Chapter 24
Con artists had an uncanny talent for sniffing out money.
“Mr. Oh, didn’t you receive the registered letter?”
“The registered letter?”
“Yes. Under Article 2 of the Enforcement Decree of the Land Compensation Act, all notices have to be in writing, so you should have received a registered letter first.”
He must have received it. Registered mail was supposed to be delivered face-to-face, and although the details varied by district, the post office usually made a second attempt or two. Before trying again, they stuck a delivery notice on the front door, with the return date written on it. If a piece of registered mail still went unclaimed after that, you could always pick it up at the post office. These days, they even sent an AlimTalk notification.
So if no one had been home, the woman who came back from work would have seen it.
“Young man, I’ve never seen it.”
The man, rubbing his chin, walked over to the shoe cabinet. He pulled out the center drawer unit and carried it over as it was.
Thunk.
“Maybe it’s in here.”
“……?”
“Yeji’s mom, look for it.”
“…….”
The drawer was stuffed with unopened mail.
The woman dumped the letters onto the dining table. “Not this one either.”
I helped without thinking.
“The notice will be attached like a fine notice, and the registered letter should have blue diagonal stripes at the end.”
“…Young man, found it!”
The woman handed me the registered letter.
“It’s personal information. Is it all right if I open it?”
“It’s fine. Yeji’s dad can’t read anyway.”
So he really was illiterate.
The man’s ears turned bright red.
Was illiteracy something to be ashamed of?
I didn’t know. I’d learned to read as a child, and I’d rarely met anyone who couldn’t.
Maybe I saw it when I was a first-year public-service lawyer. Korea had always had a relatively high literacy rate. According to a survey by the National Institute of the Korean Language, the percentage of people who couldn’t read at all was only 1.7 percent.
When I thought about the history of literacy campaigns and the drive to eradicate illiteracy during the modernization movement, I could understand what he was feeling.
Back then, illiteracy wasn’t just a mark of difference. It was treated like a stigma, something to be corrected.
“What did you just say? You old hag, what do you mean I don’t know anything!!!”
Enraged, the man thrust out a hand as if to strike the woman on the head.
“……!”
“Mr. Oh!”
Smack.
I grabbed his wrist before he could bring his hand down.
“No matter how angry you get, you can’t raise a hand.”
“……?!”
Then I turned my gaze to the woman. Her face had gone pale.
“Are you all right?”
“…I think so.”
I let out a breath.
“You fighting right now isn’t going to solve the land issue, is it?”
“…I’m telling you, I don’t care if we give the compensation money to my siblings.”
What a suffocating thing to say.
“Mr. Oh, your siblings came here because they knew about the land compensation money, didn’t they? They didn’t come because you called them first. They came after seeing it on the news and decided to ask for it. That isn’t generosity.”
“…….”
“And now there’s even a clause saying that you, who don’t know much about the law, have to pay the taxes too.”
It was an absurd, poisonous clause. I didn’t know what he thought of his siblings, given that he couldn’t read, but that was beside the point.
“Do your siblings even have the money to pay the taxes?”
“How should I know? They just keep saying things are hard.”
He was making it hard to even find the words.
Maybe he had been conditioned by patriarchal guilt-tripping. People of his generation had been raised with a rigid Confucian mindset that said the eldest son was supposed to take care of the siblings.
“Do you really have to be the one to pay it, Mr. Oh?”
“…I guess I do.”
“And what about your siblings’ children? I heard your daughters work too.”
I’d even heard that the other siblings’ children were older than the owner’s daughters. Surely at least one of them was working.
“Ahem, my daughters grew up early.”
Apparently, he didn’t realize that growing up early was not exactly a compliment.
“You don’t even have joint tax liability here, do you? Wouldn’t it be better to sort that out?”
“Hey now, I said I’d pay it, didn’t I! Why are you making such a fuss?”
“To put it bluntly, you’d be paying your siblings’ taxes with the money your daughters earned.”
“……!”
He seemed so shocked that his mouth opened and closed soundlessly.
He probably hadn’t had a third party accuse him this bluntly in his life.
I steadied my breathing and glanced sideways at my watch.
Still a long way to go before this mission is complete.
Tick, tick.
A few seconds passed, just enough not to feel awkward, and I lowered my head.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Oh. I didn’t mean to, but I got carried away. I’m a lawyer, but I’m also someone’s child, so I found myself speaking from your daughters’ point of view.”
“Oh? Well, I suppose that’s possible. I wasn’t thinking about my girls, either.”
He sounded slightly dazed, but at least he was still willing to listen. I hoped there would be fewer situations like this in the future.
“Then please think a little more about your daughters. When things get hard for you later, your siblings may be there, but your daughters and your wife are the ones who’ll be closest to you.”
“…That’s true. We live together.”
…….
That was enough for now. If this had been a personality that could be fixed easily, it would never have gotten this bad in the first place.
“That’s right, so at least please reconsider that affidavit. Once the person who stamped it changes his mind, there’s nothing I can do for you. Not even for the sake of your daughters.”
“…I’ve got my pride too. I’ll talk to my siblings.”
“Yes. In that case, let’s look over the land compensation notice first. I’ll read it to you. Starting this year, they’ve been giving advance compensation notices. The advance contract period is from December 5 through December 11.”
The notice also stated that the compensation payment period and the objection period had not yet passed, and whether the landowner wanted cash compensation or a land-for-land substitution application—being compensated with land instead of money.
And there was the problematic section too.
This is why the siblings were making such a scene.
“I’d have to go into the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and check exactly where the farmland sits in relation to the GTX route before I could be certain. But let me give you the good news first: it looks like you may be able to get more compensation from the state.”
“Oh!”
“Young man, really?”
The couple leaned toward each other, smiling.
Just a moment ago they were tearing each other apart over that affidavit. Unbelievable.
I couldn’t help snorting.
“Yes. The appraisal value is still the same as it was five years ago. If you look at the material you brought, that’s what it says, right?”
“Oh my, it does!”
“I checked just now on my smartphone, and it’s still the same. So we’ll need to request a fresh appraisal. Do you happen to have the real-estate registry too?”
“I do. Yeji’s dad, you know that yellow envelope we used when we paid the inheritance tax?”
“That one? Yes.”
The woman and I looked at the man at the same time.
“You don’t know where it is?”
“No.”
“Hoo, wait there.”
The moment the man went into the back room, the woman covered her twitching mouth with her hand.
“Goodness, thanks to you, young man, the twenty-year knot in my chest just disappeared.”
“Haha.”
“There are times when my daughter sends that meme about your insides lighting up, and that’s exactly how I feel right now.”
“That’s one of the best memes. Still, don’t push Mr. Oh too hard.”
I still had to complete the mission.
“I know. It’s only something I can say because you’re here, young man.”
“…He’s selfish, but I think he must be lonely.”
The man had spent his entire life working at a construction company site. Then IMF hit, the company went under, and before he knew it, he had lost his job.
As the head of the household, he had become the one relying on his wife, and when the economy recovered, his age probably made it hard to find work again.
Out in the world, people fill themselves up by saying, This is what I do. But he couldn’t do that anymore, so he probably tried to make up for it at home.
The woman forced a faint smile onto her face.
“For some reason, I really wish I could meet your mother today. If she were still alive, I would have treated her so well.”
“She liked going out to see flowers on weekends, and she was warm and affectionate, so the two of you would have gotten along beautifully.”
“Oh my, then we’d have ditched the flower shop and gone on flower trips, wouldn’t we?”
“As if! My wife is talking nonsense!”
The man, who had somehow appeared behind us, dropped heavily into a dining chair.
“Counselor, I brought everything from the house!”
Whether what he’d said about not being able to read was true or not, the yellow envelopes weren’t the only things he’d brought. There were several of them.
I quickly skimmed through the documents he laid out.
“There’s even an inheritance division agreement.”
“I was hoping there’d be something on the inheritance side too, so this is very thoughtful of you.”
“Ahem! I do have some sense.”
“Let me take a quick look at the registry.”
Rustle.
Fortunately, the lot number, the title section dealing with ownership, and the encumbrance section were all in order.
“You should check the real-estate registry from time to time. It’s less common these days, but in the past, people would register themselves as creditors or even transfer ownership without the real owner knowing.”
“What?!”
“Then we should check again tomorrow.”
“Make sure you check it once a year at least.”
Money—civil matters in particular—came down more to effort than conscience.
People would ignore something because it sounded ridiculous, only to lose the case later. Others would think a small amount meant they could handle it on their own, and end up getting badly burned.
What was worse was that even when con artists used the same method over and over, they only became more sophisticated in court.
Just like this case.
“By the way, young man, I think I understand the land compensation money, but about that affidavit Yeji’s dad stamped.”
“Yes.”
“Yeji’s dad can’t read, yet he still stamped it. Does it still have legal force?”
“It’s more than enough to be legally valid. It would be different if we could prove deception, but that’s not easy.”
Even if the siblings had come and deliberately misled the man into making a mistake and fabricating false facts, if they got together and said, “We explained everything,” he would still have a hard time fighting back.
If he’d taken one of those driver’s license written tests that are read aloud for illiterate test-takers, he might have proved it easily. Instead, it had become difficult.
“How many times is this now?”
The woman pressed a hand to her forehead, looking fed up.
“You not knowing Hangul? Fine, maybe you can’t know. But I told you we should talk after I finished work this morning. How could you not last a few hours before stamping your name on something?”
“Ma’am? What matters is how you deal with it now, not what happened before. So…”
“My siblings aren’t fraudsters, and if the eldest sister inherits then there’s this reserved share thing, right? They say everything has to be divided again!”
“Yeji’s dad, didn’t you hear the poisonous clause? This is fraud. Your siblings scammed you because they wanted to swallow you whole!”
“Don’t you bad-mouth my siblings again!”
“Please calm down, both of you. Why is this suddenly happening?”
As if neither of them could hear me, the couple’s voices only grew louder.
I grew more and more tense, like a participant in Russian roulette with only one bullet loaded, staring down the barrel and waiting for the trigger to pull.
“It’s not just once or twice. Look at it—he didn’t only want the compensation money, he wanted us to pay the taxes too. And he says you stamped it in front of all the siblings? But nobody told you any of that was in the affidavit.”
The woman swallowed her rage so hard it seemed to rot her chest from the inside.
“That’s—!”
“Why should I have to run this flower shop until I’m this old? Because you dumped our family just to keep chasing after your precious siblings.”
“Why are you blaming my siblings? Did I say I didn’t want to work?! The company should’ve hired me!”
“You said you were too embarrassed to work security at a shopping center or do parcel delivery for the subway. And those aren’t real jobs?”
“…….”
“Still, I gave you five hundred thousand won so you wouldn’t lose face when you went to meet people. And what did you do with that money? Did you do anything besides saying you were paying? Have you ever even brought back gifts for the kids?”
“I’ve told you a hundred times—I spend money where it should be spent! That’s all networking! How can someone who wants to run a business not understand that?!”
“…You’re talking like someone who’s never run a business.”
The clock on the wall read 9:59.
Tick!
Before I could react, an ashtray came flying at the side of my head.
Ma’am!!!