Ulsan
On April 27, Syngman Rhee's letter of resignation was laid before the National Assembly.
He had agreed to submit it that very day, and then he suddenly refused. Only the persuasion of Defense Minister Kim Jeong-ryeol and Foreign Minister Heo Jeong brought him, at last and barely, to put his name to the page. In that hollow fashion the First Republic came to an end. Under the constitution, Foreign Minister Heo Jeong assumed the powers of the presidency and formed a caretaker cabinet.
The next day, the twenty-eighth, Rhee left Gyeongmudae for Ihwajang, his private house—the Pear Blossom Villa. When he departed, crowds had massed like cloud along the road from Gwanghwamun to the palace gates. Ki-jo stood among them. He had wanted to see Syngman Rhee go.
Then something strange occurred.
Citizens who, not two days earlier, had shouted for Rhee to step down now paid him their respects. Women who saw him pass in the car wept, murmuring how pitiful he looked. Ki-jo thought this was simply the heart of people in that hour. A current of sympathy for Syngman Rhee was real enough, and there were those who clung to the illusion that the evils of these years had not been Dr. Rhee's work at all, but the doing of Lee Ki-poong and the Liberal Party beneath him.
Ki-jo was not surprised. He had seen much the same in 2017. Then, too, when an impeached president left the Blue House for home, there were people who comforted him and called him pitiable. He watched Rhee wave to the citizens offering their respects, and the sight was only bitter. If the man had truly known nothing of the Liberal Party's wrongs, then he had been incompetent—or he had failed the duty of his office. Ki-jo had lived through April 19 himself, and the judgment he passed on Syngman Rhee held no mercy.
That same night, after Rhee had gone, eight gunshots rang out inside Gyeongmudae. They came from Residence No. 36, beside the guard post of the annex. Lee Ki-poong's family, who had taken refuge with the VI Corps in Pocheon, Gyeonggi Province, was staying in that house. When the police looked in, they found them dead of wounds to the chest and the head.
The police announced that Lee Ki-poong, Park Maria, and the younger son, Lee Kang-ok, had swallowed a heavy dose of sleeping pills, after which Lee Kang-seok had fired once into each of their heads and once into each chest, then turned the gun on himself. What was strange was that Kang-seok, too, had died by shots to his own abdomen and head. A single bullet to the head would have done it. That he had shot himself in the stomach first gave rise to the claim that the family had been murdered.
After the twenty-eighth, Ki-jo swept the figures of the First Republic from his mind. Lim Hwa-soo and Yu Ji-gwang were already in police custody as the ringleaders of the attack on the Korea University students, and Lee Jeong-jae and Kwak Young-joo were under investigation as the men behind them. Their ruin was already fixed.
Ki-jo began a modest work of aid for the victims of April 19. He read the stories in the papers, called the families himself, and sent money in condolence; where a household had a student, he promised to pay the school fees through high school. In this way he struggled to climb free of the shock April 19 had dealt him, and he drove himself harder into the business.
On the last day of April he invited Hertz, the West German ambassador, to Ulsan. He meant to show him how the harbor works were advancing, so that West Germany would keep its commercial credit in place. Hertz was flying into Busan. To meet him, Ki-jo brought out for the first time the 1958 Cadillac Hee-jun had given him—a car he had left sitting in the garage at the Yeonji-dong plant, unused, wary of the eyes it would draw. He seated the ambassador in the Cadillac, and they went on together.
On the road to Ulsan, Hertz spoke of the turmoil in Korea.
"I hear the Assembly voted through a constitutional amendment for a cabinet system yesterday. It will not be easy, changing the government from a presidential system to a parliamentary one."
He believed Ki-jo had lines into the government and the politicians, and the remark was a probe.
"What do you expect, Mr. Ambassador?" Ki-jo asked. "Do you think it will go well?"
"Who can say. What worries me is that former President Rhee is still in Seoul. The Liberal Party is still intact, and there's a rumor they mean to put him forward again."
Hertz was passing along what his own network had gathered. Ki-jo answered with a credible account of what lay ahead.
"It won't happen that way. I expect he'll go into exile around the end of next month."
"Exile?"
Hertz's eyes widened.
"Exile where?"
"That much I don't know in any detail."
Ki-jo cut the thread there, then took another path, the better to lend his words weight.
"I've been told that Madame Francesca, the First Lady, is uneasy about remaining in Korea. And according to American friends who are close to the family..."
Hertz leaned in. Aware of that attention, Ki-jo kept putting flesh on the story.
"There are friends I often see at the Eighth Army golf club. From them I heard that the CIA has offered, should former President Rhee only ask, to move him to American territory other than the mainland."
"American soil, but not the mainland..."
Hertz turned it over.
"Hawaii would be the likely place."
Ki-jo nodded and said nothing. Then he set one more weighted sentence on the table.
"You said a moment ago that the Liberal Party is still standing. In the end, I suspect its assemblymen will leave the party in droves."
Ambassador Hertz took the words with grave seriousness.
When they reached Ulsan, the harbor that Cheongsan Construction and Hyundai Construction were raising together opened all at once before them. A concrete port going up on a country shore seemed already to speak of the day this ground would be the heart of Korea's heavy industry.
Hertz stepped from the car. The spring sun must have been warm; he took off his hat and fanned himself with it.
"The materials for the fertilizer plant will come in through that harbor," Ki-jo said. "And the plant itself will stand over there."
He pointed to land he had bought. The ground where the factory would rise was already being graded, the site work in full swing. He led the ambassador toward a rendering of the plant, set up in the middle of the empty plain.
"Set this drawing against the ground itself, and it will come clear quickly."
Hertz nodded. His look was one of admiration—that Ki-jo had prepared this far, in earnest, to build.
"How did you raise the money for the port?"
"With the government's backing, we took a long-term, low-interest loan from the bank. Cheongsan will hold the operating rights for the next twenty years and recover what the harbor cost to build."
"I see."
Satisfied, Hertz smiled.
"Over there," Ki-jo said, indicating a stretch of sand, "a tractor plant will rise on a loan from the World Bank. Once the tractors are coming off the line, the whole of the output for five years will be exported to India."
"Which firm are you partnered with for the tractors?"
"Cummins, in the United States."
"Cummins..."
"They've already sent the drawings and the prototype parts to Korea. We're assembling them at another plant in Busan and running tests."
He let it be seen that the American loan, too, was being spent as it should.
"You've bound the two plants into a single district."
"Yes. Other factories will come in around them."
"I hope they do."
Ki-jo was still explaining the work when a man came toward them. His hat was thick with dust, his work clothes filthy. He looked every inch a laborer. As he drew near, Ki-jo made the introduction.
"Ambassador Hertz, this is President Chung Ju-yung of Hyundai Construction. He's building the harbor with us."
He turned to Chung.
"President Chung, Ambassador Hertz of West Germany. He's come to see how the work at Ulsan is getting on."
Chung took off his hat and smiled, and a hand like the lid of a cauldron closed around the ambassador's. The greetings done, he said to Ki-jo,
"Mr. Lee, tell Ambassador Hertz that if they'll only give us the money, we can put up an automobile plant right here too. Ha ha."
Ki-jo relayed it, and the ambassador laughed.
"Tell him that since this place sits so near the sea, wouldn't it be better to build ships than cars?"
When Ki-jo passed the words on, Chung let out a booming laugh.
"Then tell him this. Give us the money to build one ship, and we'll put up a shipyard here and make the ship for them."
Ki-jo interpreted between the two of them and laughed along. Hertz seemed struck by the sight of Chung Ju-yung out working the site himself, and he tried to draw him into talk of one thing and another. Ki-jo walked the grounds with the ambassador, then returned to Busan with Chung.
He saw Hertz onto the plane for Seoul. After that he and Chung went on to Cheongsan Fisheries, newly launched. Since Typhoon Sarah, the company had all but monopolized the catch it sent into the fish markets, and it was making a fortune. In the office Ki-jo had their own fish sliced raw, and the two of them drank and talked.
"They say Seoul was a mess for a while."
"It was."
"I'm glad the Liberal Party got blown to pieces. You have no idea how much money they shook out of me. If I could only get that money back, I could build an auto plant in Ulsan myself. I swear..."
In the middle of the complaint he caught Ki-jo's hand.
"I heard it from Shin-yeong. He said he lived through the nineteenth because of you, Mr. Lee. Said if he'd gone up toward Gyeongmudae that day, he'd have caught a bullet. Thank you. Mr. Lee."
He smiled, warm and satisfied. Chung had never finished elementary school. He cherished, as if the boy were his own child, the youngest brother who had gone all the way to Seoul National University, and he seemed to believe that in the middle of the upheaval Ki-jo had saved him.
"Not at all, President Chung. I didn't save your brother. I was curious about Lee Ki-poong's house, that's all, so I dragged Shin-yeong along with me."
He tried to turn the talk aside.
"Now, now, Mr. Lee. When a man praises you, you take it. Quit telling me you never helped anybody."
"All right, President Chung. I saved your brother."
"Ha ha! That's the way. Here—take a glass from me."
Ki-jo took the drink Chung poured and drank it. The liquor was sweet that day. Chung drank as well, let out a rough breath of pleasure, and picked up a piece of the raw fish. Chewing, he said,
"I keep thinking of the day you came looking for me with one sheet of paper signed by an American division commander."
"When we were building Goryeong Bridge?"
"That's the day. I thought you were crazy. The whole thing was going under, and you grabbed hold of me and wouldn't let go, talking partnership. I wondered if you were in your right mind. Ha ha ha."
"Was I that strange?"
"Strange? You were plenty strange. You said you'd hit a gambling crew at the cattle market and come away with opium. Sold the opium to a dealer in medicinal herbs, turned the money into gold bars, and with that you were going to build a brick factory."
The memory of six years past rose up sharp, and Ki-jo laughed with him.
"I laughed when I heard it, I did. But it brought the old days back. Selling a cow behind my father's back and running off from home... I thought, this one's not right in the head either, same as I was."
Listening, Ki-jo remembered the time he had worked like a man possessed, certain that if he only made bricks and sold them, he and the people of Eundae-ri and the refugees driven from their homes could all live well.
"Listen, Mr. Lee."
"Yes, President Chung."
"Let's do well from here on. The Liberal Party government's gone, so the bastards bleeding businessmen dry ought to be gone too."
"I suppose so."
For the moment, Ki-jo let the optimism stand.
"Listen, Mr. Lee. Lately something's been strange with me."
"How do you mean?"
"When I first came to Ulsan, I thought, what are we doing building a factory in a seaside nowhere like this? A few months of work, and hasn't the place grown as easy as my own hometown? Ha ha ha."
Ki-jo smiled at him—at a Chung Ju-yung who had come to like Ulsan. It seemed the man had recognized the ground on which Hyundai would rise.