Unsettling Movements
On January 16, 1962, Kijo went to Myeongdong to see Baek Hee-yeop—the woman known as Grandma Baek.
He had come to learn whether the rumor Chairman Park had set loose, a probe into the hidden funds of the Chinese residents, was actually doing its work.
In her office she was exactly as she had always been: proud as any man of standing, and expansive in her cheer. When Kijo told her why he had come, she laughed and asked.
"You want to know how real estate, dollars, and gold are moving?"
"I do."
"Mr. Lee, I had you down as a man with no interest in that sort of thing. This is a surprise. None in securities either?"
She brought up Exchange stock—shares in the Korea Stock Exchange itself—and Korea Electric Power, both of which had been climbing without a pause.
On January 5 the revolutionary government, hoping to stir the capital market to life, had privatized the exchange and announced that it would permit the free pursuit of profit. On the strength of that startling measure, Exchange shares that had been trading around thirty-eight jeon broke through their par value of fifty jeon and were changing hands above a hundred. A hundred jeon made one hwan; the price now sat near one hwan and seventeen jeon, and investors were turning profits of two and three times over, one after another.
"Somehow I thought a man like you would have an eye on Korea Electric Power. They're saying you'll build one of those atomic-power things in Korea, aren't they?"
Since Chairman Park's visit to America, Korea Electric Power had been soaring as well. Kijo, though, had no interest in the market. He knew Exchange shares would shoot to nine hwan in March and explode to forty-two in April—eighty-four times par. He also knew who was driving the surge, and where the money made from it would flow, and he had no wish to join the speculative frenzy.
"I'm not interested in stock speculation."
Baek Hee-yeop smiled, just barely.
"You don't care to drop in on other people's feasts. Well... lose yourself at someone else's banquet, and you won't notice when the pillars are being pulled out from under your own house."
There was more in the smile than amusement.
"A man without greed, asking after real estate, dollars, and gold. Dollars I can allow—you run a business. But real estate and gold? Don't tell me it's that rumor. The one about the government seizing property from the Chinese."
"It is."
"It hasn't moved a thing. A noodle shop or two in Myeongdong coming up for sale is a stone tossed into the Han River."
"And gold?"
"The same. What's sucking the money out of the street right now is securities. Some crazy bastard is hauling stock prices up with no end in sight, and if you ask me, he's gone past the line."
The crazy bastard she meant was Kim Jong-pil, raising founding funds for the Democratic Republican Party by rigging the market. Hee-yeop had no way of knowing that. Even so, Kijo thought that keen instinct of hers had caught the scent of something wrong.
"Did you come back from America with much to show for it?" she asked, her face bright with interest.
"Nothing I can claim as my own."
"Is that so? The rumors say otherwise. Word is Chairman Park is pushing you hard. People are even saying Cheongsan ought to list on the exchange—that the future looks very bright..."
"That will never happen."
He meant it.
"Looking at your face, you really don't seem to care. A company of yours, I'd trust enough to put money in. Ho ho."
She laughed—Baek Hee-yeop, who bought only the shares of firms with solid results, never whatever happened to be rising.
"It isn't because of the favor Sun-yup did you that I'd invest in Cheongsan. I want the company. Cheongsan tempts me."
"I wonder if General Paik is getting on well in Free China."
Kijo turned the talk aside.
"Sun-yup's fine, they say. The problem is In-yup. I told him and told him not to be so greedy for money, and he wouldn't listen to his cousin—not by so much as the tip of his nose. That foolish boy..."
Only yesterday Paik In-yup had stood before a revolutionary court and been recommended for life imprisonment, on charges of illicit accumulation and corruption in military office. Even so, Baek Hee-yeop did not look especially worried for her cousin.
"They say Chairman Park grinds under his heel anyone who tried to kill him, but pays back to the last anyone who saved his life. The man has a sense of obligation, doesn't he? The older brother will probably get the younger one off."
She was predicting it exactly.
Kwak Young-joo, who had humiliated Chairman Park in public and blocked his promotion, was dead. Acquitted after April 19 over the order to open fire in front of Gyeongmudae, he had been stood before a revolutionary court again after May 16, found guilty, and put to death.
Paik In-yup had done something of the same kind. While he was a corps commander he had grossly insulted Park Chung-hee, then his deputy, in front of the men, and tried to close off his way forward. In 1949, had In-yup's elder brother, Paik Sun-yup, not saved Park Chung-hee from a death sentence on suspicion of spying for the Workers' Party of South Korea, In-yup would have met the same end as Kwak Young-joo.
In the end Park Chung-hee would pardon him, and he would live. He would go on to commit wrongdoing at the private-school foundation he ran, be indicted in 1981 and again in 1994, and even then receive suspended sentences, slipping the law's blade by a hair. Breach of trust and embezzlement would follow him all his life, and still he would survive. His was a stubborn fate.
"These days in Myeongdong they're saying that once the general election is over, Chairman Park will run for president no matter what. People put his chances at fifty-fifty. I don't see it that way. Better for him to hold the presidential election later than to hold it first and the general election after."
She offered an analysis that was entirely her own, and Kijo, who trusted her instincts, asked.
"Why do you see it that way?"
"The way I look at it, if he'd dragged military rule out, his votes would have fallen. Deciding quickly on a general election was the right move. More people will look kindly on him for having a man's nerve about it."
It was Kennedy's pressure that had forced the early date, and she was reading it as a manly decision.
"And people still don't really know what kind of man Chairman Park is, do they? Whether they can trust him as president, I couldn't say. But there are certainly plenty who are sick of the Democratic Party raising hell in the Assembly. They'll vote his side because they can't stand the Democrats."
Kijo nodded.
"Once his side is the majority coming out of the general election, the wind will shift again. As long as we're at it, let's make the man president and push him so he can get things done. That's how I think it'll go."
He thought it a plausible scenario.
"And you, Mr. Lee? What do you think?"
At her question he smiled, bright and open.
"I really couldn't say."
"You seem to have a definite opinion, and you're keeping it to yourself. Is the talk of Chairman Park backing you just empty rumor? You don't seem to take his side much. Ho ho ho."
Baek Hee-yeop laughed.
Kijo brought the visit to a close, went out, and drove his jeep toward Gwangjang-dong, where the Walker Hill Hotel was going up. The groundbreaking had been held on January 5, and the site was being readied for construction in earnest. Military heavy equipment stood deployed in force, and the ground around the works was being put in order. Here, too, Kim Jong-pil's shadow flickered. A considerable sum from the Walker Hill budget would be drawn off as founding money for the Democratic Republican Party.
Kijo looked the site over, then returned to Jongno.
There he met Won Tae-sik, general manager of Cheongsan Heung-eop, and heard the plan for recruiting talent under exclusive contract to DBC. The drive was an answer to KBS, which was auditioning its first class of television talent to coincide with the opening of its station. In 1962 alone KBS would hold three rounds and absorb a great many gifted people: Kim Nan-yeong, Park Ju-a, Park Byeong-ho, Choi Jeong-hun, Jeong Hye-seon, and Tae Hyeon-sil in the first class; Kang Bu-ja, Kim Min-ja, Lee Il-ung, and others in the second and third.
Tae-sik said Cheongsan Heung-eop would hold a competition of its own, the Comprehensive Talent Selection, and open a road into film, television, and popular song alike.
"People with real spark want to do movies, and they want to be in dramas, and they want to sing. Now and then you even get someone who's good at all three."
Kijo nodded.
"That's right. Stress that if they come to Cheongsan Heung-eop, they can break into more fields than they could at KBS. Add voice acting to the list, and tell them that even if they're chosen as voice actors, they can still become singers, film actors, or television talent."
He believed in what voice actors could become. They already had the instrument; with a little polishing they would act well and sing well too. Korea had no shortage of actors who had started behind a microphone.
"Understood, sir."
"And give some support to the people doing theater."
"Theater?"
Tae-sik looked as if he would rather keep his distance.
"Sir, theater people have fierce pride. They won't come out in films or dramas. They'll go hungry and still call themselves artists, and they won't give Heung-eop a second glance. Getting into the National Theater Company is the glory of a lifetime to them."
"That's all right. Go see them often. Buy them meals. If an actor needs money, lend it with no interest, and don't even tell them to pay it back. And whatever you do, don't say a word about joining Cheongsan Heung-eop."
"Yes, sir."
Kijo knew a fair number of talents would start on the stage and later cross into film and television. They had skill, and they were hungry. What mattered was not letting them slip away. It was still an age when loyalty meant something; if they could not repay the money, they would come work as Cheongsan Heung-eop actors of their own accord. Among television talent who had come up from the stage, Park Geun-hyung and Lee Soon-jae would be the names people remembered.
When the talk was finished, Kijo asked him.
"Manager Won, I've been seeing a lot of pachinko machines in Myeongdong and Jongno. Do you know anything about that business?"
"Ah... you mean those?"
Perhaps because he had come up through the gangs, Tae-sik seemed to know a great deal about gambling machines.
"They say those came into Busan at the end of last year. The craze started there. A Korean living in Japan brought them back when he came home... and there's a whiff of something rotten about it."
"What kind of smell?"
"Under the Liberal Party, gangsters like us could join hands with the police and the politicians and run that kind of thing. But the soldiers have the government now, don't they?"
Kijo nodded for him to go on.
"These days the gangsters have all been rounded up. There isn't one of them left running pachinko. Which means, in the end..."
"The soldiers are running it?"
"Yes. Otherwise, how could gambling machines like that be spread all over Seoul and Busan in the middle of martial law? It doesn't make any sense."
"Is that the rumor?"
"Ordinary people wouldn't know. Anyone who came out of the gangs will. Without someone high up in the military looking the other way, it simply couldn't be done."
"I see."
The pachinko business, too, was tied to Kim Jong-pil. The Korean Central Intelligence Agency had cleared the way for the banned machines to come in and had issued operating permits, taking money in return. When the machines entered the country they were dressed up as property a returning Korean resident was bringing home from Japan, and granted a duty exemption besides. There was even a story that more than twenty-five hundred of them had been brought in.
With the general election moved forward, Kijo expected Kim Jong-pil to work all the harder at raising founding funds for the party. And with that came a worry: the man might commit even more reckless excesses than in the history Kijo remembered.
Leaving Cheongsan Heung-eop for headquarters, he turned it over. Evidence was already emerging that the Chinese residents' underground money amounted to very little, and with it a basis for stopping Chairman Park's currency reform. That, at least, was hopeful. Kim Jong-pil's rampage, though, would only grow fiercer if it changed at all. It did not look as if it would fall short of the history he remembered, and there was no telling how the butterfly effect set loose by Kennedy's pressure would unfold.
On the way back he watched the pachinko parlors flourishing along the road. They were not hiding in the alleys. They were doing business in the open on the main streets, and the sight brought back the adult arcades of his previous life, the ones called Sea Story. Those illegal gambling halls, too, had gone up without regard for the neighborhood, operating in broad daylight even along the Jongno boulevard. The police had known perfectly well what kind of shops they were and had not cracked down, and gambling arcades had flourished across the country.
The old saying came back to him. History turns, and turns again.