A Peace That Would Not Hold
The first morning of the new year.
The executives and employees of Cheongsan Group gathered in Myeongdong and set out on the company climb up Namsan. The outing was the work of Kim Seogwang, chairman of the Cheongsan Comrades Association, the fraternal circle of Cheongsan's senior men. Before anyone had taken a step, he launched into an opening address for the New Year's hike.
"On this historic morning of January 1, 1960, I offer my thanks to the members of the Cheongsan Comrades Association who have gathered here."
Ki-jo and the other Cheongsan officers gave him a round of applause.
"We set out from this very spot. Whoever is first to the top of Namsan, to Unamjeong, will receive the first-place prize the Association has prepared."
"And what's the prize, Director Kim?" Hansu called.
"The prize prepared by the Cheongsan Comrades Association is none other than this!"
Seogwang hoisted the sack he had brought and held it high. It was a bag of money.
"Ten thousand hwan! But this is no ordinary ten thousand hwan!"
He worked the knot loose and drew out a gleaming fifty-hwan coin.
"Oh!" Wangcheol burst out, frankly admiring.
"And what is this coin? After those Japanese bastards did away with coinage in this country under colonial rule — fifty years on, back it comes, hot off the mint! That's what this is!"
In later years a coin would be nothing, a bit of unwanted scrap. In 1960 it was otherwise. The pieces struck in America and brought over at the end of the previous October were few and hard to come by, and people who received one so often set it aside at home like a keepsake that little of the mintage ever circulated.
"Kindly remember the trouble I took, gathering two hundred clean fifty-hwan coins! And if any of them were dirty, this Kim Seogwang sat down with his family and polished them clean! Do not forget it!"
They applauded the boast.
"Come Lunar New Year, when you meet the family and press these coins into the children's hands as holiday money — what a magnificent uncle you'll make! What a splendid elder uncle!"
Seogwang had a gift for talking the spirit out of a crowd before it had even started, and at last Ma-ryang stepped in.
"Too much talk. Get moving, before Unamjeong's packed solid."
The pavilion at the summit was itself a new sight of Seoul, raised only the previous November 18. Built by the Liberal Party for Syngman Rhee, the octagonal-roofed pavilion was fated before long to lose the name Unamjeong and become simply the Octagonal Pavilion. Ki-jo thought it would be worth seeing the nameboard before it came down this year.
Before Seogwang could shout them off, Ki-jo lifted his camera and photographed the officers where they stood together. Then, at the signal, he fell in at an easy pace behind the employees. He sent Dae-ik on ahead — the man had meant to stay at his side — and climbed with Seogwang, whose leg was bad. Ma-ryang took the bundle of coins out of Seogwang's hands and walked along with Ki-jo.
"What'd you go and prepare a thing like this for? You can't even carry it yourself."
Seogwang flared at the needling.
"Who asked you to carry it? Hand it over. I'll take it."
Watching the two of them bicker, Ki-jo found himself, for the first time in a long while, back in the Yeoncheon days. The first day he met Ma-ryang, raising hell in the gukbap shop in front of Jeongok Station. The time they went together to buy a cow, and the men of the neighborhood came pouring out in search of him. The scrambling around the American base for any thread of connection to a U.S. officer, and Ma-ryang and Seogwang coming to find him on bicycles. It all ran past like a lantern wheel. Right after the war, when everyone was struggling just to eat, and they were doing whatever they could not to starve.
He climbed with the memories of '54, and before he knew it they were at the summit. They handed the prize of ten thousand hwan to Hansu, once a hunter, who had arrived first, and everyone gathered before Unamjeong for a photograph. Ki-jo took shot after shot until every employee standing there came out clearly. He wanted to remember all of them for a long, long time.
When he finished, an employee who knew his way around a camera came up, set him in the middle of the line, and said,
"President! You've got to be in one too! I'll take it."
Ki-jo posed with the staff, then looked out over Seoul from the cold, clear height of Namsan. It was the first morning of the new year, and the city looked peaceful. The thought that the peace would not last left a weight on him.
Before long his gaze had gone to the board-shack slums sheeted over the city's hills. Syngman Rhee would open his New Year's day with a visit to one of those hillside settlements. Then he would come up Namsan, scatter feed for the pigeons, and pledge, together with Lee Ki-poong, their paired victory in the presidential and vice-presidential elections.
A little later the police climbed the mountain to clear the ground for Rhee's visit. At the sight of them Ki-jo urged Seogwang to start down.
The men of Cheongsan Group yielded the place to the police, came down off Namsan, and made for a gukbap house in Myeongdong. There Ki-jo turned his camera on them again — employees eating and talking over one another in a happy din.
They were men who had come through the hard years of the forties and fifties and grown calloused to nearly any upheaval the world could throw at them, and they cared for little beyond whether their families had enough to eat and a decent life. Perhaps because Cheongsan had sailed smoothly for several years, their faces were bright. For men like these, the morning of January 1, 1960, was a peaceful, lively hour, and the beginning of a bright future.
Ki-jo wanted to share in that brief optimism. He could not quite manage it. A heavy unease about what was coming had settled in him and would not lift.
The new year brought a good many changes to the Republic as well.
On January 3 came word that the National Central Meteorological Observatory would use aid funds to bring in weather balloons and seismographs — a bid to strengthen the forecasting of an office whose record-breaking errors in '59 had worsened the damage of Typhoon Sarah. On January 7, a de facto cut in the rates: telegram fees, until then the same everywhere in the country, would be halved for messages sent within the same city, county, town, or township.
Small changes kept coming from the start of January, and from around the twentieth, rumors began to spread that something was wrong with the health of Cho Byeong-ok, the Democratic Party's candidate for president. Word went around in some quarters that he was ill enough to need surgery, and that the presidential and vice-presidential elections ought to be put off.
The Democrats wanted the vote pushed to May. The Liberal Party held fast to March. May was the height of the farming season, the Liberals said, and an election then would hurt ordinary people — and in that spirit they refused the proposal out of hand. While talk of the schedule went back and forth, each party grinding its own interest against the other's, something happened that stunned the public.
On the night of January 26, with Lunar New Year just ahead, a crush at Seoul Station killed a number of people. It happened on the stairs to the Honam Line platform. More than 3,900 travelers bound home for the holiday had packed the southbound train, three times the usual crowd, and as they hurried down steps sheeted with ice, they slipped. Thirty-one died. Forty-one were injured. Most of the dead were women.
A major loss of life in the middle of Seoul, days before the holiday, and the political world found its voice all at once. The Democratic Party demanded that the minister and vice minister of Transportation be dismissed, and that the truth be got at to the last detail. The Liberal Party, fearing the public mood might shift before the New Year, rushed out a statement of mourning and carried condolence money to the families of the victims. The Liberals looked fretful to the point of anguish that opinion might turn against them over a disaster on the eve of the holiday; the Democrats attacked them without restraint.
Watching, Ki-jo thought of the disasters that would repeat after this one, and of the way the political world answered them. Whenever a tragedy struck, politicians looked the same.
No one, all this while, had made an issue of Seoul Station having no proper heat. No one had shown any interest in the platforms being without a single light. No one had cared that the tickets sold on New Year's Day itself bore no seat numbers, so that whoever got there first and sat down owned the seat. In the end the accident had burst straight out of that indifference.
There had been no station hand who thought the ice on those stairs ought to be broken up beforehand, and no one who imagined what would happen if they opened the gates five minutes before departure and sent the crowd down onto the platform. Indifference and carelessness had made the disaster. The politicians were busy only laying blame, and hunting for a scapegoat.
Two days after the crush, Cho Byeong-ok, the opposition's presidential candidate, left for the United States to undergo surgery. America had agreed to bear the whole cost of the journey and the operation. A direct flight was arranged as far as San Francisco, and arrangements were made for him to be treated at the U.S. Army hospital in Washington.
Hearing that he had gone — a man who would never come home to his country alive — Ki-jo could not shake a bleak heaviness. With a month still left before the election, Cho Byeong-ok would draw his last breath at Walter Reed Army Hospital. Strangely, it kept happening. The opposition candidates who stood against Syngman Rhee died before election day.
On February 25, 1960, Cho Byeong-ok came home a cold corpse, and his funeral was held as a national rite, hundreds of thousands gathered to see it. People took Park Jae-hong's hit, "A Thousand Li of Affection," changed the words, and sang it as a dirge.
He goes. He departs.
Following after Master Haegong.
Leaving Dr. Chang Myon all alone,
Dr. Cho, too, has gone.
Ki-jo had come to the funeral, and when the dirge rose he sang it with them. A cold rain fell without letting up. Women in white mourning dress led the way, a great national flag held between them, and behind them came men in black suits, bearing a large funeral portrait of Cho Byeong-ok. A truck dressed in wreaths carried his body through the streets of Seoul.
The mourning did not distinguish ruling party from opposition. The Liberal Party, in particular, observed every courtesy over his death. He had been very close to Lee Ki-poong, and he had more enemies inside the Democratic Party than among Liberal assemblymen. And because that death had all but assured Syngman Rhee's election, the Liberals seemed to show the dead man a still fuller respect.
Ki-jo and Chang Key-young walked the wet road behind the hearse, talking as they went.
"Now the Liberals will throw everything they have into the vice-presidential race."
Chang Key-young said it with a bitter edge. Rhee's own election was already certain, and he was of an age where it would not have been strange if he died tomorrow, so attention had fixed on the vice-presidential contest — on the man who would have to bear it if the presidency fell vacant. Even so, it was an open question whether Lee Ki-poong, the Liberal candidate, was popular enough to beat his opponent, Chang Myon.
Chang Key-young spoke of Lee Ki-poong.
"That man looked as if he were grieving in earnest. I heard the two of them were very close. Ki-poong's sick himself, so a friend's death must have hit him harder."
In the bleak weather Ki-jo turned up the collar of his coat and listened without a word.
Chang Key-young was just concluding that this year's election was already over, and that the pairing of Syngman Rhee and Lee Ki-poong would at last lead the Republic, when Ki-jo spoke.
"Hyung-nim. Look at those students."
He pointed to the young students following the hearse in the rain. Chang Key-young looked.
"The students are grieving Dr. Cho's passing too..."
He seemed to be seeing something other than what Ki-jo saw. What Ki-jo saw was not grief. It was the students' faces, stifled frustration and resignation and anger all mixed together.
He walked on with heavy steps, thinking of the Republic's future, which only he knew. No one expected that Syngman Rhee would soon fall, and a new world open. Nor did anyone know that teenagers would lead that fall.
The April 19 Revolution would be driven by the teenagers of the Republic. The young of that time, who barely remembered the Japanese occupation if they remembered it at all, did not take a ruler's boot on their necks as the natural order of things, the way the generation before them did.
Standing in the cold rain and watching the young, who could not hide the outrage on their faces, Ki-jo felt a complicated ache. He would have to watch teenagers tear up and mend what adults had done wrong, and then watch adults ruin it again, over and over. The thought left him sorry.