok-hwa; Dokgo Sung, father of Dokgo Young-jae; Choi Moo-ryong, father of Choi Min-soo; Park No-sik, father of Park Jun-gyu; Joo Sun-tae, father of Joo Yong-man. Their sons, too, would make their lives in entertainment with faces cut from the same cloth as their fathers'. What amused him was that, among that second generation, it was the sons of the worst womanizers who kept the most exemplary homes. They had grown up under mothers who suffered, he supposed, and had sworn that when their own turn came they would be faithful in marriage.
While he was turning this over, Lee Ye-chun set the seating to rights.
"President Lee, please sit here."
He offered the chair Lim had occupied. When Ki-jo moved, the actors rearranged themselves of their own accord. Taking it for a kind of hierarchy, he checked the order: Kim Seung-ho, Lee Ye-chun, Joo Sun-tae, Kim Jin-kyu, Heo Jang-gang, Choi Moo-ryong, Dokgo Sung, Park No-sik, Yoon Il-bong.
"As you are Commander Lim's younger brother, we will honor you as our elder."
Ki-jo raised no objection. It sat uncomfortably on him, but Lim's power was so absolute that they were doing this on their own, and he saw no help for it. By rights he himself ought to have been sitting beside Park No-sik. The two of them were the same age.
He thought it over. Lim had invited him to the March First ceremony and, right in front of him, had brought up the Anti-Communist Artists Corps with these actors. The message seemed plain enough: put Cheongsan Heungeop's entertainers into the corps Lim himself was leading.
Having caught the intent, Ki-jo looked around. Every actor was watching him. He felt he ought to say something. He had nothing in particular to say, but nine of them were gathered around the table, and that gave him an idea.
"DBC is thinking of holding a soccer tournament for entertainers. I'd be glad if you joined us."
The men smiled and answered him.
"That sounds good. We needed the exercise anyway. This works out well."
"Ah, so that's why the Commander sent for you, President Lee. A soccer tournament—excellent."
They had been tense, wondering whether Ki-jo might be another gangster in Lim's mold. Once they decided he had only come among them for the sake of goodwill, the tension seemed to leave them.
"We'll just need two more," Lee Ye-chun said. "Who should we call?"
"Call Won and Seong-il, and that ought to do it," Choi Moo-ryong said.
"Won and Seong-il?"
"A couple of new actors. Namgung Won and Shin Seong-il."
"Right, those kids. Call them. Call a few more—we'll need reserves."
"Then we ought to get Brother Park Am and Brother Nam Hyun."
A soccer team took shape in an instant.
"Cheongsan Heungeop has quite a few singers, doesn't it?" Kim Jin-kyu said, warming to him. "Singers have good wind. I imagine they'd run well."
"Ah, yes. We do have a fair number of singers."
"Actors against singers. People would enjoy that."
Park No-sik cut in. "Brothers, our side's got too many men in their thirties and forties. We're at a disadvantage. You'd all better start working on your stamina."
"You worry about yourself, punk. Being young doesn't mean you're in shape." Heo Jang-gang put him neatly in his place.
Ki-jo had tea with them and went back to DBC. In the president's office he turned it over.
If he says to put them in, then in they go. What else is there to do...
He was surprised Lim had not simply ordered him to enroll Cheongsan Heungeop's entertainers in the Anti-Communist Artists Corps, or bullied him into it. Lim treated him gently, and with respect. Ki-jo didn't know why, but it was better than being pushed around. Even so, he had to bear in mind that the March 15 election fraud—the fraud that would bring the Liberal Party to its end—was not far off.
The Anti-Communist Artists Corps was an organization of entertainers mobilized for the Liberal Party's elections. Throw yourself into it too hard, as Kim Seung-ho would, and your house burned. Refuse, as Kim Hee-gap had, and you were beaten until your ribs broke. In the end it was a group he would have to step into, if only lightly.
Ki-jo telephoned Won Tae-sik and told him to enroll Cheongsan Heungeop's entertainers in the corps. He did not forget the caution: Won was to manage it so that no one took part with too much zeal.
"Oh, and Manager Won—put a soccer team together."
He added that he had agreed to a match against the entertainers at Lim Hwa-soo's company.
"Yes. Understood, sir."
Ki-jo hung up and sat with the thought. Keeping company with the talent at Korea Entertainment Co. might not be a bad thing. After April 19, Lim's company would be broken up, and the entertainers who had lost their agency would be looking for a new nest.