Lee Byung-chull's Lament
The day after he met Lee Maeng-hee, Ki-jo heard from Lee Byung-chull. Summoned to the house, he set out at once for Jangchung-dong.
Lee Byung-chull's home stood in a residential quarter not far from the Army Gymnasium—Jangchung Gymnasium—wrapped in a long wall. The lower courses were stone and concrete, the upper red brick, and the whole rose two or three times the height of a grown man, so that from the street nothing of the interior could be seen at all.
Ki-jo had the jeep circle the property at a crawl until he found the gate. He left the car nearby and walked a path where pines stood in a row. He rang the bell, and someone came out.
"Good afternoon. I'm Lee Ki-jo of Cheongsan Group. I've come to see Chairman Lee Byung-chull."
"We were told to expect you. Please come in."
Inside the gate, ancient trees lined the inner face of the wall as well. Planted in symmetry with those outside, they gave the place a peculiar air—set to keep prying eyes from the grounds, and yet they might almost have been street trees.
It was a great house. The grounds alone covered nearly three thousand square meters. The main residence and its annex stood as two buildings laid out in an L, and both rose two stories. Ki-jo knew that in the 1960s the place had commanded as much as a hundred million won. Fine houses in that stretch of Jangchung-dong went for around thirty million at the time; this one had cost more than three times as much, a residence of outright extravagance. He took in the exterior—trim, imposing—as he went in.
In the living room, Chairman Lee Byung-chull was waiting.
"Thank you for coming. Forgive me for not stepping out to meet you."
Something in the words suggested a man who no longer wished to go outside at all.
Behind the chairman stood his wife, Madam Park Du-eul, and his eldest daughter-in-law, Sohn Bok-nam.
"This is my wife. And this child is my eldest daughter-in-law."
When he introduced Sohn Bok-nam—Lee Maeng-hee's wife—Lee Byung-chull smiled. It was a father-in-law's smile, fond of the woman his son had married.
Ki-jo greeted the ladies of the Samsung household in turn, and Lee Byung-chull showed him to the study.
Like the house within and without, the study was strictly ordered and spare. The shelves were packed with works of Confucian learning, the Analects and Mencius among them, and with books in Japanese. Ki-jo could feel the two bodies of knowledge that had made the man: Confucian scholarship, and the modern learning he had brought home from his years of study in Japan.
Byung-chull offered him a chair. When Ki-jo sat, the daughter-in-law brought tea. The two men each took a sip, and only then did the talk begin, with the weather.
"How is it outside these days? I hardly go out anymore, so I wouldn't know."
Ki-jo heard two meanings in the question. One was simply that Lee Byung-chull had shut himself away. The other seemed to ask what Ki-jo made of the times. He answered with the greater weight on the second.
"Still rather chilly."
"Is that so? I've been feeling the cold myself, of late."
He said it with a bitter edge, and Ki-jo offered something more hopeful.
"It ought to warm up before long, shouldn't it?"
"That would be welcome. It can't be winter forever."
Lee Byung-chull spoke while looking out the window—he, whom the papers and every gossiping mouth were working over day after day as an illicit accumulator and an unscrupulous employer. Spring had already come to the window he was watching. Hills and fields were greening, and flowers were in bloom. His heart, though, seemed still caught in a cold winter.
"It's a very fine house."
Ki-jo had turned the talk to the house, and Lee Byung-chull smiled.
"Built in 1936. That was when I put up a cooperative rice mill in North Masan, close to my hometown of Uiryeong, and first went into business. This house was going up then, too."
A distant smile crossed his face. To lift the spirits of a man sunk in disappointment, Ki-jo deliberately drew him back into the past. For Ki-jo himself, as for any man who had succeeded, the years of just starting out tended to be remembered as more romantic, and kinder, than they had truly been. He asked for the story, and Lee Byung-chull's expression brightened.
"Well... When I told my father I meant to go into business, this is what he said to me. 'Don't let the business master you. Master the business.' That's what he told me..."
The memory of his late father seemed to rise in him, and for a moment his eyes grew moist. As if unwilling to sink into sentiment, he went on at once.
"That first venture, I wrecked it in grand style."
He smiled as he said it.
"The land my father put behind me brought in some fifteen hundred bushels of rice a year. At first the business showed a little promise. Then Japan started the Pacific War, the country went onto a wartime footing, and the whole thing collapsed."
Ki-jo already knew the history of that first enterprise. It had gone well enough at the outset that Byung-chull pushed into transport and real estate; then, under Japan's wartime system, credit was cut off, the Joseon Industrial Bank called in what it had lent him, and the business fell to ruin overnight. A rice mill alone would have been no trouble. The trouble was stepping into real estate, which swallowed capital. A novice who finds things going well is apt to overreach and run onto the rocks. And Lee Byung-chull, then, had been only twenty-six—an age of hot blood and no fear.
"Ah, Masan was a grand place in those days. In a word, it was a town that had arrived. There'd been a government granary there even in the Joseon period, but the Japanese meant to develop Masan, so they cut the district into clean, straight blocks and built a whole new city."
As he talked his way back through those years, the smiles came more often.
"After I'd smashed that business to pieces, I took my father's help once more and tried again. This time I went abroad. I traveled through China and Manchuria, and it struck me that if I traded with Manchuria I could make real money. So I threw in with friends from home and a few men senior to me, and we opened a trading house in Daegu—Samsung Sanghoe."
"Was that when Byeolpyo noodles came out? The star brand?"
At the question, Lee Byung-chull broke into a wide smile.
"That's right. That's right. Are you fond of noodles, Chairman Lee?"
"I'm fond of noodles of every kind, but I'm especially partial to milmyeon—the wheat noodles Busan is known for."
"You must have lived in Busan a good while, then. People there always seemed to rate Gupo noodles higher than Byeolpyo."
"The Busan natives did. I was very fond of Byeolpyo noodles myself, though."
"Were you? I'm grateful to hear it. Ha ha ha."
Seeing him grown cheerful, Ki-jo felt better himself.
"With the money from the noodles we got into dried fish, and fruit, and the trading house grew. In 1942 we took over Joseon Brewery. And right after that I came up to Seoul and expanded the business. That's how it went."
Talking with Ki-jo, Lee Byung-chull seemed easier in himself, and he smiled often. It did not last. The weight of the present seemed to find him again; his face darkened a little, and he stroked his chin.
"Is the fertilizer plant coming along well?"
The question came abruptly—about the Cheongsan fertilizer plant going up in Ulsan. Ki-jo found it hard to answer. Near the end of Syngman Rhee's rule the two of them had gone abroad at roughly the same time and come home with loans, and he knew that Lee Byung-chull's fertilizer venture, unlike his own, was floundering. He was afraid any account of his own progress would sound like boasting. But Byung-chull would already know the state of Cheongsan's business well enough. Ki-jo held his words back.
When he hesitated, the older man spoke.
"I should have stuck to my own story. When Maeng-hee passed on your word that you'd be willing to sit and talk with me, I thought I'd simply unburden myself a little—and here I've gone and asked something foolish. Ha."
The slight laugh faded, and he began, slowly, to lay out what he had been through.
"Once the Heo Jeong caretaker government stepped down and the Democratic Party came in, I met every politician of any weight in that party. Every one of them."
He had pleaded, he said, that he would accept whatever punishment was coming to him, but that quite apart from that they should let the foreign loan come through, so a fertilizer plant might be built for the country.
"I even told them that once the plant was up and Samsung had recovered only what it had invested, I would turn the whole thing over to the nation. But there were men who said they couldn't so much as sit down with an illicit accumulator, and refused to see me at all..."
He gave a hollow laugh, then spoke of Finance Minister Kim Young-sun.
"The very day Minister Kim received his appointment, he came to this house. I hadn't sent for him. He came on his own and said that if the confusion in society and the slump in the economy were left as they were, the country's future would be in serious trouble—and that he hoped for Samsung's active cooperation."
Ki-jo nodded.
"So I told him that if Samsung carried the project, everyone would be against it, and that Samsung would therefore give it up. I didn't care who took it on. I asked him to push the thing somehow as a national undertaking, see that the loan from Italy was secured, and have the work go forward. That's what I urged him to do."
The minister, he said, had left with the assurance that he too was entirely in favor of the fertilizer plan, and that they would discuss the practical questions again.
"A few days later I met the minister once more, and he told me that no matter how he turned it over, only Samsung could make a success of the plant. He pressed me to see it through to the end. He asked me to endure everything, for the country's sake... Endure it as I might, what could I do, branded as I was an illicit accumulator?"
He let out a long sigh and went on.
"After I met Minister Kim, I endured for three months. Endured, and endured again. When the prosecutors called, I went and submitted to their questioning, and I waited only for the fertilizer plant to be settled. But nothing changed. Neither the National Assembly nor the government showed any interest in the plant. The only talk was that I had to be punished..."
Some unpleasant memory seemed to surface. He snorted once and continued.
"I heard that a lawmaker from the business world, a man I'd been on good terms with, had been going around saying it. Whenever he met people from the Ministry of Finance or the prosecutors' office, he told them that Lee Byung-chull, of all men, had to be dealt with without mercy—punished so that one man's fate would warn the rest... Because I'd been close to him, for a while I didn't even want to look at people."
He worked one shoulder gently, as if it ached.
"I started to think that if this went on, the country really would suffer a great loss. So I turned over to Minister Kim Young-sun every document Samsung held on the fertilizer plant. With these, I told him, anyone could build one. Please pass them to the right man, and see that it's carried forward. That's what I said. And I wondered whether..."
"I've had no word from Minister Kim Young-sun. No one has spoken to me about Samsung's fertilizer plant."
At that, Lee Byung-chull's gaze drifted to some empty point in the study. He looked like a man watching the fertilizer works he had driven forward shatter to pieces in midair. Slowly, he nodded.
It seemed he had hoped that, since he himself could not build the plant, someone would step forward and carry Samsung's project in his place. However much he was a businessman in pursuit of money, he must have believed Korea truly needed a fertilizer plant, and he must have wished that whoever took the work up would be of some use to the country. At this moment he might well have thought the firm to take it on was Cheongsan—a house with no tie at all to illicit accumulation, or to any breath of corruption.
But the project Samsung had abandoned had never come to Cheongsan. That meant, in all likelihood, that the documents he had entrusted were sitting in some cabinet at the Ministry of Finance, or had been passed along and were drifting, even now, from hand to hand.
Lee Byung-chull kept a long silence. When he spoke, his voice was tight.
"So in the end a perfectly good fertilizer plant—just the one—has gone to waste..."
Ki-jo thought so too. But Cheongsan could hardly step forward and offer to take Samsung's project onto its own shoulders. To the public it would look like a special favor, and it would draw the attacks of the political world. Even if some politician with a sense of responsibility and the power to act had stood up and said outright that a venture worth tens of millions of dollars was about to run aground, and that someone had to be entrusted with it, the thing would have been touch and go. And no one had stood up. To look after the national interest and be found in Samsung's company was to put oneself in danger of a savage public opinion, and so everyone, it seemed, was keeping quiet.
He had the sense that Byung-chull had called him in part to pour out his frustration—but also because he was desperately curious to know what had become of the national project he had won, with such pains, out of Italy.
"Thank you for telling me how things stand outside, Chairman Lee."
There was no strength in his voice.
Ki-jo wanted to tell him that a chance would surely come, later. He could not make himself say it. Nothing he offered, he thought, would be of any use to a man who seemed to be living out his days in gloom.
He brought the conversation to a close and left the house. Outside the gate he stood for a while, looking at the mansion behind its wall of red brick.
In the history he carried from his other life, the title to this house would pass in 1977 to the third son, Lee Kun-hee. By giving his home to that third son, Lee Byung-chull would make it official that Samsung's true line of succession had gone to Lee Kun-hee.
He was still gazing at the house with that memory when the gate opened and Sohn Bok-nam, the eldest daughter-in-law, came out. She held a small box, and she offered it to him.
"Father said he had forgotten he meant to give you this. He asked me to see that it reached you in his place."
Lee Maeng-hee's wife handed over the box, bowed, and went back inside the gate. Sohn Bok-nam would tend Lee Byung-chull until the day he closed his eyes, and she would be cherished for it. With his eldest son, Lee Maeng-hee, he had raised a wall and would not exchange so much as a word; the daughter-in-law who lived in the same house, and his grandson Lee Jae-hyun, he loved and looked after dearly.
Ki-jo climbed into the jeep and opened the box Lee Byung-chull had sent. Inside lay an American golf ball, white as a new egg. He looked at it, and a small smile came to him.
Someday, if a better season came, perhaps the two of them might play a round and talk of brighter things. For now the older man looked on him with complicated eyes; but if a day ever came when they truly understood one another, might they not meet, and smile? Ki-jo hoped for that day with all his heart.