Thieu's Proposal
Ki-jo slipped easily into the conversation between Lee Dae-yong and Thieu.
"What does your older brother teach at the university?"
"French."
Ki-jo's face brightened, as if the answer could not have come at a better moment.
"Might I call on him sometime? Before we move into Vietnam, I want to prepare training materials for our people and teach them the country's history and culture. If your brother would put those materials together, I'd be glad to pay him a proper fee."
"Is that so? I imagine he'd be pleased. I'll send word ahead. Do go and see him."
Thieu told him which university his brother taught at, and Ki-jo judged that this alone had carried their acquaintance halfway to solid ground.
The brother, Kieu, was a man with a keen nose for money and a sharp grasp of economics. Posted to Korea as chargé d'affaires in 1966, he had taken the measure of the Korean economy and concluded that a rolling mill built there stood a fair chance of success. He had meant, in fact, to invest five million dollars and put up a plant. Lee Dae-yong, just home after three years as military attaché, had helped him with the venture, scouting a serviceable mill and arranging the purchase of one in Yeongdeungpo. But Dae-yong, already slated to run the Korean branch, was suddenly promoted to brigadier general and stepped away from the business, and Kieu's investment collapsed. With no one left in Korea he could trust to mind the plant, his appetite for the deal had vanished.
Ki-jo had already decided that Thieu's brother was no ordinary man. To look at a Korea that still had no integrated steelworks and judge that a rolling mill would turn a profit was shrewd enough; to push the venture as a joint enterprise, Vietnamese capital paired with Korean skill, was something else again. When he met Kieu, he meant to tell him about KISA, the project he himself had a hand in, and offer to arrange an investment in Korea.
Thieu's brothers had money. Born to one of Vietnam's great landowning families, they had lived in comfort, elites schooled from childhood in the French manner.
From there the talk among the three men turned to investing in the Bien Hoa area. They meant to build a logistics base and would need the help of the sector commander—Thieu himself—and he agreed at once, and gladly.
"Of course I'll help. There's nothing difficult about it at all."
His promise to look after Ki-jo's company was no empty boast. The ARVN 5th Division under his command at Bien Hoa was an elite formation, the last bastion charged with the defense of Saigon. Even so, Ki-jo felt the irony in that cooperation. President Ngo Dinh Diem, now in office, trusted him enough to place the 5th in his hands, and yet next year Thieu would lead that very unit to surround the presidential palace and take it. He would play the most decisive part in the coup's success.
"Well then. Business seems more or less settled, so shall we enjoy some cognac?"
A devotee of the stuff, Thieu ordered the most expensive cognac in the Continental Hotel. It was the dearest drink Ki-jo had tasted since coming back to this life. Over that costly liquor, Thieu brought up money.
"Dae-yong, what do they pay you as military attaché here in Vietnam?"
"About a thousand dollars, American."
"Is that so?"
Thieu looked startled—not because the sum was too high, but because it seemed far lower than he had expected. Dae-yong's face reddened as well. Ki-jo knew why he was ashamed. His actual attaché pay was seven hundred and twenty dollars. He had inflated it a little in front of his friend. Still flushed, he added,
"Still better than what I drew back in Korea."
"And what did you get there?"
The question left Dae-yong plainly uncomfortable.
"About sixty dollars, American..."
Thieu, who had been lifting his glass to his lips, stared at him in open shock. He smoothed the astonishment from his face, set the cognac down with care, and said,
"Listen, Dae-yong. What would you say to leaving the army and working with me? I can arrange a post for you as a military adviser. You've no shortage of war experience, and you distinguished yourself in actual combat, didn't you? Train the men in my division. I can guarantee you at least two thousand dollars a month."
It was an attractive offer. The salary Thieu named came to thirty-three times what a colonel earned in Korea—roughly three years' pay in a single month. At the astonishing proposal Dae-yong gave a hollow laugh and swallowed his cognac. It seemed to go down very bitter. When the glass was empty, he said,
"Thank you, my friend. But how could I? I am a man who swore to spend his life as a soldier guarding his country..."
Ki-jo looked at him with a pang, this man who had just turned down a fortune. He had kept himself clean on a pittance, and had applied for an overseas attaché post only because he could no longer bear the poverty. In the history Ki-jo remembered, he had even wondered, for a moment, whether he ought to leave the army. When his tour as attaché in Vietnam ended in 1966 and he returned to Korea, Thieu's brother Kieu—by then the Vietnamese chargé d'affaires in Seoul—had offered him a partnership. Work under me, Kieu had said, and I'll pay you three thousand dollars a month. Even then he had never left the service.
Lee Dae-yong was a man of duty. It had been the same when South Vietnam fell in 1975. Serving then as chargé d'affaires, he was given the task of evacuating the thousand-odd Korean residents and workers still in the country. In the extremity of the chaos the withdrawal crawled, until six hundred Koreans were left behind. The government in Seoul, fearing that a former army brigadier and sitting diplomat, if taken prisoner in Vietnam, might be hauled off to the North, ordered him to get out first. He did not obey. He could not leave ahead of the two hundred men under him who were still carrying out the evacuation. When an American helicopter came to pull him out, he put his subordinates aboard and stayed at the embassy. In the end, resigned to dying, he mounted one last effort to get his countrymen away, was captured by communist forces, and spent five years as a prisoner before he was released.
That was Lee Dae-yong. Even a man like that, thinking of a family gasping under poverty, could not have found Thieu's offer easy to refuse. Had he not come to Vietnam because he was hungry? Ki-jo thought of the people who had lived through the bone-poor nineteen-sixties. Some had taken whatever work came, desperate only to live a little better. Others, like Lee Dae-yong, moved according to their love of country.
"If you ever change your mind, get in touch. You and I are classmates, and friends, aren't we?"
"Thank you."
Dae-yong's eyes had gone red.
After Thieu's generous hospitality, Ki-jo and Dae-yong left the hotel. Everything had gone well, and yet Ki-jo felt hollow, and Dae-yong seemed bitter about something too. In the car on the way back to their lodgings, Ki-jo broke the silence.
"Today was the first time I've tasted cognac. I think makgeolli or soju sits better with me than a drink that expensive."
"Same here. Ha ha. I kept thinking it would have been better just to have makgeolli with some bindaetteok."
Ki-jo wanted to soothe the man who had just refused an offer that would have changed his life.
"Then how about this. Come with me to Kim Tai-sung's house—Shinheung Yanghaeng—and have a glass of ginseng liquor. Ask them to fry up some mung-bean pancakes, and they will."
Lee Dae-yong laughed. He, too, seemed desperate to wash the emptiness and the bitterness down with a drink. Ki-jo glanced at his watch. It was still a long way from quitting time. He spoke to Counselor Kwak Min-gyu, who was at the wheel.
"Don't take me to my lodgings. Let's go to the Korean embassy first."
"Yes, sir."
Kwak Min-gyu turned the car toward the embassy. Once inside, Ki-jo met Ambassador Seo Sang-cheol and told him the business had gone through thanks to Attaché Lee Dae-yong. He added that he wanted to buy a drink for the man who had helped him that day, and asked whether it would be all right.
"By all means. Attaché Lee has carried off his first assignment. He ought to be congratulated."
Ki-jo also got leave to bring along Counselor Kwak, who had driven them. By taxi he took the two men to Kim Tai-sung's house, introduced Lee Dae-yong and Kwak Min-gyu, and asked if a drinking table might be laid. It was a shameless request, but Kim Tai-sung's wife stepped forward without a moment's hesitation. When Ki-jo thanked them, Kim Tai-sung said,
"Our countrymen drop by all the time when they get a craving for Korean food. My wife's generous with her hands—she puts up a tremendous amount of kimchi. And we've no shortage of ginseng liquor in the house. Ha ha ha."
The place was well stocked with ginseng liquor that had been bound for sale across Southeast Asia. The smell of mung-bean pancakes and pork stir-fried with kimchi spread through the rooms and set their mouths watering. A lively party got underway, and little by little the light came back into Lee Dae-yong's face.
Around sunset, as the gathering broke up and Dae-yong and Kwak Min-gyu made to leave, Kim Tai-sung pressed a great bundle of dried fish on them.
"Boil up some dried-pollack soup with the folks at the embassy. And if your mouth gets bored, grill some squid and dried young pollack."
What he sent them off with was stock he imported from Korea to sell in Southeast Asia. Grateful for the gift, Lee Dae-yong and Kwak Min-gyu returned to the embassy.
After they had gone, Ki-jo stayed on and had another quiet drink with Kim Tai-sung. The house, built in the French style, had a terrace and a wide yard, and in that yard bloomed a great many flowers brought over from Korea. Roses of Sharon, especially. Looking at the mugunghwa flowering in the darkening garden, Kim Tai-sung asked,
"Now that you've met the men who run Vietnam, what do you make of them?"
Ki-jo thought for a long while, clicked his tongue, and said,
"I found myself thinking our own people are better, all the same."
"Aren't they?"
Kim Tai-sung smiled.
"Korea and Vietnam have a great deal in common, don't they? Both were colonies. Both fought civil wars. Both were split in two..."
He let out a shallow sigh, turned his cup between both hands, and went on.
"Before long you'll be meeting President Ngo Dinh Diem. That man... he isn't a particularly good one."
Ki-jo, who knew what sort of man President Diem was, nodded.
"It may be a poor way to put it, but that man... he's worse than Dr. Syngman Rhee. No. I ought to say he's incompetent."
A bitter look crossed Kim Tai-sung's face as he continued.
"Rhee and Diem have this in common: each was the first president of a weak country fresh out of colonial rule. Leading such a nation can't have been easy. The country was poor and in turmoil, so now and then they must have had to play a reckless hand."
"They must have."
Ki-jo understood that much himself.
"Even so, Dr. Syngman Rhee succeeded at land reform. Korea did divide the land up evenly, didn't it? I'll be honest—I'm not especially fond of the man. But I'd like to give him that."
Kim Tai-sung, who had worked with the Provisional Government in Shanghai, had reason enough to dislike Syngman Rhee. The Provisional Government had, after all, impeached him while he was its president.
"Vietnam tried land reform the way Rhee did, and botched it. They seized the land, and the president handed all the choicest pieces to his own people. He also left the great landlords a way to buy their holdings back in the names of their families. In the end the landlords lost nothing. Then, telling landless farmers he was giving them land, he forced them out into the backcountry to break wilderness."
"Was that how it went..."
Ki-jo listened quietly to things he already knew.
"That's why so many South Vietnamese side with the Viet Minh. The North, at least, divided the land evenly among the poor farmers."
Perhaps uneasy at having spoken up for the communist side, Kim Tai-sung hurried on.
"Mind you, I'm not saying communism is better. You know that, don't you?"
"I know."
Ki-jo smiled for him.
"Korea is poorer than Vietnam right now, but in the end we'll live better than they do. You wait and see. The way I look at it, Korea's leaders are better than Vietnam's. We've got more hope than they have. Ha ha ha."
Ki-jo laughed with him and agreed.
"When you meet President Ngo Dinh Diem, you'll understand what I've been saying."
With that, Kim Tai-sung was done with grave talk. He and Ki-jo passed the bottle back and forth and spoke of smaller things. Tai-sung, apparently struck by Young-soo when he had been fed at Ki-jo's house, talked of the boy at length.
"The child's sharp, and his English is good. He'll be a man of real ability someday."
"You flatter him. I'd be content if my son just grows up healthy."
Ki-jo never boasted of his children, not anywhere. But whenever, in the pauses of their talk, his eye fell on the roses of Sharon blooming in the yard, he thought of the family waiting in Korea. He could not go home until the work in Vietnam was finished, and so he had no choice but to look at the flowers and quiet his heart.