April 18
Those were the words on the placards in the students' hands.
Some three thousand students of Korea University, racing toward the National Assembly, were stopped cold in front of Daegwang Bridge and at the mouth of the Anam-dong rotary. The police had already gotten word of the march, and they moved at once to put it down. The students had meant to go through Sinseol-dong into Dongdaemun, follow Jongno, and come out at City Hall, where the Assembly sat. Instead they broke and scattered, fleeing the police.
Ki-jo stepped out of the car and caught the scene on film. An agitated officer rushed him, grabbing for the camera, but Chang Key-young blocked the man. Still grappling with the officer, Chang shouted.
"What do you think you're doing to a reporter! You think you can stop the press like this? I'd like to see your face run in the Hankook Ilbo, big as a front gate!"
The officer glared at Chang and Ki-jo, then sprinted off after the fleeing students.
Chang let out a long breath.
"First time I've seen the police like this. No restraint left in the crackdown. Far too rough."
He and Ki-jo slipped into the alleys and photographed the violence of the suppression. In the midst of it more than a hundred university students were seized and dragged away, and the Korea University students vanished somewhere.
Ki-jo knew where they would go.
"Hyung-nim, let us head for the National Assembly."
"The Assembly? You think the students will go there?"
"I believe they will. Gyeongmudae would be too difficult, wouldn't it?"
"True enough. You're right."
Chang granted him the point. This time Ki-jo took the wheel. He circled wide through the streets, drew up before the National Assembly, and waited.
An hour later the scattered students gathered again in front of the Assembly building and began a sit-in. They demanded the release of the students under arrest, and a fresh election for president and vice president.
It was the first sit-in protest staged in Seoul before the National Assembly, and reporters from the papers began to arrive, one after another. There Ki-jo met Chung Shin-yung of the Dong-A Ilbo — Chung Ju-yung's youngest brother.
"Hyung-nim, what are you doing here?"
Shin-yung was staring, curious, at the Hankook Ilbo press armband on Ki-jo's arm. Ki-jo answered him.
"I happened to be in front of Korea University and saw it. The armband is only temporary, on account of the police."
Shin-yung nodded, as if that told him enough. He set to interviewing the students, filling his notebook with what they claimed.
Around four in the afternoon, Yu Jin-o, president of Korea University, appeared at the protest and asked the students to disperse.
"Your wishes have been fully conveyed. Let us return to the school."
The president's persuasion did not move them. They would not leave, and they pressed even harder for the release of the classmates who had been taken away.
Ki-jo could not leave either. The thing that would strike the fuse of April 19 was about to happen.
Around six, Hong Jin-gi, Minister of Home Affairs, accepted the students' demands and began releasing the Korea University students held at the police stations. At about six-forty, once they had confirmed their classmates were free, the students roared and cheered, crying manse.
The Korea University student committee officially declared the demonstration over and resolved to return to campus.
Watching them break up, Chang Key-young spoke.
"So the government is afraid of university students marching after all. Not even a few hours, and they've turned loose the ones they hauled in. Ha ha ha!"
He laughed, rough and satisfied. It pleased him that the same police who had been so quick to beat and drag off middle- and high-school demonstrators did not dare lay a rough hand on the university students gathered before the Assembly.
"What did I tell you? Didn't I say the finest minds in the Republic had to step forward? The world's finally starting to turn the way it ought!"
To that early optimism, Ki-jo said,
"Hyung-nim, let us make sure the students get back to school safely."
"You think so? What could happen? I doubt there'll be any trouble... but all right. Fine."
Ki-jo put Chang in the jeep and followed slowly in the students' wake. The day was darkening.
It was about twenty past seven. The sun had gone down completely, and the streets were sinking into dusk. In front of Cheonil Department Store at Cheonggyecheon 4-ga, shouting broke out all at once. The students bringing up the rear had no idea what was happening ahead, and they kept walking. But soon the thugs came running all the way to the back of the column and began beating students without distinction.
Chang stared as if he were dreaming.
"Th-this... what..."
The Anti-Communist Youth Corps under Yu Ji-gwang, and more than a hundred thugs with them, were swinging iron hammers, iron pipes, chains, shovels, and hooks, laying into the Korea University students. A few stood against the attackers. Most, in shock, broke and fled.
Right before Ki-jo's eyes, a student running past took a brick a thug brought down on him and collapsed.
"What do you think you're doing!"
Chang shouted, startled. He and Ki-jo got out of the car to stop a thug who was kicking the fallen student.
"See here! Stop that!"
Chang stepped in front of the man first. The thug drove his forehead into Chang's face.
"Aigoo!"
Struck square on the nose, Chang staggered and sat down hard where he was. The thug picked up the brick he had used on the student and came toward the seated man. Ki-jo threw himself into the way.
"Stop. This man is the president of a newspaper. Nothing good will come of taking this any further."
The two of them faced each other, dragging in hot, ragged breaths. The thug lifted the brick as if to threaten him — then started, and asked,
"Aren't you President Lee Ki-jo? What are you doing here?"
By good fortune, the thug knew him. He was a man of the Dongdaemun Gang, and he had learned Ki-jo's face in the days when Ki-jo met with Lee Jeong-jae and Lim Hwa-soo.
"I happened to be passing and saw this. Let us leave it here."
"Yes, sir. I'm sorry about your companion. Please get out of here. You'll be hurt."
Recognizing him, the thug went so far as to urge him off, saying it was dangerous. Ki-jo told him he would see to himself, then got the fallen Chang to his feet and loaded the student lying in the street into the jeep.
Blood streamed from Chang's nose until his shirt was bright red with it. He pulled out a handkerchief, pressed it to the bleeding head of the student who had taken the brick, and spoke.
"We've got to get to a hospital. Keep on like this and the student will die."
With the student aboard, Ki-jo drove clear of the place where the thugs of the Dongdaemun Gang were attacking the Korea University students. The students fought back with everything they had against the men who had set on them, but they were no match for brawlers carrying weapons.
By the time they had the student with the head wound admitted to a hospital and returned to Cheonil Department Store, it was already over. The street was full of university students who had fallen, bleeding.
A middle-school boy in uniform looked up and down the street, then shouted.
"The thugs are all gone! Help the university brothers!"
At the boy's cry the adults found their courage and took the fallen students under their arms. Ki-jo hurriedly photographed the citizens helping them, then loaded the wounded into the jeep. Chang, cotton stuffed into his nose, helped him.
Ki-jo did not think the regime of Syngman Rhee, or Lim Hwa-soo, had any idea what they had just done. They had dug their own graves.
Dawn, the day after the attack on the Korea University students.
Ki-jo was up early, going over the front pages of the morning papers. Every one of them carried news of the assault. Of them all, the Dong-A Ilbo gave the story the greatest weight.
Beside the headline ran a photograph of the Korea University protest Ki-jo had seen by day: students trying to pass along the side street by Danseongsa at Jongno 3-ga, face to face with the police. The police had thrown up a curtain of men, five ranks deep, to stop them. The students locked arms in a scrum and broke through.
Ki-jo turned to page three. What the Dong-A Ilbo truly wanted to say lived, for the most part, there.
Under that headline the paper covered the demonstrations breaking out across the country. News of the protest in Jinju, South Gyeongsang, was given as four photographs and nothing else. There was simply too much demonstration news; the pictures had to stand in for the words.
It was the morning that announced April 19.
After an early breakfast, Sunrye looked at the paper Ki-jo had set aside and asked,
"This isn't something serious, is it..."
Her face had gone grave at the photographs printed there.
"It will be all right. Stay in the house today with the children. Lock the front gate tight. Tell Hyeon-gyeong next door to do the same."
"And you... you won't be home with us?"
"Don't worry about me. I'll be at the Yeongdeungpo warehouse."
At that, Sunrye nodded.
Before he left the house, Ki-jo drew Yeong-su and Yeong-eun tight against him.
"Listen to your mother. You are not to go outside. Even if you hear something out there, don't be afraid. Stay by your mother."
"Yes, Father."
Yeong-su, the eldest, eleven years old now, answered in a brave voice. Five-year-old Yeong-eun, already welling up in the heavy air, suddenly burst into tears.
"Daddy, don't go..."
She clung to him, and Ki-jo spoke to her.
"Yeong-eun. Daddy is going out to work, and then he'll come home. I'll be back this evening."
He held the crying child and looked at Sunrye. She was looking back at him, tears standing in her eyes. An unease and a sorrow she could not name had closed around her. Ki-jo cradled Yeong-eun in one arm and drew Sunrye in with the other — Sunrye with Yeong-jun in her arms, Yeong-eun against his chest, Yeong-su with his arms around his father's waist. All of them leaned on him.
He soothed his family. Then he stepped out through the gate.
As he went, he thought of the Dong-A Ilbo's false report. In its zeal to take the side of the students who had marched, the paper had ended up reporting that one of them seemed to have been killed. That error would bring a result no one had intended. It would be the thing that drew the anger of Seoul's citizens up to the surface.
Ki-jo climbed into the jeep and started the engine. Heading for Yeongdeungpo, he watched the streets around him. Seoul was still calm. Something grave had happened the day before, but the air did not feel as if a revolution were about to begin. People on their way to work in the early morning walked with the same faces and the same gestures as any other day.
Word had spread that a Korea University student had died in the protest, and yet no one seemed to expect a great demonstration in Seoul today.
Ki-jo checked his wristwatch. The demonstration that would set the April 19 Revolution alight would begin around nine in the morning. There was still time.
On the road to Yeongdeungpo he turned into the parking lot of Mac O, across from the gate of the U.S. Eighth Army in Yongsan. He had ordered the place kept shut, but the blinds at the windows were raised, and that was strange enough to make him stop.
He got out and knocked on the door. Seo Yong-woo, manager of Mac O, came from inside.
"You've come, sir?"
The man had come in to work. Ki-jo asked him,
"What is this? I told you to take today off."
"It's... I was worried about the shop..."
He stepped inside and found every employee of Mac O already there. Meeting their eyes, he looked back at Seo Yong-woo.
"Did the manager tell you to come in?"
"No, sir. Everyone came in early on their own."
The others all nodded along with him.
Ki-jo held their gaze a moment, then spoke.
"Very well. The American troops will not be coming off the base today. Since you are all here, use every ingredient in the shop and prepare food."
"Sir?"
Seo Yong-woo and the whole of the staff were startled.
"Make hamburgers and french fries. Use up all of the ingredients. And package them."
"Yes, sir."
He set the employees who had come in to their work, and left Mac O. Then he drove the jeep across the Han by way of the Hangang Footbridge.
Thinking of the people who would be sacrificed today, Ki-jo headed for the Yeongdeungpo warehouse. His wish was that even one fewer might die. He was on his way to the warehouse to make that wish real.