Drawing the Line
On January 1, 1961, Kwak Seung-geun came home safe.
The man who had taken him put the boy into a Sibal taxi in front of Yongsan Station—one of the boxy homegrown cars that plied the streets as cabs—pressed seven hundred hwan into the driver's hand, and asked him to deliver the child to No. 23, Lot 1, Sejong-ro.
When her son returned, Shin Ok-gyun, Kwak Young-joo's wife, sent the boy the next morning to their hometown of Yeoju, in Gyeonggi Province. Then she came to find Ki-jo, and to thank him.
"Thank you. Truly, Chairman. Because of you, my child came home safe."
For ten days Ki-jo had run a special broadcast searching for young Kwak Seung-geun, twelve times a day. He never said who the father was, or the mother. He simply gave over commercial time and let the camera rest for about a minute on a placard bearing the child's photograph, his name, the clothes he had been wearing, and the place he had vanished, and he asked anyone with information to take it to the nearest police box, or to DBC.
A few viewers who knew that Seung-geun was Kwak Young-joo's son called DBC to protest. Ki-jo paid them no mind. A father's sins were the father's alone. A son could not be told to answer for them.
"Is the boy all right?"
"Yes, Chairman. Seung-geun doesn't even seem to have known he was kidnapped. He says he wasn't put through any hardship."
"I'm glad."
It cheered Ki-jo that Seung-geun, about the age of his own Yeong-su, had come home unharmed, just as the boy had in the history Ki-jo remembered.
Shin Ok-gyun drew a thick fold of bills from inside her coat and held it out to him. It was the reward of two hundred thousand hwan she had publicly promised to anyone who found Seung-geun, or who sent word of where he was.
Ki-jo refused it.
"Please, keep it. Use it for Seung-geun's schooling."
"No one helped us the way you did, Chairman. I don't think I'll rest easy unless I give you this much, at least. I heard a DBC television was smashed in Jongno..."
She meant the set that had been broken by someone angered when Ki-jo put televisions out on the streets of Seoul, so that passersby would learn Kwak Seung-geun had been kidnapped.
"I'd like to make it up to you, if only for the price of the broken television."
"It's all right. Please don't trouble yourself over it."
Ki-jo did not care that a few televisions had been smashed. That Kwak Young-joo, at the height of his power, had stripped the uniforms off Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo was payment enough all by itself.
No. On that score, it was Ki-jo who owed the greater debt.
"I hope Seung-geun grows up bright, and well."
Ki-jo would not take the reward however she pressed it on him, and Shin Ok-gyun bowed her head in thanks.
The police had still not found Mae Seok-hwan, the man who kidnapped young Kwak Seung-geun. He had taken Kwak Young-joo's son meaning to squeeze out a large sum and spend it buying his way clear of military service. Arrested a few days later, he would serve his term, come out, and enlist, only to be caught while still on active duty making counterfeit notes and passing them; later still he would kidnap a little girl. A vicious criminal, through and through.
For the present the police had no feel for Mae Seok-hwan at all. They had arrested only a man who coveted the two hundred thousand hwan Shin Ok-gyun had posted as a reward and had been playing the part of the culprit, and they were looking into whether he had accomplices.
Ki-jo thought of Kwak Young-joo's son. Mae Seok-hwan had come up to the boy on his way home from Deoksu Elementary School and taken him, saying that his father in prison would soon be leaving for America, so he had better come along quickly. A child put through a thing like that would live the rest of his life with a painful memory, bound up with his father's death. Kwak Young-joo had been a sorry father, one who laid suffering even upon his own son.
A few days later Ki-jo was formally invited into an organization called the Korean Economic Council.
Seventy-eight businessmen had banded together to form it, joining forces with the Chamber of Commerce, the Trade Association, the Spinners and Weavers Association, and the Construction Association in order to oppose the Act on the Punishment of Illicit Accumulators of Wealth, which the House of Representatives had introduced.
Ki-jo knew perfectly well what sort of body it was, and he went anyway. He met the businessmen gathered at the Bando Hotel and exchanged greetings with them. Once he had taken his seat, he listened to the council's chairman, the president of Sam○ Company.
"We have to join forces and oppose this bill. The man who demanded the money is the one at fault. Are we, who had it wrung out of us, any more to blame? If this bill passes, fully fifty-seven thousand people will be punished. And who do you suppose will be happiest about that? Kim Il-sung, up in the North."
It was an argument in which the logic of economics and the logic of national security were strangely tangled together. In February, in fact, the Korean Economic Council would issue a statement declaring its hope in so many words.
That the disposition of illicit accumulators of wealth not be carried out in any manner that profits the Northern puppet regime.
The gist of it was that what North Korea hated most was the South's economic prosperity, and that the assemblymen had therefore better not lend the Northern puppets a hand. The Democratic Party lawmakers would flare up at that and protest that they were being branded Reds, but Ki-jo knew it for what it was: a rigged show, a match fixed in advance.
Men of business and men of the Assembly fought where the public could see them, and behind the curtain they passed political funds back and forth. And in fact the bill on illicit wealth would be deftly rewritten, and the number of suspects would plunge from fifty-seven thousand to six hundred. The members of the Korean Economic Council would slip clear of indictment.
No. On May 16, the very deadline the Punishment Act had set for the voluntary declaration of illicit wealth, a coup would break out, and the work of settling those fortunes would pass into the hands of the men who made it.
It would become an event of great weight in the Korean economy, the first slack in the leash by which the business world would come, almost of itself, into the soldiers' grip.
Ki-jo merely listened to the businessmen who, blind to the way that current was running, railed that the Democratic Party's bill on illicit wealth had to be stopped. They were committing the old folly of reaching for a shovel to stop what a hoe could have stopped.
The soldiers would see that business and politics had traded money in order to smother the reckoning, and they would swing a far larger blade. Lacking any legitimacy of their own, they would play the punishment of illicit accumulators as a card to catch the public mood, and they would trumpet it far and wide.
Ki-jo remembered. A few of the cases the military regime would hold up as the corruption of the Chang Myon government.
They would announce that Finance Minister Kim Young-sun had accepted a refrigerator as a gift, a tremendous luxury in those days. In truth it had not been a refrigerator at all. It had been an icebox, and a present from an old friend besides.
Nor was that all. Among the more absurd of these affairs was the military government's investigation of former Foreign Minister Jeong Il-yeong. He had stood on weak ground even inside the Democratic Party, and the party, torn by its own feuds, turned its guns inward and branded him an illicit accumulator of wealth. They claimed he was taking bribes and raising a great house. The Kyunghyang Shinmun, friendly to the Democrats, piled on and splashed his supposed corruption across its pages in the largest type.
In fact he had only been repairing his own house against the day he left office, and a rumor had grown out of that. The military government, too, went through Jeong Il-yeong—who arrived already trailing that rumor—as if it were picking lice, and all that came of it in the end was that he had gone to America on business and turned his unused travel money back in.
As Ki-jo saw it, the corrupt Democratic Party and the businessmen were digging their own graves.
The chairman presiding over the meeting turned to him for his opinion.
"I would like to hear what President Lee Ki-jo of Cheongsan Group, who has joined us today, thinks of all this. We ask you to favor us with your esteemed view."
Every face turned toward him, waiting. The words of Ki-jo, a chaebol so newly risen, carried weight.
He got to his feet and spoke to the businessmen.
"I am in favor of this bill. I would sooner it passed quickly, and that businessmen took their punishment and were done with it."
His words left the room stunned.
"Better to take the beating early. If the business world is seen resisting a society's hunger for reform, I fear we'll only be cast among the old evils. As for me—"
"Easy for Cheongsan to talk, when you've got nothing to be caught for. That's how it sounds to me."
Someone cut him off mid-sentence.
That Cheongsan was run so cleanly the prosecutors and the Tax Bureau could shake it out and not raise a speck of dust was a famous tale, passed around like legend among the men who ran the business world. They had called Ki-jo in so they might hold an incorruptible businessman up as their public face and lobby the politicians behind it. He had seen as much, and he had just made it plain that he would not work with them.
"Even if I'd had something to be caught for, I would have stepped forward this time and asked to take the punishment."
The seventy-eight executives met that with a cold silence. Ki-jo went on, steady, speaking to men who were turning their faces from him.
"If you mean to claim that putting businessmen in prison would do grave harm to the national economy, then go to prison—and afterward show the people and the government how great that harm is."
"What? Isn't that going a bit far? Does prison look that easy to you?"
Some of them bristled. Ki-jo kept on.
"You gentlemen say that the politicians demanded money and you had no choice but to give it. Is that the truth? There were cases like that. But weren't there also times you offered the money yourselves, of your own accord, hoping for a favor?"
He put the question back to them calmly, and the businessmen had nothing to show but their displeasure. They sat mute, as if they had swallowed honey.
"I don't believe that making a great deal of money, paying a great deal in taxes, and giving people work can stand as a pardon. The public won't think so either. To say we mustn't lock businessmen up, because locking them up would ruin the economy, is absurd."
Ki-jo said everything he had come to say, and he did not sit back down. Every look in the room wished him gone. He knew it, and he reached for his hat and coat. It was then that one of the elder businessmen spoke to him.
"I suspect President Lee of Cheongsan, being still young, believes it's enough if he alone stays clean. But run a company for a long time, and a man can make a mistake without ever knowing it..."
The elder, who had chided him gently, went on.
"When we're young, we can be confident we'll make our way through the world alone. Live a little longer, though, and the day may come when you suffer a very great loss for want of anyone beside you to be your strength. So don't turn your back on the men gathered in this room. Let us put our strength together."
At his words they all nodded, and their eyes came back to Ki-jo. He ignored them and gathered up his hat and coat.
"I've said what I had to say. I don't expect my convictions will change from here on, either."
He bowed to the elder, nodded to the other businessmen, and went out.
Leaving the Bando Hotel, Ki-jo felt scoured clean inside. He had not the slightest intention of joining an economic association in the years to come. The business federation that would become a window for lobbying the political world, and a stronghold for crushing even sound labor unions, was not the sort of body he wanted. To have used this chance to draw a hard line against them seemed to him, if anything, a thing well done.
He was not afraid of becoming an outsider among businessmen. He was confident he could compete with them, and he had not founded Cheongsan so that he alone might live well. Had that been his aim, he would never have endured the hardship of the last seven years, and he might have left Korea for America long ago.
He had drawn a clear line against the men who went on in the old way, and the bad blood was real. His step, all the same, was light without end.
Dae-ik, who attended him, spoke to Ki-jo, who looked to be in good spirits. Dae-ik had not gone into the conference room, and he did not know what had passed there.
"Chairman, has something pleasant happened?"
"Hard to say. It's pleasant, and it's bitter, too."
Dae-ik smiled faintly at that.
"Then please tell me only the pleasant part."
"Hmm."
Ki-jo thought a moment, and then he spoke. Dae-ik was a man who would take heavy duty upon himself at Cheongsan and rise. There was something Ki-jo wanted to leave with a man like that.
"Dae-ik. From here on, even if you should someday commit a wrong you don't yourself see—never get into a wheelchair."
"A wheelchair...?"
The word threw Dae-ik. Ki-jo looked at him and broke into a wide smile.
"If you do wrong running a company, walk there on your own two feet, wherever it is, ask forgiveness, and pay what you owe. Never go anywhere in a wheelchair, or in an ambulance."
As Ki-jo went on, Dae-ik scratched the back of his head. Ki-jo thought it would be decades before the young man understood what he meant. He gave the bewildered back a few light pats.
Nineteen sixty-one would be, in more ways than one, no easy year. But Dae-ik, who would weather the hard decades ahead at his side, felt to Ki-jo like a solid strength. The family who stood with Cheongsan was his strength.