The Eve of Revolution
On the front page of the March 17, 1960 papers, two headlines ran beside their photographs in type the size of a front gate.
The government had defined the unrest in Masan as the Masan Incident and, at an emergency meeting of the cabinet, resolved that those involved would be punished with the utmost severity. Choi In-gyu, Minister of the Interior and chief architect of the rigged election, pointed at the incident and thundered.
"I regard it as having been fully intended to raise a riot, a disturbance, an insurrection."
He stressed that he meant to uncover, without remainder, whether the Democratic Party's central headquarters or its provincial chapters had pulled the strings from behind, and whether the Communist Party had intervened. The article closed by noting that the decision rested on a situation report on the Masan Incident drawn up jointly by the military, the police, and the prosecution.
The front page of the seventeenth was enough for Ki-jo. They had not changed. In the end, they meant to smear their opponents as stooges of the North.
Amid all of it, on the left of the front page's center, there was a piece on Chang Myon, the vice-presidential candidate. He had invited even the foreign correspondents, declaring that Korea's future was bleak, urging the Liberal Party to examine its conscience, and announcing that the court fight over the fraudulent election would be settled at a general meeting of the party's assemblymen. Asked whether he would recognize the new president and vice president, he said only that they meant to fight through the law and through politics, and that the finer points of that fight would be studied later. Even so, he narrowed the meaning of the struggle, insisting the Democratic Party had never spoken of fighting to the bitter end. When a reporter asked who bore the blame for this election, he answered only that it was a thing the whole world already knew.
Ki-jo turned past a front page crammed with the positions of the government and the political class. The real information was on page three, where a story ran even larger than the article confirming Syngman Rhee's election.
Five photographs ran beneath the headline: the North Masan police box, burned to the ground; Democratic Party officials under arrest; a street where utility poles had been felled to choke off traffic; a woman treating a man with a wounded head, her eyes meeting the camera; and, last of all, two corpses laid side by side. The reporter's language was bleak.
The bodies laid out at Cha Surgical Clinic in Jungseong-dong had been taken into police custody. The dead, for the moment, numbered seven. Of twenty-three patients with penetrating wounds to the chest and abdomen, five or six were in critical condition, and most of them were young students. The police had held seventy-three students who took part in the unrest at city hall, then moved them to Masan Police Station, where they were investigating who had stood behind them.
Ki-jo checked the small article pinned beside it.
It was a small piece, and a sharp one. It needled the police for turning their excess even on citizens who had done nothing, now that their nerves were raw.
Ki-jo knew that article was not the whole truth either. He had seen five hundred high-school students demonstrating in front of the Democratic Party headquarters in Anguk-dong, and had watched, with an ache of apology, as children shouted Down with dictatorship! and Save our people in Masan!
He could feel it then—the slow first turn of a whirl that would raise a political storm. The March 15 Uprising in Masan was a miniature of the April 19 Revolution that would break over Seoul.
A Liberal Party assemblyman's house was wrecked. The Liberal Party office, a local branch of the Seoul Shinmun, a police box, and the police box chief's home were burned or smashed. The gunfire poured into citizens and students was a carbon copy as well. But the Liberal Party never grasped how grave the thing had become.
Asked what he made of the Masan Incident, Lee Ki-poong let fall a single sentence that laid the party's mind bare.
He realized at once that he had misspoken and tried to gather the words back in. A man's true mind, though, has a way of escaping in a slip of the tongue.
The police defined the Masan Uprising as a riot by an underground communist organization, and by savage torture they succeeded in turning the twenty-six people under arrest into the shape of South Korean Workers' Party members. They produced evidence as well. In the pocket of a demonstrator's corpse, they said, a leaflet had been found.
That leaflet was the work of Noh Jang-gwang, chief of detectives at the Masan Police Station, who had slipped into the provincial hospital where the victims' bodies lay and manufactured it there.
Even this operation—painting the dead and the arrested as followers of the North—could not quiet public opinion. On March 23, Syngman Rhee dismissed Interior Minister Choi In-gyu. On March 28, he dismissed Lee Kang-hak, chief of the Public Security Bureau.
In the interval, on Syngman Rhee's birthday, the children's poet Yun Seok-jung offered a verse for him in the Seoul Shinmun.
Greeting his eighty-fifth year—
our President.
Let us take him with us
to Baekdu Mountain, covered in snow,
and on the way home let us stop
at Kumgang Mountain, where the azaleas bloom.
White hair, a young man's vigor,
a child's heart—
our President,
greeting his eighty-fifth year.
Reading the verse on Syngman Rhee's birthday, Ki-jo thought of Kim Ju-yul.
Kim Ju-yul, dead with a tear-gas canister driven into his face—because of a white-haired president of youthful vigor, greeting his eighty-fifth year.
On April 11, 1960, a teenage boy in a school uniform rose to the surface of the waters off Masan. The boy with a tear-gas canister buried in his eye was the very son his mother had been searching for, desperately, since March 15. She had walked the streets of Masan for more than twenty days looking for the child who had vanished after the March 15 Uprising, and so in Masan, not to know Kim Ju-yul and his mother was to be a spy.
The moment he was found, the fury of the city broke loose. Word that Kim Ju-yul had been discovered spread through Masan in an instant. The police, as soon as they hauled him from the water, rushed the body to the mortuary of Masan Provincial Hospital and barred the public from coming near—but not even police with guns could hold back the citizens, who came on like a cloud to see him.
People were aghast. The canister lodged in Kim Ju-yul's eye was American-made, a high-powered long-range tear-gas shell some two inches across and eight inches long, with a propeller fixed to its tail. It was built to punch through a building wall and explode, a weapon for putting down armed rioters. On the shell buried in the boy's eye, a warning had been printed.
The citizens of Masan who had seen Kim Ju-yul's body did not go home. One by one they gathered, citizens and students together, and began to denounce the Syngman Rhee regime. So that the demonstrators, shouting themselves raw, would not go thirsty, people drew water, passed it from hand to hand, and urged them on.
The students grieved and raged as if a dear friend had been murdered. The adults, too, burned with indignation, holding Kim Ju-yul as they would a child of their own.
The second Masan demonstration, begun on April 11, swelled until the crowd reached a hundred and fifty thousand, and turned into a demonstration against the Syngman Rhee regime itself. At the time of the March 15 Uprising it had been ten thousand people protesting a stolen election. The numbers had grown fifteenfold. They no longer recognized the regime at all.
On April 14, the Dong-A Ilbo at last let loose the cry it had been holding in.
The editorial denounced the Syngman Rhee regime and came out squarely in defense of the people of Masan.
As the second Masan Uprising gathered force, the sense of danger climbed. It might, all too easily, have become a second Gwangju—the Gwangju of 1980. But on April 14, fortunately, a downpour broke over Masan, and the demonstrators dispersed of their own accord.
The very next day, April 15, a statement from Syngman Rhee was released.
The disturbance in Masan was directed from behind by Communists who have come in among us. If those who do not know this are taken in by Communist propaganda and join the disturbance, it is a thing as hateful as it is grievous.
That little children should rise up and throw hand grenades even at their own parents—such a calamity is impossible unless it be the work of Communists.
Where he had heard such a thing, and from whom, no one could say.
Once the rain had quieted the streets, the police spirited Kim Ju-yul's body away and buried it in Namwon, his hometown, without a funeral. It was their answer to the boy's mother. Even after she heard that her son's body had been found, the police had kept her from going to Masan, and she had said she would carry Ju-yul's body to the yard of Lee Ki-poong's house and bury him there.
Even as all this unfolded, Seoul was quiet. To Ki-jo, the quiet had the look of a calm before the storm. Nothing happened that was large enough to keep even Syngman Rhee from imagining that society had settled.
Then came Sunday, April 17. Ki-jo told Sunrye to remain in the house for two days.
"Why? Has something happened?" Sunrye asked.
"Just stay home with the children. Two days."
"And Yeongsu's school..."
"I'll speak to his homeroom teacher."
Then he said to Sunrye, who still could not see why:
"Yeobo. Before the Korean War, I asked you to come to Busan with me. Do you remember?"
"Yes. You did."
"Trust me, and follow me, the way you did then."
"All right, yeobo."
He sent Han-su and Dae-ik away on purpose, on business to the provinces, so they would not be in Seoul. He was afraid the two young men might join the demonstrators if they stayed. He told Seo-gwang and Ma-ryang not to come to work, but to remain at home. Every affiliate of the Cheongsan Group with offices in Seoul was ordered to treat the eighteenth and the nineteenth as special holidays and shut its doors. If the April 19 Revolution burned hotter than it had in the history he remembered, he feared Seoul itself would become a battlefield.
On April 18, Ki-jo went to the Hankook Ilbo, where Chang Key-young was, and the two of them talked. Chang Key-young was dissatisfied that the university students of Seoul had not said a single word about the state of things.
"The university students in this country seem to think of themselves as a privileged class. Up in the ivory tower, all they care about is taking a diploma and landing a good job. It's gotten so bad the middle-school and high-school kids are out there shouting, 'Seniors, wake up! Seniors, you've gone rotten!'"
He was lamenting students who had shown no real response even to the fraudulent election of March 15 and the uprising in Masan.
"Would you come with me to Korea University?" Ki-jo asked.
"Korea University?"
"Yes. I've heard their student committee is rather more awake than most."
"Where'd you hear that?" Chang Key-young asked.
"From a Korea University graduate on our staff."
"Ah. The manager over at Mac O?"
"Yes."
"Then let's go have a look."
Chang Key-young took up the suggestion. President of the Hankook Ilbo and a journalist of long standing, he put Ki-jo into one of the paper's reporting cars and set off for Anam-dong. When the car, with Chang Key-young at the wheel, turned in through the gates of Korea University, the students took notice. Ki-jo marked them too—hurrying, all of them, in a single direction—stepped out, and asked.
"Mind if I ask where you're going?"
A student who took him for a Hankook Ilbo reporter said there was a freshman welcome that day in front of the statue of Kim Seong-su, and that was where they were bound. In those days, the school year began in April.
At half past twelve, Ki-jo and Chang Key-young made their way to the statue. Some three thousand Korea University students had gathered there. At a distance, Lee Gi-taek, chairman of the student committee, together with Lee Se-gi, Kang Woo-jeong, and the others, had drawn the freshmen and the student body around them and begun to read the April 18 declaration aloud.
Beloved students of Korea University!
In a word, the university is the emblem of resistance and of freedom!
The final, desperate thrashing of this suffocating established dictatorship is even now threatening the lives and the liberty of the entire nation!
I. Let the older generation awaken.
II. Immediately punish those responsible for the Masan Incident.
III. Reject intellectuals who will not act.
IV. Strictly forbid the police from entering the schools.
V. Do not obstruct today's peaceful demonstration.
When the five articles had been proclaimed, the students cried out for a general rising and poured toward the school gate. Once through it, they raised the placards they had prepared and ran for the National Assembly.
"Hey, Ki-jo. Looks like the university students are joining the demonstrations too," Chang Key-young said, a thrill moving across his face.
Ki-jo said he would drive. He put Chang Key-young in the car and went after the students.