Saigon
The Northwest airliner carrying Ki-jo and his party touched down at Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon.
Late October in Vietnam was not especially hot. Rain must have fallen before they landed; the runway was still wet, and a cool wind blew, fresh enough to be pleasant. White clouds drifted across a blue Vietnamese sky, and nothing in that brightness suggested a nation standing on the brink of war. Only because Tan Son Nhut doubled as a military airfield—American transports and fighters lined up in dense ranks—did it begin to feel, a little, like a country waiting for war.
When they came out of arrivals, Kim Tai-sung was there to meet them with his local staff. Ki-jo introduced the members of Cheonwoohui, and greetings were exchanged.
Under Kim Tai-sung's guidance they left the airport, and a Vietnamese girl in a white ao dai, wearing the traditional conical hat called a non, came up to Ki-jo and offered him a flower.
Jung-hun saw it and laughed.
"So a handsome man in Korea is a handsome man in Vietnam, too. Then why doesn't anybody give me a flower?"
The men of Cheonwoohui all laughed.
Ki-jo knew perfectly well why the girl had chosen him, and he reached for his wallet. When he moved to give her a one-dollar bill, Kim Tai-sung stopped him.
"A dollar is too much. Let me pay her."
Speaking fluent Vietnamese, Kim Tai-sung handed the girl a single Vietnamese note. She looked once more at Ki-jo—the man who had been about to give her dollars—with open regret, bowed, and disappeared.
Jung-hun laughed, bright and easy.
"So it wasn't about good looks after all. She can spot the man with the most money. Hahaha."
The party boarded a minibus parked in front of the airport. The moment they entered central Saigon, the traffic snarled. A policeman blew his whistle and waved them onto a detour, and the local driver at the wheel began to turn.
"What's all the fuss up ahead?" Kim Jong-hee asked.
"A demonstration, I think," Kim Tai-sung said. "The university students and the monks have been very unhappy lately."
"Well, the students I can understand. Students the world over take to the streets at the drop of a hat. But the monks—why them?"
"The president and the first lady have been closing temples in Saigon and forbidding religious ceremonies."
"You don't say? Isn't Vietnam a Buddhist country?"
"It is. Most Vietnamese are Buddhist. But a great many of the people at the top are Catholic. The old French colonial influence never quite went away."
Kim Jong-hee, an Anglican, nodded.
Bang! Bang!
Tear gas burst as the bus made its U-turn. From Ki-jo's side of the vehicle the demonstration was plain to see. Vietnamese soldiers with fixed bayonets advanced slowly on the crowd, rifles in hand. Their uniforms were not so different from those of the Korean Army, and Ki-jo felt a small relief that the muzzles were not yet trained on the protesters. The voices of denunciation carried past the soldiers and reached the bus with perfect clarity.
"This country's in real trouble," Park Hee-jun said.
"All of Southeast Asia is like this. Borneo is out demonstrating for independence from Britain, and in Indonesia the overseas Chinese and the natives are at each other's throats. It's the same everywhere. Haha."
Kim Tai-sung laughed, as if embarrassed that Vietnam's first impression on the Korean businessmen had been such a shambles.
Ki-jo and the members of Cheonwoohui felt, all the same, how much more settled Korea had become than the rest of Asia. Only two years earlier the April 19 uprising had turned the country upside down, and under the Democratic Party demonstrations had come one after another. When the reformist faction marched with torches from City Hall toward the Blue House, people had watched in unease. A torchlight rally after dark called up memories of the communists they had seen in the Korean War.
The minibus pulled up at a shabby hotel well clear of central Saigon. Stepping down, Kim Tai-sung explained why he had lodged them on the outskirts.
"The luxury hotels downtown gouge you something awful. And they're full of Americans, which makes them a bit dangerous besides."
American soldiers attached to the military advisory group, and other Americans with them, were targets for the Vietnamese communists and suffered terrorist attacks often enough, he said.
"Cheap is good. You did well."
Chung Ju-yung, who loved to save a penny, smiled.
Once they had dropped their bags, Ki-jo and the Cheonwoohui members followed Kim Tai-sung to a restaurant the locals favored. When the pho arrived, the hungry men marveled at the generous bowls and inhaled the rice noodles without ceremony.
"I thought people here were so small and skinny they barely ate," Jung-hun said. "They eat plenty."
Kim Tai-sung laughed. "Maybe it's the heat. They seem to be the sort who don't put on weight no matter how much they eat. They eat more sweets than we do, too, and it's the same story."
After the meal he led them somewhere they could drink beer. As they walked, a child came up to Ki-jo and offered a pale green juice. Ki-jo recognized it as nuoc mia, a drink pressed from sugarcane, and reached again for his wallet. Once more Kim Tai-sung stopped him and paid in Vietnamese currency.
Ki-jo took a sip, then offered it around.
"It's wonderfully sweet. Have a taste. My treat."
He led the Cheonwoohui members over to the stall and bought nuoc mia from the child's mother. A dollar more than covered four glasses, and the woman thanked them again and again.
"Ah, this is really good. I like it."
Jung-hun, who had a sweet tooth, was satisfied.
They finished the cool nuoc mia and stepped into a beer hall, where several American soldiers sat with women. Kim Tai-sung's face tightened, and he suggested they move on.
"This isn't a place the Americans usually come. One of them must have taken up with a girl who lives around here."
They did not look much like lovers. Seeing the beer glasses already empty, Ki-jo said, "Let's just drink here. From the look of it, they'll be gone any minute."
As he had guessed, the Americans loaded the women into a jeep and left the bar.
After a few swallows of draft beer afloat with ice, Kim Tai-sung laid out the schedule.
"Starting tomorrow, we'll begin with Saigon Port, the southernmost of them, and then make the rounds of Vung Tau, Da Nang, and Qui Nhon, in that order. Along the way you ought to see for yourselves what the roads are like."
From the next day, under Kim Tai-sung's guidance, Ki-jo's party toured Vietnam from the south into the center. The ports and the roads were wretched. Except for parts of the city of Saigon, every road was unpaved.
"It's all right now that the dry season has set in," Kim Tai-sung explained. "When the rains come, the roads turn to ruin."
Ki-jo, who understood that Vietnam's lack of development was an opportunity, was not disappointed.
From the twenty-fourth of October through the twenty-seventh—four days and more than a thousand kilometers up and back—they returned to Saigon and prepared for what came next. This appointment was one Kim Tai-sung had secured only with difficulty. They would attend Mass with Madame Nhu, a Catholic, and her husband, Ngo Dinh Nhu, and afterward explain their business to them.
At the church it would be Kim Jong-hee's turn to shine. He was the only Christian in the party. When they asked the Anglican to pass himself off as a Catholic, he agreed at once.
"Well, sure, I'll do it. We believe in the same God anyway. How's that? Haha."
On Sunday morning Ki-jo, Tai-sung, and Jong-hee went to the church attended by Vietnam's presidential couple, sat through a devout Mass, and then accompanied Madame Nhu and Ngo Dinh Nhu to a hotel.
The Continental, built in the French colonial era, was a stately European building. Seated on the balcony with coffee ordered, the Nhus looked every inch the aristocracy. Now and then they slipped into French, and they were fluent enough in English that no interpreter was needed. Kim Jong-hee, who had studied under Anglican missionaries as a boy, spoke English well himself.
"Monsieur Kim."
Madame Nhu addressed him in the French manner.
"Are there many Catholics in Korea?"
"Yes, a great many. Among the denominations that believe in God, the Catholic Church is the largest. There are many Catholic schools, and several monasteries right in Seoul."
"How very gratifying."
She was plainly pleased that Korea had so many Catholics.
"Monsieur Kim. Do you know why Vietnam's Catholics are special?"
Kim Jong-hee thought a moment before he answered.
"People who truly believe in God are diligent and sincere. Isn't that it?"
"That is true as well. But Vietnam's Catholics are special because they are anti-communists to the bone."
Her husband agreed.
"The Buddhists have no interest in anti-communism, or in the unification of Vietnam."
Ki-jo, Tai-sung, and Jong-hee nodded along.
The couple's views were of a piece. Because the Buddhists flirted with communism, they had to be suppressed; and they, as Catholics, believed it fell to them to defend Vietnam from communism. Yet the conviction looked less like a sense of mission than like a sense of privilege. Vietnam might be a democracy, but the two of them seemed to think a handful of brilliant elites ought to lead a foolish majority.
Ngo Dinh Nhu, the president's younger brother, said the people of the North and the South were different enough that one might as well call them two nations.
"Northerners are proud. They have self-respect. Southerners, by comparison, are lazy, cunning, and selfish. Ho Chi Minh will have an easier time ruling a country."
He did not seem particularly fond of the southerners he himself was leading.
Once they had heard the couple out, Kim Tai-sung made an opening for Ki-jo to explain the business. To the couple who held the real power in Vietnam, Ki-jo set out the development of Qui Nhon Port and the paving of the roads. If the Cheongsan Consortium were granted the right to operate and develop the port, it would return those operating rights to the Vietnamese government after fifteen years.
In any case, in thirteen years the government of South Vietnam was fated to be gone.
The couple listened carefully, then raised an objection.
"Is it really necessary to return the operating rights to the Vietnamese government? Give them to a Vietnamese, and they become Vietnam's all the same."
When Madame Nhu made the point, Kim Tai-sung caught Ki-jo's eye. Ki-jo understood, and shifted the offer with a light touch.
"Then we will transfer the operating rights to a Vietnamese party."
Kim Tai-sung followed with something more concrete.
"If the First Lady will designate a company, we will turn the operating rights over to that company in full."
What he meant was plain enough. If the Nhus formed a company of their own, the entire port would be handed over to them after fifteen years.
"Excellent. Do it that way."
Madame Nhu smiled, satisfied. They would not have to spend a penny of their own, and someday they would swallow a Vietnamese port whole. They had reason to be pleased.
Watching her, Ki-jo remembered the incident that had made her infamous the world over as a villainess of the age.
In 1963, in protest against the South Vietnamese government's suppression of Buddhism, a monk poured gasoline over himself, settled into the lotus posture, and burned—a self-immolation whose image was broadcast on television across the world. He had set himself alight to demand religious equality of the government, and through the whole of the burning he never stirred and never screamed. The world was shocked. Of all the pain a human being can feel, the agony of burning is said to be the worst; to endure a body in flames all the way to death was a height of devotion few of the religious could show.
When an American television broadcast interviewed Madame Nhu and put the question to her, she answered like this.
To call a man who had burned himself in protest against religious persecution a barbecue, and to sneer as she said it, was a moment that showed the world how cruel, and how numb, Vietnam's ruling class could be. Kennedy saw the interview and was stunned. He consented to the removal of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime, and the United States threw its support behind a coup in Vietnam.
"And the road project—what do you intend to do about that?"
Madame Nhu, her hair piled in a sixties bouffant and her eyes heavily made up, turned the question on Ki-jo.
He answered calmly that he meant to proceed just as with the port. Cheongsan would lay a privately financed road, recover the cost in tolls from the vehicles that used it, and hand it back once fifteen years had passed.
"Very good."
She was content.
"I will speak well of you to the president. I will tell him that the gentlemen from Korea have made a remarkable proposal for the development of Vietnam. I expect there will be good news."
The meeting with Madame Nhu and Ngo Dinh Nhu ended in success.
On the way back to their lodgings, Kim Jong-hee asked Ki-jo, "The port I can understand. But paving a north-south road of more than a thousand kilometers—where do you mean to find the money? With a sum like that you could build two and a half expressways back in Korea."
"In truth, we won't build it. It's enough to hold the rights."
Ki-jo smiled.
The details could wait. The modest success they had just won was only one step on a staircase that still climbed a long way.
For the moment Madame Nhu and her husband enjoyed their power with Ngo Dinh Diem at their back, a hand in every concession. This time next year a coup would break out in Vietnam. Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, would die, and Madame Nhu would drift from country to country abroad. Coups would follow five more times after that, and in the end Nguyen Van Thieu would be the winner.
It would be wise to meet the man who would join next year's coup, and to tie a bond with him in advance. However fine a contract they signed with the people who ruled Vietnam now, by next year it might be worth no more than a scrap of paper.