Light and Shadow
July 7, 1960.
Up with the dawn, Gijo sat on the wooden veranda and worked through the morning paper, laying his memories against the present as it stood. Most of what he read was unfolding just as he remembered. Now and then an incident he had forgotten would surface as he read, and now and then he would pause over some report and wonder, Did this really happen?
One matter, though, he could see clear through to its end: the trial of the political gangsters, spread across the pages.
With Kwak Young-joo, security chief of Gyeongmudae, and Shin Do-hwan, head of the Anti-Communist Youth Corps, at their head, twenty-six political gangsters stood in the great courtroom of the Seoul District Court — Lee Jeong-jae, Yu Ji-gwang, and Lim Hwa-soo among them. Studying the courtroom photograph, Gijo could not keep down the complicated ache that rose at the sight of men he had once known being brought to the judgment of the law.
Kwak Young-joo in that photograph, above all. Lee Jeong-jae. Lim Hwa-soo.
The road before them was already laid. Kwak Young-joo would not escape responsibility for the shooting in front of Gyeongmudae. And Lee Jeong-jae — who, unlike in the original history, had tried to stand against Lee Ki-poong — would in the end vanish like dew on the execution ground. The sins piled up behind them were too great to cover, however anyone might try.
Gijo folded the paper and turned to look behind him.
His wife and children lay asleep inside the mosquito net. The sight eased him; his greatest happiness was here, close enough to touch. The men who, unlike him, had gone looking for their happiness somewhere far off were in a detention center now.
Before the family woke, he took up a broom, went out, and swept the ground before the gate. Watching the front of the house come clean was, for Gijo, a joy and a happiness of its own. After a peaceful breakfast together, he set off for DBC.
The streets wore a different air than they had in the fifties. The pressure bearing down on people had eased, perhaps; the buildings, the roads, and the trees along them were all unchanged, and yet the people themselves looked a little freer.
In the ten minutes it took to walk to the station, his thoughts drifted back to April 19. Through all that upheaval his station had come through whole. Most of the nation still depended on the radio, and so the demonstrators that day had made for the radio stations. They had massed at the Seoul Central Broadcasting Station on Namsan as well — KBS Radio. With students from Yangjeong High School at their core, the crowd had stood before the building shouting, "Im Taek-geun, come out! Im Taek-geun, come out!"
The staff inside, knowing the Seoul Shinmun building had already burned, braced themselves, certain the same harm was about to fall on them. But the students had only come to ask Im Taek-geun, then the most popular announcer in the country, to put the demonstration on the air exactly as it was.
Recalling that day, Gijo turned over the thought of how beloved radio still was. It was still the age of radio. Here in the middle of 1960, ownership nationwide stood at 21 percent. Seoul had reached 62, while the countryside managed a bare 7. Cheongsan radios would surge explosively through '61, and television would follow slowly in radio's wake until at last it overtook it. He counted himself fortunate to be able to bring both out in step with their times, and the partnership with Sanyo, which would let him turn out decent sets quickly, struck him as luck beyond hoping for.
Still turning those thoughts over, he arrived in front of the station and found a cluster of young women gathered near the main gate. Wondering what was the matter, he went up to the guard posted there.
"Something going on at the station?"
"Well, sir... it's that today is Announcer Lee Hwan's night on duty."
"Night duty?"
"Yes. Whenever Mr. Lee stays overnight, his fans gather like this in the morning. They want to watch him come in."
"Ah..."
Gijo nodded.
"Maybe I ought to put Announcer Lee on overnight duty every day."
He tossed it off lightly, a joke for the guard, and a fan who had been listening nearby cried out.
"President! You mustn't! Please don't wear our Announcer Lee Hwan out!"
Startled, Gijo apologized to the woman. He was sorry, he told her; of course nothing of the sort would happen — and he hurried on inside.
Climbing the stairs, he felt a smile come to his face. Television announcers were not radio announcers, not yet, but their popularity seemed to be climbing little by little all the same.
In his office he drank his coffee and set about the day's work without hurry. He still could not see how the future would turn, and so he meant to keep the broadcasting as free as he could. With government censorship all but gone, this was commercial broadcasting's hour.
He looked slowly through the proposals the young producers had sent up. Full of nerve, they were scrambling to bring over whatever programs were in fashion in America, and one plan caught his eye. Modeled on the American quiz shows that paid out prizes, it had contestants competing each week for first place over goods worth twenty thousand hwan in all. The prizes would come from corporate sponsors and double as advertising, while a book holding some five thousand questions would be sold and the problems drawn from its pages, so as to draw ordinary people into the game.
Gijo liked an idea with that kind of spark in it. Freedom had been handed back, and already people were putting their inventiveness to work. He was pressing his seal to the approval when the intercom sounded.
"Sir, a lady is here who says she knows you well."
"Knows me?"
"Yes. She's brought two children with her."
Something about it struck him as strange. He opened the door and stepped out.
There in the secretaries' room stood Shin Ok-gyun, Kwak Young-joo's wife, her grade-school son's hand in hers and her daughter, just past her first birthday, carried on her back. At the sight of Gijo, relief crossed her face, and she bowed her head low, like someone guilty of a crime.
He did not hesitate.
"Please, come in, ma'am. Come inside."
Kwak Young-joo's power had crumbled to nothing, yet Gijo showed his wife the same courtesy he had shown in the days when the man rode high. Ushering the family into the office, he tried to read what had brought Shin Ok-gyun to him with her small children in tow. It seemed less a bid for sympathy than a fear of setting them down anywhere and going off alone. She knew what had befallen the inner circle of Syngman Rhee's regime and their families, and the knowledge frightened her. The pity of it drew a faint sigh from him.
"How have you been, these days..."
At his question Shin Ok-gyun, perched on the edge of the sofa with the little girl still on her back, said nothing, and the tears fell one after another. Gijo called a secretary and asked that the boy and the baby be taken to the outer office to play. He did not want the children hearing what would be said about their father.
At that, Shin Ok-gyun spoke.
"I'll keep my daughter with me. She's still so young..."
The boy she could bear to leave outside if she had to, but the little girl she wanted with her.
"Of course."
"Seung-geun. Wait outside."
"Yes, Mother..."
Kwak Young-joo's son rose and went out to the secretaries' room. To Gijo's eye the boy already seemed to know, if only dimly, that his father had done something terribly wrong. He looked sunken and bleak, and Gijo caught himself thinking, What was any of it for? If a father's wrongs left his family suffering like this, what meaning had there ever been in the glory Kwak Young-joo had enjoyed?
He swallowed his anger and asked.
"Nothing's happened at the house?"
"No..."
The answer was barely loud enough to hear. Unlike Lee Ki-poong and Lim Hwa-soo, Kwak Young-joo had seen his house come through unharmed, and Gijo knew it. Not because people had failed to learn where he lived, but because the house stood near Gyeongmudae. The police had fired so savagely that day that no one had dared go and ransack it.
"Sir... have you seen my husband at all? They refused me when I asked to visit..."
She asked it with no strength left in her voice. Gijo shook his head. If even his own wife's request was being turned away, they were hardly going to let him look upon the man's face. Nor did he want to. The memory rose of a dead middle-school boy carried away on his back, and he did not think he could ever forgive him.
"You won't believe me, I know, if I tell you this... but my husband never did the things people say."
Gijo kept silent.
"He did as he was ordered from above. He was a man who guarded the President with his life on the line. He wasn't someone who shot people on a whim of his own, or who squeezed money out of them..."
Kwak Young-joo's wife broke down and wept, and watching her, Gijo felt his chest tighten. There was nothing he could say.
"People say he stole another man's land to put up the Yeongbo Building, but that's a bald-faced lie. My husband had no interest in other people's land, or in money..."
"I know."
That one thing, at least, he could give her.
Many had come forward claiming Kwak Young-joo extorted money and land, and the claims were half true and half not. The money, to begin with, was true enough. Making the rounds of the companies to raise election funds and delivering what he collected to the Liberal Party — he had done plenty of that. Cheil Wool had not been spared. He was also said to have pushed into various concessions and taken unjust gains, but look closer and the money had often never reached Kwak Young-joo himself. He had been busier scraping funds together for the Liberal Party and for Syngman Rhee, or securing favors for his acquaintances, than lining his own pockets. All of it had sprung from a warped wish to flaunt his power and play the open-handed patron who looked after the people around him.
And the matter of the Yeongbo Building, just as his wife had said, would later be found to be no crime at all. A Mr. Gu, original owner of the land the building stood on, had filed suit claiming that Kwak Young-joo used his power to seize a prime parcel for a mere fifty thousand hwan, but the court ruled that the plaintiff's story lacked evidence and decided against him. As it happened, title to the Yeongbo Building was held in the name of Kwak Young-joo's twelve-year-old son, and so the world had been sure Mr. Gu must be right; the verdict overturned that expectation.
The charges against his elder brother went the same way. The man was accused of trading on Kwak Young-joo's backing to obtain seventy automobile license plates and sell them for an illicit profit, and that too ended in acquittal. Branded a chief culprit of April 19, Kwak Young-joo had suits brought against him from every side, and most of them came to nothing.
Whether it was gratitude for that single word — that Gijo knew — his wife's face brightened, and she went on.
"People think my husband took bribes and made himself rich, but my husband's family was well off to begin with. The moment we married, my father-in-law gave us two cows and two pigs. We lived comfortably on what we earned raising them. I hardly ever touched the money my husband brought home for household expenses."
She was defending him with everything she had.
"We were given an official residence, so I rented out the house we'd been living in and built up what we had myself. While my parents-in-law were alive, rice always came up from Icheon. For a long while I don't even remember buying any..."
Gijo nodded.
"Before Dr. Rhee fled to Hawaii, I told my husband to run, and so did everyone around us. He turned around and got angry at us for it. He thundered that he was guilty of nothing and had no reason to flee — that Dr. Rhee was still here, and where did we imagine he would go if he abandoned his post and left the man unguarded?"
Gijo heard her out in silence. It was like Kwak Young-joo. And his wife, he thought, was not without her grievance.
"I am truly sorry to those who died when they fired in front of Gyeongmudae. But guarding the President was his work, and he did it because the men above him ordered it. How could a mere security officer do a thing like that on his own? There was the chief of the metropolitan police, there was the Minister of the Interior — how could he have acted alone?"
Shin Ok-gyun broke into tears again. To Kwak Young-joo's wife, Gijo offered only what he could.
"The court will hand down a just verdict."
She wiped her tears and looked at him.
"It will, won't it? Surely it will. Won't it, sir?"
"Yes. It will."
She was taking his words for hope, and watching her, Gijo felt his throat close tight. He knew what lay ahead for Kwak Young-joo, and so there was nothing more he could say.
She thanked him for hearing her out, and left.
After Shin Ok-gyun was gone, Gijo sat a long while in his chair without speaking. All that remained in him was the thought that Kwak Young-joo had been a fool.
Noon came, but he did not go home; he had no wish to let his family see him sunk so low. He asked his secretary to order something simple and took his lunch in the office. That day he worked harder than ever, trying to put the meeting with Kwak Young-joo's wife out of his mind, and then he went home.
The moment he came through the gate the children burst out and flung themselves at him, and Sunrye took his bag and told him to go wash. So glad of them that it ached, he set the children on his shoulders and carried them around the yard, and he told Sunrye thank you. Hearing it, she broke into a shy, foolish little smile and said she was grateful to him too. When he asked her whatever for, she said it was because he had thanked her — and she laughed, for no reason at all. He laughed along at the sight of her, and the children, hanging off mother and father both, shrieked with laughter.
Gijo's true happiness was inside that house.
A man who lived with a family he could laugh with for no reason at all was happy without end.