The Shame Parade
On the morning of Sunday, May 21, 1961, Kim Seogwang came to Kijo's house. The two of them sat out on the wooden veranda and talked, and Seogwang reported what he had seen: around four the previous afternoon, revolutionary soldiers had stormed the Miwon supply depot in downtown Seoul, demanding to know the wholesale unit price and grilling the staff, point by point, on what it actually cost to make the seasoning, before they left.
"They took the ledgers, too, just as they pleased. I understand the soldiers want to steady prices and stop companies from gouging people. But if that's the aim, they ought to be looking at flour and sugar. I can't see why they'd go stirring up a seasoning."
"They'll be looking there as well."
Kijo answered calmly, even at the news that the soldiers had carried off the books. He was confident that they could shake the place out to the last scrap and still find nothing.
Seogwang felt suddenly awkward before that unruffled manner. Kijo had come home late the day before, and here he was, the moment his eyes opened, making a fuss on a Sunday. Scratching the back of his head, he glanced at the empty house next door.
"Boss, did the fellow next door move out? He hadn't been here any time at all. Was there somewhere better than this? Can't have been."
"It seems he was reinstated in the army. They provided an official residence, he said, so he had no choice but to leave."
When Kijo told him that much about Jong-pil, Seogwang clapped his hands lightly.
"So the man next door had someone behind him. The soldiers take the government, he pulls a few strings, and luck drops a post in his lap. Hahaha."
Kim Jong-pil was hardly a name the public knew. There was no reason Seogwang should have recognized it. He put on the face of a man who had seen through the way of the world.
"Anyway, whoever grabs power, connections aren't going to disappear. Everything under the sun gets done because people rub up against other people. Isn't that so, Boss?"
Kijo smiled and nodded. They had each just taken a pull on a cigarette when Sunrye came out of the kitchen.
"Aigo, ma'am. Busy already, and the morning barely started."
Seogwang bowed to her with a grin. Sunrye returned the bow, then turned to Kijo.
"Everything's ready. We only have to get the children dressed."
"Boss, you going somewhere today?"
"Yes. The youngest says he wants to see the monkeys, so we're heading to Changgyeongwon."
"Monkey-watching at Changgyeongwon? That's a fine idea! A Sunday comes along once in a blue moon, and I ought to take Yeongbae, Geunbae, and Gyeongbae myself. Some father I am."
When the man rich in sons began blaming himself, Sunrye spoke up.
"Come with us. I packed plenty of kimbap anyway, thinking I'd bring some over."
"Ma'am! You packed kimbap on top of everything? Then our family can hardly stay behind. I'll fetch them and be right back."
Seogwang let out a big loose laugh and went out the gate. Sunrye and Kijo watched him go, and the moment their eyes met, they laughed.
Kijo's heart was light. This, he thought, was the savor of living in one neighborhood with the cousins next door. He had lived all the way to ninety once, and he knew how quickly a season like this slipped past. By the time the eighties arrived, people would be living in apartments and would have lost the taste of it entirely.
He and Sunrye got the children dressed, waited for Seogwang's family, and set out together for Changgyeongwon.
On the way they came upon a crowd milling thick in front of the police station. Curious as ever, Seogwang asked what was going on, and a woman standing there answered.
"Aigo, if it isn't our neighborhood head. I came looking for Jeongman's father."
The neighbors called the incurably meddlesome Seogwang their neighborhood head.
"Seonggyu—what's that fellow doing locked up at the station?"
"He was drinking, and he broke curfew on the way home. That's all. I don't know how many more scoldings it'll take before he starts coming in early. Still, it's Sunday. I wish they'd let him go soon and be done lecturing him."
She sighed, and Seogwang nearly stuck his nose in as usual, then thought better of it. On an ordinary day he might have sidled up to a friendly policeman and asked, quietly, to have someone let out a little sooner. After the revolution, though, he knew the police were drawn tight, nothing like before.
"He'll be out before long. If there are this many people outside the police box, that means they've got plenty locked up in there. The police will turn them loose just to be rid of the nuisance."
Kijo's family and Seogwang's waited until his meddling had run its course, then started again for Changgyeongwon.
It was a holiday morning in May, and Kijo liked the sight of them: Sunrye dressed in her hanbok, the children in their very best clothes because there would be photographs. Sharing the lunch tins and water canteens with Seogwang as they walked, he felt what it was to live among people.
Changgyeongwon, when they arrived, was already a sea of bodies. In a Seoul where there was little else to see, the zoo was always packed on weekends with parents who had brought their children to look at the animals. Afraid of losing the little ones in the press, Kijo and Sunrye went about with the children's hands gripped tight in their own.
When the looking was done, they slipped into the shade of a tree that Yeongbae and Yeongsu had claimed for them. The two families spread mats and ate the kimbap—seaweed rice rolls. Yeongbae, hurrying because they were so good, choked and had a miserable spell of it, and Seogwang, thumping his son on the back, went off to the Cheongsan Store near Changgyeongwon and came back with bottles of Chilsung Cider.
All ten of them finished what they had brought, and when they left the grounds they chose the boulevard instead of the alleys. Worn out by the swarming crowds, everyone wanted a wide road that would throw their chests open.
They were following the main street of Jongno toward home when a column like a demonstration came into view far ahead. Seogwang eyed the suspicious procession and muttered.
"What kind of time is this for demonstrating? They're going to get themselves killed by the soldiers."
The column's true nature revealed itself soon enough.
At the very front walked Lee Jeong-jae, hands bound against his torso, a sheet of paper with his name written large pinned to his chest. Under the watch of the Airborne Special Forces, the gangsters kept their eyes lowered and marched in orderly ranks.
People who saw them started in surprise. Some jeered at Jeong-jae and the rest—serves them right. Most, though, kept silent, and quietly watched the fall of the gangsters who had lorded it over Seoul for more than ten years.
Kijo stopped with his family and watched the end of Lee Jeong-jae. The nearer the man came, the more a corner of his chest ached. Jeong-jae had been a bad man, but he was also a man who had belatedly grasped his own wrongs and tried to change. Somehow, in the fifties, a tie had formed between them; Kijo had heard what lay deep in him, and he remembered the sight of Jeong-jae stepping in to stop Kwak Young-joo's blows.
He could not keep looking. He was about to drop his gaze when someone called to him in a loud voice.
"Chairman of Cheongsan! Where have you been?"
It was a supplier who delivered bricks to Cheongsan Brick. As Kijo raised his head to find the owner of the voice, his eyes met Lee Jeong-jae's. Jeong-jae looked at him like a man with something to say. At once a soldier walking beside him poured out a bellow.
"Eyes front! Keep walking, you bastard! Where do you think you're looking!"
The paratrooper was far smaller than Jeong-jae in both height and bulk, but in his steel helmet he looked hard as iron, and he glared and cursed him without letup. Jeong-jae lowered his eyes to the ground ahead of his feet and walked on.
Kijo shook hands with the man who had greeted him, spoke with him briefly, and went home with his family. On the way he heard Seogwang talking to his wife.
"Look at them, paraded through the streets in front of everybody. They mean to shame the gangsters to their hearts' content and then let them go. They'll get beaten, sure. But after a humiliation that bad, how could they stay in Seoul? They'll go back to their hometowns, farm quietly, and live quietly. If it were me, I couldn't live in this city after being shamed like that."
Listening, Kijo felt his heart grow heavier still. He knew all too well that this was not a military regime that would finish with humiliation alone. And he knew that the blade the army had turned on the gangsters would soon be turned on businessmen like himself.
On May 29, the Dong-A Ilbo carried, splashed across the front page as big as a gate, the news that twenty-nine illicit fortune-builders were to be arrested.
Ever since the April 19 Revolution, whenever illicit wealth was mentioned, Lee Byung-chull's name was always the first to be spoken. Kijo understood that Lee was still staying in Japan. The list, he saw, also included Kwak Young-joo and Paik In-yup.
Those two had committed their share of crimes, of course. Even so, Kijo thought they had landed on the list for the further offense of having gotten on the wrong side of power. In the fifties, Kwak Young-joo and Paik In-yup had been the policeman and the soldier who, more than any others, hounded Park Chung-hee.
He waited with a worried heart to see what the newly formed Illicit Wealth Disposition Committee would do in this turn of history.
A few days later, a call came from Chung Ju-yung of Hyundai Construction, asking him to lunch.
"President Lee, come by Hyundai Construction. I'll have the meal ready."
Kijo hung up and set out for Mugyo-dong, where the Hyundai Construction building stood. If Chung had sent for him, something was burning him up inside.
It had not been announced in the papers, but every firm with a head office in Seoul was under investigation by the committee. Cheongsan was no exception. Even so, whether because of a reputation that had reached even the army or because someone had put in a word, the inquiry was not especially harsh. Soldiers came, flipped through the ledgers for an hour or two, or sat down one-on-one with the department heads. According to Sung Dae-ik, Ma-ryang, and Seogwang, the soldiers had been, as they put it, on the gentlemanly side.
Arriving in front of 92 Mugyo-dong, Kijo looked up at the eight-story Hyundai Construction building rising over the boulevard. Nothing nearby could compare with it. In 1961 an eight-story building was a rarity even in Seoul. Get into a taxi and ask for an eight-story building, and they would take you to the Bando Hotel. That the Hyundai headquarters stood tall and imposing enough to be set beside the Bando was proof of how far the company had grown. And yet Kijo had a feeling that the great building, finished only in January of '61, was going to cost Chung Ju-yung a rough time of it.
Hungry for early results, the soldiers were tearing through companies even on holidays, as if conducting a military operation. To eyes like those, Hyundai Construction—suddenly the owner of a great building in the middle of Seoul—would look like fine prey.
Kijo went in through the lobby and stopped before the elevator, the pride of the building. In those days, structures with elevators could be counted on the fingers in all of Seoul. The mere presence of one was enough to invite comparison with the Bando Hotel. The elevator inside the Hyundai building was a Krupp. When the headquarters was going up, the plan had been to install a Japanese machine, cheap and easy to get parts for, until Kijo talked them out of it and they changed to a West German Krupp. Cheongsan would soon be producing elevators under a technical tie-up with Krupp, he told them, so they ought to buy the West German one.
The doors of that elevator opened, and someone stepped out. Kijo went in, and the operator on duty asked him where he was going.
"Which floor?"
"I have an appointment with President Chung Ju-yung."
The operator let him off on the eighth floor. Kijo stepped out and into the president's office, its door standing wide open.
"Come on in and sit down, President Lee."
Chung Ju-yung, seated on the sofa with his brothers, waved him over and broke into a broad smile. The brothers—Chung Soon-yung, Chung In-yung, and Chung Shin-yung—rose to greet him. On the table in front of the sofa, several lunch boxes and bottles of soda caught Kijo's eye.
"Today I told my wife, President Lee is coming, so pack a special lunch. Ha-haang!"
Chung laughed brightly. Kijo sat down across from him, took up his chopsticks, and smiled at the box. It was a generous one, packed full of rice.
"This looks wonderful. Please give Mrs. Byeon my thanks."
"You haven't even tasted it, and you're already saying it's good?"
"You can tell just by looking. Hahaha."
Kijo laughed as he mixed the rice—half of it barley—with kimchi, a fried egg, and a little doenjang, fermented soybean paste. It had been a long time since he had sat down to lunch with the Chung brothers.
He remembered 1954, and the day he had gone looking for Chung Ju-yung with a single memorandum written by the commander of the 7th Division, and found him building the Goryeong Bridge. He put a mouthful of the doenjang-mixed rice between his teeth. He was not sad, and yet his chest tightened for no clear reason. He lifted his head, chewing the barley rice, and the sight of the Chung brothers eating with such open pleasure brought a smile to his face of its own accord.
Whenever he watched them sharing a meal with their eldest brother, the same thought stole over him. Ought I to have more children?