Each Their Own Dream
Kijo arrived at the KCIA on Namsan and found President Chang Key-young in a fourth-floor office.
Sunlight filled the room. A desk and a simple cot had been set out for him, and an electric kettle stood ready for clean water and tea. Cigarette butts lay heaped in the ashtray, so he was plainly free to smoke as he pleased.
Kijo had expected something else entirely. Dragged up to Namsan, Chang ought to have been down in a basement interrogation room in a uniform stripped of rank and name tape. Instead he was being kept like a guest in a hotel, and Kijo asked him how he was.
"Hyung-nim, are you all right?"
"I'm fine."
Chang Key-young said it flatly.
There was no trace of a beating, nor of torture. A few days of mental strain had aged him a little, but his color was not dark.
Kijo went straight to the fact he needed confirmed.
"Is it true you're stepping away from the management of the Hankook Ilbo?"
"It is. I said I would. So I want you to run the paper in my place."
Kijo only looked at him and held his tongue. Chang went on.
"Do that for me. I'm asking you."
"What did they say to you, to bring you to this? Me, running the Hankook Ilbo..."
"I was the one who offered. They said they'd shut the paper down, so I asked them not to—told them I'd hand it over to you. Better that than seeing the Hankook Ilbo closed, isn't it? And I said I'd turn my shares in DBC over to you as well..."
Kijo held out a cigarette.
Chang took it, and when Kijo lit it for him he drew the smoke in deep.
"I should have moved the moment you called. I was too complacent..."
A faintly bitter smile crossed his face.
"If you're deciding this because they threatened to shut you down, I won't take it."
"No, Kijo. It isn't only that I was afraid. The Agency people didn't handle me roughly. The Director came to see me himself and heard me out."
Kijo marked that. Kim Jong-pil had met Chang Key-young and spoken with him in person.
"Listening to the man, I began to think I'd been too rash. And from where they stand, it seems they took a serious blow they didn't deserve."
Chang blew out a thick stream of smoke.
"I told them I'd apologize and bear the responsibility. After that, they asked me to step away from running the Hankook Ilbo only until the general election is over."
So Kim Jong-pil and Chang Key-young had traded a deal, and the result had been reported to Chairman Park. Kijo could see it now.
"Even so, they did threaten to close the paper. That's a fact, isn't it?"
"Shutdowns? We had those under the Liberal Party government too, didn't we? A threat of closure is an ordinary hazard of the trade for a newspaper. The Kyunghyang Shinmun was shut down and came back to life, and that's how it made its name, isn't it? From the press's point of view, government suppression is a medal. The Hankook Ilbo has received its medal. That's how I mean to think of it."
Chang offered a slightly awkward smile.
Kijo pressed a hand to his brow and tried to set his thoughts in order.
In the original history, Chang Key-young resigned as president of the Hankook Ilbo and returned in less than two months. The man who held the presidency in the interim was Namkoong Ryun of Far Eastern Marine, someone Kijo knew well.
"Hyung-nim, what if you asked Mr. Namkoong Ryun to take the presidency in your stead?"
"No. I want you to take it. You're a fairly neutral man, aren't you? I'd rest easier with someone as moderate as you in the chair. Namkoong is a good man too, but he isn't in any position to do anything but side with Chairman Park with all his might, is he?"
Namkoong Ryun had nearly been punished alongside Lee Byung-chull and the others as an illicit accumulator of wealth, then released after promising the government he would help revive the economy. Chang was not wrong. The man had little choice but to take Chairman Park's part in earnest.
"Will the reporters listen to me? My schooling is nothing to boast of, and even if I become president of the Hankook Ilbo, it's useless if they won't follow me."
At that Chang broke into a rough laugh.
"Listen, Kijo. Reporters aren't some special breed. Treat them the way you treat the people at Cheongsan Group, and they'll follow you too."
"If they write according to their conscience, I don't think I could stop them."
Kijo was letting it show that he did not believe he could run the Hankook Ilbo to the government's liking, and Chang laughed again.
"Reporters are simpler than you'd think. The more ornery and bullheaded the bastard, the weaker he is to plain human feeling. He'll swear the piece he wrote has to run and carry on as if he's quitting the company that very day, and then you say, 'Come on, just let it go this once,' or, 'Hey—after everything I've done for you, this is how you treat me?' and he folds, pretending he has no choice. Heh."
Chang was encouraging him. Even so, taking the man's DBC shares sat badly with Kijo.
"Hyung-nim, please keep your stake in DBC."
"Is there really any need?"
Chang meant to give that up cleanly as well.
"Running a television station turned out less interesting than I expected. There's no authority to report the news, and what people seem to want from television is simple entertainment. And you can run it well enough on your own, can't you?"
He refused outright. If he held on to his DBC shares now, when he would have to compete with KBS, the government might make him pay for it.
Kijo saw that his mind was set.
"I'll always keep your seat empty. The Hankook Ilbo or DBC—come back whenever you want to."
"All right. I understand how you feel. That's enough."
What struck Kijo as strange was how calm Chang seemed. The Hankook Ilbo was as good as the whole of his life, and no matter how much he trusted Kijo, handing over its management could not have been easy.
"If you let go of the Hankook Ilbo and DBC, what do you mean to do?"
"Well... I'd like to study economics a little further. It's my own field. Take in the latest theory, and try my hand at public administration while I'm at it."
The moment Kijo heard that, he understood. Kim Jong-pil has asked Chang Key-young to join the party.
He remembered that in the original history Chang had entered the cabinet in 1964 as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Economic Planning Board under the Third Republic. The man had already felt some goodwill toward the Park Chung-hee government. Was this Kim Jong-pil bringing him to the Agency, soothing and coaxing him, and talking him into the Democratic Republican Party? It seemed entirely possible.
Chang had thrown obstacles in the way of the party's founding, but he was an economic hand who had also served at the Bank of Korea, and Kim Jong-pil might well have seen talent in him. The wrong he had done could be written off by his laying down the presidency for a few months, and drawing him onto their own side was something the Kim Jong-pil of those days—a man of remarkable magnanimity—was capable of doing. Nor was it strange that Chang Key-young, having succeeded to some degree in the press and in broadcasting, should take an interest in politics or administration. In the original history he had cared enough about politics to run for the National Assembly and for mayor of Seoul.
All at once everything stood clear, and Kijo no longer refused the presidency of the Hankook Ilbo. From Chang's side as well, a run in the general election would have meant stepping down as head of the newspaper and the broadcasting company in any case. He might even have meant to take the money from selling his DBC shares and put it into a campaign. Kijo felt he had no choice but to take the paper.
"I'm counting on you with the Hankook Ilbo and DBC."
"Yes, Hyung-nim."
Kijo granted the request. He would have to go back to the Blue House, say that he would take the paper, and see to the release of Chang Key-young and the Hankook Ilbo executives.
Returned to the Blue House, he met Chairman Park.
"Finished your talk with that man Chang Key-young?"
"Yes. I've agreed to take the Hankook Ilbo."
Chairman Park gave a faint smile and nodded. Then he took out a cigarette, set it between his lips, and struck a match. He shook the flame out.
The matches in the Chairman's office were Cheongsan matches too.
"The Kyunghyang Shinmun will keep taking the Democratic Party's side, the way it always has, and the Dong-A Ilbo will tear into both sides. That Dong-A crowd always thinks they're the only ones who amount to anything, the only ones who are right..."
He let out a breath tangled with cigarette smoke.
"I'm not asking the Hankook Ilbo to take my side no matter what. Just see to it I'm not wronged."
"I'll see to it that no one is wronged."
"Mm..."
Chairman Park smoked in silence for a moment, then picked a dead matchstick out of the ashtray.
"These matches of yours—the wood doesn't snap easily, and they catch for certain. Even on a wet, rainy day."
"Thank you."
"I wish every paper were as fair as a Cheongsan match. Rain or snow, wind or whoever strikes it, your match catches fair and true. And the flame is big and bright."
A thin smile touched his mouth as he looked at Kijo, and Kijo could not help smiling back.
"Why are you smiling? Was that funny?"
The Chairman regarded him with genuine puzzlement.
Kijo held the laugh down as he answered.
"What you just said is exactly the radio jingle for Cheongsan matches. That's why I smiled."
"Is it? So those weren't even my own words? I must have heard the jingle and repeated it without knowing. Yes... I remember now."
"I catch myself humming it sometimes too."
For the Cheongsan match advertisement, Kijo had used the melody and lyrics of The Lost Thirty Years, the song Seol Woon-do would record in 1983, exactly as they stood. The piece had originally been written as the theme of the KBS special Finding Dispersed Families, but the tune of whether the rain falls, or the snow, or the wind blows was so striking that he had set it to a commercial for matches.
"Who wrote the words and the music?"
"I... did."
He had no choice but to answer that way. In truth the lyrics were Jeong Eun's and the music Nam Guk-in's, a married pair of musicians, but the song would not exist for decades yet.
"You've a gift for composition too? From what I hear, when that man Kim Doo-han ran for office, the song someone made for him was yours as well..."
Every note of it was stolen, but he could hardly say so.
"I hummed a tune, and a composer made a proper song of it."
"Is that so? You're a man of many talents."
Chairman Park's eyes glinted.
"On the sixteenth of May we're holding a National Arts Festival at Jangchung Gymnasium, to mark the first anniversary of the revolution. I'd like one great song that a great many people can sing together. You make one."
He was ordering Kijo to write a song. Kijo swallowed the sigh that rose in him. Every time he met the Chairman, the weight on his shoulders grew heavier. Why did the man trust him with so much?
He decided to settle the request at once.
"What meaning do you want the song to carry?"
"My wish is that our people might live well. I'd like it bright, full of hope, full of spirit."
That we might live well...
Then there was only one song. Kijo made a show of thinking for a while, then took up the memo pad on the table and wrote the words.
Let's live well. Let's live well.
Let us, this once, live well.
A lovely country, rivers and mountains like embroidered silk.
If we tend it with a single heart,
the pleasure of thrifty days comes of itself.
Wealth and glory—those, too, are ours.
He had dashed the lines down in a single sweep. Chairman Park read them, slapped his knee, and brightened.
"This is it! Can you make a tune as well?"
Kijo set the melody of Let's Live Well, which he knew by heart, to the words and sang.
"Let's live well, let's live well, let us, this once, live well... How's a tune like that?"
His face went red.
Chairman Park, having heard it, laughed with open delight.
"Wait a moment. I'll call the bandmaster."
He summoned the military bandmaster who played the national anthem at the Blue House morning and evening, and had the man listen to Kijo's song. The bandmaster took it down in notation and finished the piece in a flash.
Once the score was done, Chairman Park went out into the front yard of the Blue House and had the military band play it. He followed along himself, eyes on the memo.
"Let's live well. Let's live well. Let us, this once, live well."
Kijo watched in silence the profile of the man beside him, clumsy at the notes but singing with everything he had. The passion of Chairman Park in the early days of his rule showed itself plain.
Still singing, the Chairman turned his head.
"Imja. Sing it with me."
Kijo sang Let's Live Well together with him, and as he sang he thought.
The barley pass that tormented Korea every year was drawing near. Each May and June was the spring lean, fearful enough that people starved to death. The pass was so hard that a poem had been written of it, called Barley Pass. It said Korea's barley pass was as difficult to cross as a summit nine thousand meters above the sea.
So endlessly high that many crossed it weeping.
They crossed it starving.
Some died, and never crossed at all.
Just as those lines had it, this was a season that decided life and death for ordinary people.
Let's Live Well would later grow countrified and wearisome, a song people grew sick of hearing. For now, though, it had enough in it to move the heart. This was a time when the greatest wish of Koreans was simply to live well.