The Sky Hopper
Two days before Chairman Park's multiparty talks, Ki-jo was out in the yard with the children. His eldest, Yeongsu, was pounding up and down on the Sky Hopper — the pogo stick Ki-jo had given him — and Ki-jo watched with a quiet, satisfied pleasure.
The long work of technical development was beginning to show its fruit, work unbroken since he had made springs for railroad cars in the fifties. He had ordered Cheongsan Heavy Industries to develop a spring that could bear a load of a hundred kilograms and still recover smoothly. When they had it, he sent the drawings to Kia Industries and asked them to build a Sky Hopper. Kia made one from a bicycle frame and the new spring and sent it over, and now he was testing it with his son. Further off lay the real object: the technology for making the springs that would go into multi-link suspensions for automobiles.
After a few false starts, Yeongsu began to ride the thing with real skill.
"...ninety-eight, ninety-nine, a hundred!"
He made his hundredth hop and climbed down off the hopper.
"Well done, Yeongsu. How was the ride?"
"A little scary at first. Once I got used to it, it was fun. When I understood the spring's rebound, it wasn't hard at all."
"Did the spring feel stiff when you jumped?"
"No. It was fine."
Yeongeun had been watching her brother enjoy himself, and now she tugged at Ki-jo, begging for a turn of her own.
"Dad, I want to try it too."
She was still too small to manage it alone. Ki-jo set her on the footrests and rode with her.
"Please be careful, dear," Sunrye said. She had been watching with her heart in her throat.
"Hold the handles tight, Yeongeun."
Ki-jo took the hopper through a few careful bounds with his daughter, and while he did it he tested the spring. Even crushed under a grown man's weight it came back cleanly, and the steel frame Kia had built, welds and all, felt sound beneath them.
"Dad! Me too! Me too!"
Yeongjun could not bear to wait, and pushed forward to be given a turn. Ki-jo set Yeongeun down and put him on. The boy was still bright with the pleasure of it when someone knocked at the gate.
"Is Mr. Lee at home?"
Ki-jo climbed off, lifted Yeongjun down, and went to the gate. When he opened it, Kim Dae-jung was standing there with his wife, Lee Hee-ho.
"Sir. It's good to see you. Madam, welcome."
He greeted Kim Dae-jung and shook Lee Hee-ho's hand as well. She wore the cat-eye glasses of the decade before, the outer corners swept to sharp points — the look of a New Woman who had given herself to the women's movement. Sunrye, standing behind Ki-jo as he received them, bowed deeply to them both.
"This is my wife."
Lee Hee-ho took Sunrye's hand. "A pleasure, ma'am."
Ki-jo showed the unexpected guests inside. The children, lost until that moment in the Sky Hopper, stopped their play, lined up shoulder to shoulder, and bowed to the visitors with careful courtesy. Ki-jo and Sunrye had been strict about such things. These were children who would greet an adult before they did anything else, even if they had to be shaken out of sleep to do it.
Sunrye was already in motion, receiving them. Ki-jo led the two through to the wooden hall, where glass doors had been hung against the cold and a stove was burning, and they sat down together in chairs.
"Forgive us for dropping in like this," Kim Dae-jung said. "I heard that expensive chartered plane can't even get off the ground at Mokpo airfield, on my account. So I came." He laughed, broad and easy.
"Thank you, Candidate Kim. The campaign must be in its last push, and I'm grateful you spared the time."
"You'd be reason enough, Mr. Lee. But my wife said she wanted to see me, and that's the other half of why I came up to Seoul. If she goes without the sight of me, she pines herself sick."
At the joke, Lee Hee-ho gave her husband's arm a small push, her face telling him to stop the nonsense.
"What? It's true, isn't it? She married me for this handsome face and nothing else."
Lee Hee-ho laughed, helpless at him. Ki-jo laughed with her. He was sure of it now — the man had made up his mind to meet Chairman Park, and had flown to Seoul for that — and he asked his question before Sunrye could bring in the tray.
"Was the opposition around you very strong?"
He asked because he imagined the elders of the Democratic Party would have been against a trip to Seoul.
"I didn't bother telling them. They'd have been against it, no need to ask. The more I thought about it, the more I felt it was right to meet Mr. Park Chung-hee. So I came on my own."
"I see. Thank you."
When Ki-jo offered his thanks, Kim pointed to his wife. "The only person I talked it over with was this one, and didn't she tell me to go see him at once? What's so frightening about Mr. Park Chung-hee, she said, that you should hide from him? If a man says he has something to say and sends for you, then go and meet him. I'm henpecked. Whatever my wife tells me to do, I do."
Lee Hee-ho, brought into it yet again, wore the look of a woman who had given up.
Kim laughed. "What, did I invent that? You said it yourself. Don't run off and hide the way Prime Minister Chang Myon did. A man in the opposition has to stand tall. The Democratic Party can't keep showing a weak face in front of Mr. Park Chung-hee. That's what you said."
"Yes, yes. I said it. You're right. It's the truth."
Ki-jo thanked her as well — Lee Hee-ho, who for more than forty years had stood at her husband's side and helped him to the decisions he made.
"Thank you, madam."
"It's nothing. I only told my husband to do what he wanted to do. If he hadn't wanted to talk in the first place, he wouldn't even have called to ask me."
Sunrye came in with a tray of tea and sweets, and husband and wife found themselves receiving husband and wife, a visit none of them had planned. After the two women had talked a while, they withdrew so the men might speak alone, and went on with their own conversation in the yard, watching the children play with the Sky Hopper.
Left alone with him in the hall, Ki-jo asked, "Candidate Kim, Chairman Park was pleased when he received the letter you sent me."
"And when I had the letter that gentleman sent, I thought I ought to meet him once. How shall I put it — there was a strange power in the hand. They say you can know a man by his writing. I felt there might be a side of him I didn't know."
The exchange of letters, it seemed, had done its work in opening the two of them to each other. Ki-jo told him one thing Chairman Park had said upon seeing the calligraphy.
"He said the hand was flowing, and full of skill. And he set store by your pen name being Hugwang."
"What did Mr. Park Chung-hee say?" Kim asked, curious.
"He said that since the name was Hugwang — glory that comes after — he supposed this was a man who meant to succeed once he was older."
"Did he? His own pen name is Jungsu, so I tried a reading of my own. I wondered what he meant by it."
"How did you read it?"
"The jung in Jungsu is the same jung as in my own name, Dae-jung. So there must be something that passes between us. That's what I thought." He laughed at the joke, and then the laughter settled and he went on. "A man comes by three names in a lifetime. The first he simply receives, the day he is born. The second, the courtesy name, is given after he comes of age — by his parents, or by his teacher. But the third, the pen name, he makes himself. It is the name a grown man chooses and fastens to his own life. Would a name like that not carry the philosophy of how he means to live?"
He had turned the meaning of a pen name over, and now he came to it. "Jungsu is jung, the middle, and su, the tree. Read straight off the characters, it's a tree of middling size, and a man could wear that as humility. I don't think that's it."
"How do you see it, then?"
"I take jung to mean at the center. I read it as: I will become the most important tree. That, I thought, lay closer to Chairman Park's true mind."
Ki-jo nodded. "And your own pen name, Hugwang — what meaning did you put in it?"
"Mine? I was born in Hugwang-ri, so I called it Hugwang. It doesn't mean anything in particular."
Ki-jo laughed with him. Then he explained the meeting set for two days later: a joint session with Assemblyman Kim Young-sam and Mr. Chang Jun-ha, at the Hankook Ilbo building, part of it public and part of it closed. Kim nodded.
He was quiet a moment. "Then the conscientious, fresh leaders of the future, as you see them, are myself, Kim Young-sam, and Mr. Chang Jun-ha?"
Kim Dae-jung had a good memory. He had not forgotten that the men Ki-jo chose would be the ones seated at the talks.
"Yes. I have hopes for all three of you. You're young, and you're able."
"Then of the three, I suppose I'm the one who ought to be most grateful. I'm the least known of the names."
"But you have the handsomest face."
Kim Dae-jung was delighted. Ki-jo, who had spent the afternoon receiving the candidate and his wife with Sunrye beside him, felt a quiet relief. The four-way talks, two days off, had been brought safely into being.
Two days later, at the Hankook Ilbo building, Ki-jo had a room set aside for the talks and stood waiting at the entrance. Chang Jun-ha was the first to arrive.
"Mr. Chang, thank you for coming. The editor-in-chief will show you in."
Chang Jun-ha went inside with the editor-in-chief, and Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung arrived on his heels. Ki-jo sent word to the Blue House that all three were there, and Chairman Park came to the Hankook Ilbo last of all. Ki-jo walked him in himself. The three already seated rose and bowed. Chairman Park shook hands with each of them and took his chair. A taut, strained quiet filled the room.
Ki-jo, who was to moderate, looked them over in turn. Kim Young-sam wore the face of a man who had settled something hard inside himself. Kim Dae-jung was working to keep his expression as still as he could, though a little tension showed even on him. Only Chang Jun-ha looked at ease, pleased, it seemed, that a meeting like this had been made to happen at all. Chairman Park gave his gaze to no one. The face was the one peculiar to him: sharp, and empty of expression.
As the man who would conduct the meeting, Ki-jo spoke first.
"First, my deep thanks to the four of you for attending this roundtable on the state of the nation, hosted by the Hankook Ilbo."
All four turned favorable eyes on him, and smiled.
It was Ki-jo who had bound the four of them into a single room. Each of them was close to him. They were not close to one another.
"I think of this meeting as the start of a conversation that will go on from here. We'll begin with Chairman Park Chung-hee hearing from you, and proceed from there."
"I'll go first."
Kim Young-sam stepped forward. Chairman Park nodded, and Ki-jo gave him the opening word. Kim Young-sam drew a prepared statement from inside his coat and began to read.
At that opening blow, Chairman Park's face went cold and hard. Kim Dae-jung and Chang Jun-ha, watching Kim Young-sam come at him so hard, looked taken aback.
Ki-jo had expected it. From the moment Kim Young-sam had accepted the meeting so readily, he had known some scene like this was already composed in the man's head. Kim Young-sam had the longest career in politics of any of them, and ambition besides; he was not going to let a chance to strike at Chairman Park go by. He would want himself stamped, clear and unmistakable, on the opposition-minded public. The first words by which a future leader showed what he was made of would be a repudiation of May 16.
The pitch of it was rising.
Kim Young-sam read straight on through the statement he had brought, and Chairman Park wore the look of a man enduring. Inwardly, Ki-jo prayed he would hold out just a little longer.
Then Kim Dae-jung cut across the reading. "Assemblyman Kim. What do you think you're doing?"
Kim Young-sam lifted his eyes from the page and looked at him.
The reading stopped. The room went still.