The Golden Hill
In mid-October, with the site for the steel mill finally chosen, Kijo took a plan for raising the money and went to the Supreme Council. This time, too, he sought out Park Tae-joon first. Tae-joon took the papers, and as he looked them over his caterpillar-thick eyebrows gave a twitch. Startled, he read the documents through several times before he asked.
"Uh... President Lee. Something here doesn't sit right. Is it true that Cheongsan is holding anywhere from tens of kilograms of gold to hundreds?"
"It's true."
Tae-joon stared at him, utterly at a loss. Across his face passed the look of a man betrayed by someone he had trusted.
"By any chance... did you leave it off by mistake when you filed the corporate asset declaration?"
"No. I didn't."
Kijo's unflinching manner only unsettled him further. Tae-joon checked the papers again, and something struck him as wrong. If there was gold, the amount ought to have been exact—so many kilograms. Writing tens of kilograms to hundreds of kilograms was strange. Troubled by it, he steadied himself and spoke again.
"The gold holdings don't make sense. A company couldn't fail to know exactly how much gold it holds, and the range on the weight is absurdly wide. It reads like something written by a man who doesn't know how much gold he has."
"That's right. That's exactly how it is."
When Kijo said it, calm and matter-of-fact, Tae-joon let out a hollow laugh.
"Are you pulling my leg, writing it like this? Looking at the papers again, none of it made sense from the start."
The faint smile faded. He studied Kijo with a pitying eye.
"Have you been under a lot of stress lately, trying to raise money for the steel mill?"
Tae-joon knew how hard it was to build a mill on the scale of a million tons, and he had already been worrying over Kijo.
"I'll report the details to the Chairman myself."
Kijo told him about the gold vein discovered on the land in Mapo. He had bought the ground in 1958 knowing there was gold beneath the site where the Mapo Golden Apartments would one day stand, but he spoke as if he had only recently learned that a vein ran through it. Only then did Tae-joon understand, and he nodded.
Kijo went with him to the Chairman's office. Hearing the story of the Mapo gold mine, Park Chung-hee asked,
"Isn't there a military unit near there?"
"There is, Chairman."
"I'll have to see it for myself."
Kijo, Tae-joon, and Park Chung-hee left the government complex and headed for Mapo. The jeep carrying the three of them had not gone far before it arrived, and once they climbed out, Kijo had the land manager open the barbed-wire gate. Beyond it a hill spread open, the grass itself neatly kept—land Kijo had cleared when he bought it, paying moving costs to the people who had been living there.
He led Chairman Park to a pit the heavy equipment had dug. They climbed down, drew back the tarpaulin, and the exposed vein came into view. Chairman Park and Park Tae-joon, following him down, confirmed the gold running through the rock and nodded. The Chairman ran a hand along the thin seam where it stretched away and asked Kijo,
"So you want to open a mine here and use that mine as collateral to borrow from overseas?"
"Yes."
"But you still don't know how much gold can actually be mined?"
"No. And the vein may run under the base, or on into other land nearby. As things stand, there's no way at all to know where it spreads."
"Of course. You'd have to dig to find out..."
Park Chung-hee wiped the hand that had touched the gold-bearing rock on a handkerchief and nodded. Kijo himself did not know how much gold lay buried under the Mapo land. All he knew was that a survey conducted in 1998 had found roughly fifteen grams of gold and forty grams of silver per ton. He also knew that a deposit of ten grams to the ton was generally judged an economically viable mine.
"Let's go up."
At Park Chung-hee's word, Kijo and Tae-joon climbed out of the pit. Then, together with him, they went to the crest of the hill and looked over the land around them. A military compound and civilian houses were tangled together in a knot.
"Chairman, if the vein runs out in every direction, won't we have to clear this whole area?"
To Tae-joon's question Park Chung-hee answered, "We would."
It was an age when the country had no dollars and money was desperately hard to borrow from abroad. If the ground was to serve as collateral for a loan, base or houses, all of it had to be swept away.
The three men walked the rim of Mapo's golden hill and stood where the Han River lay below them, talking. Facing the wind off the water, Kijo drew a long breath and said to Chairman Park,
"Chairman, please help me so this land can be used as collateral for a loan."
Park Chung-hee looked as if his thoughts had snarled. He kept his silence, gazing down at the Han. Kijo thought the tangle was only natural. The land was his, but the mining rights belonged to the state. With the power Chairman Park Chung-hee held, he could take the Mapo ground easily enough under the name of a donation to the nation.
Park Chung-hee needed a great deal of money just now. He could sell the gold mined at Mapo and put it to state projects, or he could use it as seed money for the Democratic Republican Party that Kim Jong-pil was even then preparing to found. Park had already announced that he would transfer power to civilian rule in 1963—the so-called August 12 Statement, the civilian-transfer plan made public on the twelfth of August. Its gist was that the regime would be handed over in the summer of 1963, a general election held, and the government cast as a presidential system.
But Kijo did not believe the announcement. If Park had meant it in good faith, he would have stopped Kim Jong-pil from preparing to found the party. Kijo hoped he would use the Mapo mine for the country, not for his own hold on power.
Park Chung-hee, silent until then, opened his mouth.
"Come to America with me next month."
What he meant was that Kijo should accompany him on the visit set for November.
"Then meet American businessmen and negotiate a commercial loan. With the Mapo gold mine as collateral."
"Thank you, Your Excellency."
The word had slipped out of Kijo before he knew it. Hearing it, Park Chung-hee smiled faintly.
"Hearing 'Your Excellency' from a man who almost never uses it on me feels strange."
The three of them took up the question of the mine right there. Kijo insisted he would donate the Mapo land to the state. If the vein spread into the surrounding ground, Cheongsan had no means to acquire it all. And if Cheongsan owned a gold mine in the middle of Seoul, the men of power would not leave the company alone. They would come around behind the Chairman's back, flaunt their authority, and hold out their hands to Kijo. That much was certain. Besides, when it came to borrowing abroad, it would carry far more weight for the state to offer a state-owned mine as collateral.
Kijo said to Chairman Park,
"Even if a private operator puts a gold mine up as collateral, the other side knows the mining rights belong to the state, and they know the mine can be shut down at any time. Better for the state to own it as a public enterprise, and for the state to provide the collateral."
Park Chung-hee heard him out and nodded.
"Then we'll do it that way. And, as President Lee says, we'll make the Mapo mine a public corporation and put Committee Member Park Tae-joon in the president's chair. If Tae-joon runs the mine, no one will dare touch it."
He looked at Tae-joon and grinned. Kijo trusted Tae-joon too. In the original history, Tae-joon left the army in 1963 as a major general and remade himself as a businessman. Taking the presidency of Korea Tungsten, he turned the deficit-ridden company into a profitable one within a year—by making an inefficient operation efficient, and by driving out every parasite who had wormed in through connections, regional ties, and school ties to suck the place dry.
When the talk was finished, the three men sat at the top of the hill and looked down at the glittering Han flowing through Seoul. Chairman Park, smoking as he watched the river, spoke.
"The national coffers aren't just empty. They're too empty. I thought it was because the country had too many thieves. Now I see there was nothing to fill the storehouse with in the first place."
He drew the cigarette smoke deep into his chest and let it out as he said it. Kijo agreed. It was true the country had been full of thieves, but the Korean economy itself was a patient in critical condition—not merely unable to stand and walk, hardly able even to crawl.
"Won't things go better from here? When you go to America, ask President Kennedy for help. Tell him we have the will to stand on our own. Ask him to support a country like ours first. Something like that."
"We'll see. Kennedy told me to come to America, so he'll have some gift to give."
Park Chung-hee smiled around the cigarette in his mouth. But he did not look as if he expected much. He seemed already to know what Kennedy meant to say to him. Kennedy would pressure the Park Chung-hee who came to America: you promised, when you staged the coup, to hand power over to civilians, so put aside any other thoughts and transfer it early. That was why he had summoned Chairman Park to the United States.
Kijo knew the Chairman would come back from America with little to show for the trip, but he also felt that history was shifting, little by little. He hoped something hopeful would happen—something different from the history that had come before. To Park Chung-hee, who had told him to come along to America, he said,
"Chairman, before I go to America, I'd like to go to Japan first."
"Japan? A loan won't be easy to get from Japan... We don't even have diplomatic relations, do we?"
"No. But they'll establish relations with us in the end, won't they? I think Japanese companies will offer better terms than the high-nosed American ones. We're pushing a project like this in Korea—I want at least to sound them out, and ask whether they'd be willing to take part once relations are normalized."
"Do that."
Park Chung-hee gave his consent. Kijo sat with him and Park Tae-joon atop Mapo Gold Hill, taking in the view, and then they came down.
The very next day Kijo donated Cheongsan's Mapo site to the state, and once the revolutionary government had received it, the government quietly began expropriating the surrounding land. That gold lay buried in Mapo was not disclosed to the public at all. Confirming that matters were proceeding well, Kijo prepared for the trip to Japan. It was Cho Choong-hoon who helped him meet Japanese businessmen.
They were talking in Room 300 of the Bando Hotel when Choong-hoon asked,
"Hey, Kijo. It's Friday. Aren't you going to see Chairman Park? Every Friday you've gone to report to him."
The day was Friday, October 21.
"I'm not going this week."
"Why?"
"I'm tired. And I don't really have anything to report."
"What are you talking about? With a man of that power, even if you've got nothing to say, just showing your face and paying your respects is a gain. We're done talking. Go on."
"I'm not going."
Kijo sank back into the sofa, folded his arms behind his head, and closed his eyes. Choong-hoon clicked his tongue at the stubborn refusal.
"Come on, don't be stubborn. Go see Chairman Park. Tell him a joke if nothing else, and come back. Listen to your elder."
Kijo didn't so much as blink. He was behaving this way because now was not the time to meet Chairman Park Chung-hee. It was the season when the Hwang Tae-sung Incident would break.
In the original history, Hwang Tae-sung—the secret envoy to the South whom Kim Il-sung had sent to meet Park Chung-hee—slipped into Seoul and was caught by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. Kim Jong-pil arrested him on October 20 and reported the fact to Park Chung-hee on the twenty-second. Hwang Tae-sung was a hometown friend of Park Sang-hee, Park Chung-hee's older brother and Kim Jong-pil's father-in-law, a man who had joined him in leftist movements before crossing into the North. Even there he had risen high, serving as vice minister of trade, and once Park Chung-hee seized power in the Republic through the revolution, Kim Il-sung himself sent this man who had once been close to him. At the time Kim Il-sung took Park Chung-hee for a figure strongly anti-American, pro-communist, and nationalist.
By tomorrow Park Chung-hee would hear of the arrest. History had shifted a little; he might learn of it today, or he might already have learned of it yesterday. In Kim Jong-pil's memoirs, the Park who received the report was described as so shocked he could hardly answer. With a summit visit to America just ahead, the blow would have landed even harder. He had been suspected of communism by the Americans even before the coup, so the arrest in Seoul of an envoy sent by Kim Il-sung, right before he was to meet Kennedy, would have been an immense burden. Worse, Hwang Tae-sung was someone the young Park Chung-hee had trailed after, calling him hyung. The very reason Park had applied to the Manchukuo Military Academy was that Hwang had urged him to become a man of real power inside the Japanese army and then do something great for the nation—that was how deeply he had trusted and followed him. That such a man, bound to him by personal ties, had lain hidden in Seoul for more than a month on Kim Il-sung's orders and then been caught was not a thing to brush aside.
Kijo expected Park Chung-hee's mood to turn very dark because of it, and he had no wish to talk business with a man whose mind would be elsewhere. So he simply stayed put in Choong-hoon's office. To that Kijo, Choong-hoon had one more thing to say.
"Looking at you—sometimes you're like a child. Other people are going crazy because they can't get a line to Chairman Park, and here you are taking it easy."
"Hyung, let's go get lunch. I hear there's a good northern-style dumpling place in Myeongdong."
"Northern dumplings? Those mild ones, big as a grown man's fist?"
"Yes. Let's go eat those."
"Well, all right. When I was young, you know, I lived in Incheon, and there were quite a few people from Hwanghae Province in the neighborhood. I grew up eating their food, so I know the taste a little."
Kijo got up with Choong-hoon and headed for Myeongdong. November was drawing near—the month when businessmen and politicians alike went rushing overseas.