Ice Cream
After dinner with Park Chung-hee's family, Lee Ki-jo stepped out into the yard with him to talk.
They had set two chairs at an angle to each other and were smoking and talking when Geun-hye, Park's eldest daughter, who had been sent on an errand, pushed open the front gate and came in.
"Father, I bought the ice cream."
"Good. Well done."
Park took the two ice creams from his daughter, passed one to Ki-jo, and kept the other.
The thought that he was being treated to ice cream by Park Chung-hee himself brought a smile to Ki-jo's face.
"What are you smiling at?"
The ice cream had softened and smeared his fingers. Park flicked it off and asked.
"I didn't know you liked ice cream, General."
Park gave a short laugh and bit into his.
Ki-jo took a large bite from the slightly melted top of his own.
Park savored the mouthful, winced for a moment as if the cold had stung his teeth, and then spoke.
"It was the summer holiday of my third year in primary school. My third brother was going to his wife's family in Gimcheon, and he took me with him."
The third brother was Park Sang-hee, twelve years his senior. He had married Jo Gwi-bun, the daughter of a Gimcheon notable, at twenty-five, and lived in Gumi. The man who had looked after Park Chung-hee had been as good as a father to him in those years.
"I was a country boy raised in the mountains, and he said he'd show me Gimcheon. My brother's in-laws lived in Hwanggeum-jeong, in the city proper. We were walking the busy streets when he gave me money and told me to try an ice cream."
Gimcheon had been prosperous enough to be raised to city status in 1949. It was the hub of western North Gyeongsang.
"The ice cream man put it in a container shaped like a pointed hat and handed me a little wooden spoon. It was the first ice cream of my life, and I lost my head over it. And my brother didn't wait—he just strode off—so I got anxious."
Park smiled, as if the childhood had come back to him.
"I was gripping the cup and eating in a frantic rush when the thing in my hand cracked. I was so startled I called out to my brother at the top of my voice."
He pointed at the cone he was holding, then looked off into the distance.
"Brother! Brother! That's what I shouted."
A smile colored with embarrassment crossed his face as he went on.
"Brother! The ice cream cup broke! I have to give it back to the ice cream man—this is terrible. I'll have to pay for it! I was yelling, and the man told me not to worry. You eat that cup too, he said."
Park smiled, hurriedly licked at the melting ice cream, and added,
"My brother and his wife spent the whole day teasing me for a country bumpkin. Ha ha ha."
Ki-jo was glad to see him laugh so unguardedly. It was the first time in his life he had seen Park like that.
The two of them passed the time over their ice cream.
When Park had finished, he fetched a rag from the wooden veranda and held it out so Ki-jo could wipe his hands.
In suit trousers and nothing but an undershirt, he looked as familiar and ordinary as any other man.
Ki-jo wiped the ice cream from his fingers with the rag, and the two of them lit cigarettes again. Keeping company with a chain-smoker like Park, Ki-jo had found himself smoking more often as well.
Drawing on his cigarette, Park asked,
"How did you fare during the April 19 Revolution? Any damage at the company? Strikes seem to be breaking out everywhere these days."
"Not a single strike at Cheongsan. There hasn't been one since the day we were founded."
Park nodded with a meaningful look.
"You must run the place well."
"Not at all. I'm only ever grateful to the employees."
"Don't be modest. You weren't on the list of businessmen who'd piled up illicit fortunes. I took that to mean you managed things properly."
At the praise, Ki-jo changed the subject.
"General, how did you meet your wife? She seems a wise and devoted woman."
When Ki-jo returned the compliment in kind, Park let out a short laugh. He seemed to think for a long while, then pointed at the front gate of the Sindang-dong house.
"When we moved in, the gate wasn't like that. It was very low. Then one day I came home from work and found it changed."
"The gate?"
Ki-jo feigned ignorance, though he knew the story.
"My wife didn't like me having to duck my head coming and going, so she had the gate built up high. That sort of thing, she does well."
Like a man of an older generation, boasting of his wife made him squirm, and he could hardly speak ill of her either—so he seemed to have settled on the gate Yuk Young-soo had changed for his sake.
"I'm sure she's good at the rest of it too. The cooking, the raising of the children."
Park kept the cigarette between his lips and looked elsewhere.
"When it comes to checking up on me, she's second to none."
He glanced at Ki-jo and grinned, and Ki-jo found himself smiling before he knew it.
Still grinning, Park said,
"A man ought to be able to go out, see people, have a drink—but she rather dislikes that, so…"
Ki-jo did not believe Yuk Young-soo would be investigating her husband if all he did was go out and drink. A good deal of testimony remained about the fixation on liquor and women that had followed Park Chung-hee all his life.
Lieutenant Han Mu-hyeop, who had served in the Army intelligence section, had been under Park's command while Park was living with a woman named Lee Hyeon-ran. By his account, Park's moods had swung violently because of her, and he had seemed unhappy. There was further testimony that whenever the gloom took him he drank himself blind, and that on one payday he had carried his wages, envelope and all, to the bar he frequented.
One day Lieutenant Han, after drinking with him at a place in Jongno, found that Park had not reported for duty the next morning and went looking—only for a call to come from Park himself. He was still at the bar from the night before, and Han was to bring a car and fetch him. When Han arrived, the woman who owned the place was changing Park into fresh clothes from his socks to his underwear, and Park was delighting in it with the guileless pleasure of a child.
There was other testimony as well. Major Cha Ho-seong, chief of Section Five at the Army Intelligence Bureau, said Park was particular about no drink, and that at staff dinners he would as soon plop down in his undershorts, drinking and dancing with no regard for form or courtesy. Drunk, he had a habit of throwing his arms around anyone at all and kissing them on the cheek.
With habits like those, it was only natural that Yuk Young-soo could not rest easy whenever Park said he was going out to drink. Just as natural that she would sometimes suspect her husband, pry into where he had been, and that the prying would end in a quarrel. Park himself seemed remarkably forgiving of his own peculiarities with drink.
But Ki-jo, who had no wish whatsoever to drink with him on those terms, said,
"If you'd like a drink with me, call me here to Sindang-dong, or come to our house in Jongno. Wouldn't that please your wife, and be easier on you as well?"
"It wouldn't be easier on me."
Park shook his head firmly.
Ki-jo said,
"You still haven't told me how you met your wife."
"Ah, that… Well. We had a matchmaking meeting in the middle of the war. Around the end of August, '50."
"Wasn't that when the war was going badly against us?"
"It was. Before the Incheon landing—we were still trading blows along the Nakdong. Maybe that's why the spark caught so easily. No one knew about tomorrow…"
Park put a cigarette to his lips and gave a short laugh.
Ki-jo knew the course of things from their meeting through the marriage, but Park did not go into the details.
"And how did you meet your wife, President Lee?"
"I went looking for work in the neighborhood where she lived, and I took her hand at a stream swollen with rain."
At that Park chuckled, amused. A single sentence seemed to have been enough for him to picture the scene.
"Do you live grateful to that stream, or do you resent it?"
"Deeply grateful. We're living well."
"How many children?"
"Two sons and a daughter."
Park nodded, then said,
"President Lee, I understand your style well enough. From now on I won't ask you to drink with me outside."
"Thank you, General."
As their talk was drawing to a close, Yuk Young-soo came out into the yard carrying a bundle.
Park shot her a glance—what's this?—and she said,
"I packed some of the seasoned greens we had in the house. Please take them when you go."
It was a return for the food Ki-jo had brought.
"Already telling the guest to leave?"
Park offered a light jab, and Yuk Young-soo answered,
"You know very well that isn't it. I was so grateful I wanted to give it to him quickly."
Park grinned, as if to make plain that what he had just said was a joke.
Ki-jo checked his wristwatch.
"It's getting late, so I should be going. I need to be home before curfew."
"That wasn't what I meant…"
Yuk Young-soo looked troubled.
"Not at all. It's nearly the martial-law curfew."
At that, a faint smile crossed her face.
Ki-jo was certain she had brought the bundle of side dishes to let him know the hour.
When he stood, Park's whole family came out into the yard.
He greeted Park's mother-in-law, Lee Gyeong-ryeong, first, then worked his way down to the youngest, Park Ji-man, and went out through the gate.
Outside, Park said,
"Get home safely."
"It was a pleasant evening, General."
They shook hands.
Ki-jo climbed into the jeep and was starting the engine when Park spoke again.
"That project of sending radios out to the countryside moved me. A very fine undertaking."
"We haven't managed to send many yet."
"Well begun is half done. We'll see each other again."
"Yes, General. It was a pleasant evening."
After the last farewell, Ki-jo pulled the jeep away.
Was it because his last words with Park had been about radios? On the drive home he turned over Park's radio-distribution campaign in his mind.
Not long after the coup succeeded, Park would issue the Supreme Council Decree on the Eradication of Smuggled Goods. Under it, a joint task force would be formed to police the sale of designated goods, and the sale of imported radios would be strictly banned. Immediately afterward, the Office of Public Information would launch, on a grand scale, the Campaign to Send Radios to Farming and Fishing Villages Nationwide. The display cases of radio shops across the country would stand empty.
The only companies that could fill those empty cases now were Cheongsan and Lucky.
Ki-jo knew that Lucky, its radio sales sluggish, was not increasing production. He, by contrast, had never stopped mass-producing them. Executives inside the group were worried, but he paid them no mind. He had ordered that production continue no matter how many sold, no matter whether the warehouses overflowed with stock. Only then could he hold the volume of vacuum tubes imported from Japan at a steady level and buy them cheap.
He remembered what he had met with when he made the rounds of the radio shops and sold in person. Shopkeepers who dealt in imported sets had flatly refused his plea to put even a few on display—and had laughed at him besides. Ki-jo kept a separate list of the shops that had agreed to carry Cheongsan radios.
Even if Park failed in the coup, on May 10, 1961, the Act Banning the Sale of Specified Foreign Goods would pass the National Assembly. It prohibited the sale of specified imports that hindered domestic industry and smacked of luxury—no fewer than two hundred and ten items, radios among them. The Supreme Council for National Reconstruction would only be carrying out what the coup had kept from being put into effect; had there been no coup, the Democratic Party government would have done the same.
Ki-jo was steadily preparing to fill the gap in radios nationwide. Whatever happened from here on, he was making meticulous preparations so that Cheongsan would not be shaken.