A Glorious Homecoming (3)
Facing official closure for its attacks on Qing tyranny, the Hanseong Sunbo devoted its final issue to a headline of dazzling splendor.
People of Jeolla! Confucian literati of the Three Southern Provinces!
What set this issue apart from every Sunbo that had come before was a device the front page had never carried: a single photograph, printed so large it swallowed the sheet whole. And the man in that photograph was none other than me.
I stood no taller than a grown man's shoulder. Against a stark white backdrop I had thrust a clenched fist high above my head, my face twisted in fury — an image striking enough to burn itself into the minds of the masses. A single frame, perfectly captured: alone upon a platform, rising out of a sea of people, pouring myself into a speech. It was the Hanseong Sunbo's last, unrestrained flourish — a paper with nothing left to save for, and no budget left worth hoarding.
I was the one who reaped the harvest. I raised my voice and shouted.
"Free people of the entire nation!"
The residents of Hanseong would only grasp it once the paper was in their hands. Ah — what had Hanseong been two years ago? What had we hoped for, that we poured out such rage?
"Thank you! By your support, your love, and your attention, this unworthy man has at last been set free! Thank you from the bottom of my heart!"
Waaaaaah!!!
Syngman Rhee, the man who had carved a new chapter into the history of Joseon's mass politics, had finally broken his long seclusion and stepped back into the world. And this time, his circumstances were a world apart from the loneliness of two years before.
At my back stood the Confucian literati of the entire country, anchored by Choe Ik-hyeon and Yu In-seok. Beside them, men like Kim Gae-nam and Woo Beom-seon kept pace with merchants and industrialists such as Lee Ha-young and Yi Yong-ik. The old "me" was gone — that frail thing with no faction worth the name, teetering on a tightrope between the Heungseon Daewongun, the Japanese legation, and the royal in-laws. There was only the Dongmaenghoe, standing with me.
"The grace you have shown me I will carve into my bones! I will never forget it!"
"Unam! Unam! Unam!"
"Thank you! I love you all!"
I took a tearful farewell of Namwon, where I had hidden myself for so long, and began a slow march north with my supporters at my side.
"People of Jeonju!"
That was the first stop. Word of my coming had already reached Jeonju, the great city of Jeolla, and I poured a passionate speech over a crowd nearly twice the size of the last.
"If a rat turns up in your house, you don't send for a troupe of beggar-clowns. You call an exterminator — or at the very least a cat!"
"That's right! That's right!"
"Look at the state of this country! Men who aren't even fit to be jesters have wrecked five hundred years of dynastic rule in a single decade — and they have done it thoroughly!"
In Naju, too, which had backed me through all those long months of shuttling between Namwon and Jeonju, I spoke.
"Corrupt officials and sycophants! Royal in-laws who traffic in offices like market goods! Traitors who sold their consciences to the Qing! The sages said that when the hen crows, the household falls — and not a word of it was wrong! I am told that the royal house, for a single grand rite, poured five hundred thousand nyang from the national treasury into the hands of a common shaman! How much longer are we to sit and watch these traitors to the nation devour this country?"
"Damn the Min clan in-laws!"
"Kill the corrupt officials!"
Next came Gunsan and Gongju, cities that had sprung up where the shipping of the Three Southern Provinces naturally gathered.
"In what country under heaven is tax wrung from the people two and three times over, so that the very subjects a government is bound to protect and care for are driven to ruin? Abolish the Grain Transport Commission and deliver the farmers who have suffered under it for so long! The government must wake up!"
"Wake up! Wake up!"
And last of all, Boeun — the great crossroads of the Three Southern Provinces, and the old rallying ground of the Donghak faithful.
"People of Joseon."
By then the supporters who had followed me through the southern provinces numbered a full three thousand, and some thirty thousand more had poured into Boeun to hear me speak. Among them, the members of the Youth Association — better known as the Vanguard — my most fervent and formidable supporters, had swelled to a full five hundred, enough to leave Kim Gae-nam and Woo Beom-seon at their wits' end.
In the distance I could see the local magistrate and his clerks from the Boeun yamen, startled by the scale of the gathering and come running to look. I paid them no mind and turned my gaze away. What filled my vision then was heat. A storm.
From the platform raised at the center of Boeun's marketplace, I looked slowly over the black sea of heads packed to the horizon, and opened my mouth without hurry.
"We."
Every breath in the square died. They strained not to miss even the sound of my breathing, eyes fixed and wide, staring up at me. Before them, I parted my lips with care.
"Are falling into the abyss."
At the word abyss, a low sigh ran through the crowd. They knew it too. They knew that this country, Joseon, was sinking by the day. I lifted both arms to the height of my waist and turned my palms toward them — solemnly, almost reverently. When a speaker means to set before the people the ugly crisis bearing down on their community, his words and his bearing must never be light.
To understand them, you must be able to govern their feelings.
They had to take this matter as gravely as I did. I had to become them, thoroughly and without remainder. I raised my voice by degrees and spoke.
"And we did not even know it! Because of the traitors to the nation who mean to sell this country to the Manchus of the Qing!"
"Traitors to the nation" was a stock phrase I had been driving hard in my recent speeches, a slogan thick with propaganda. The masses had no need to listen to every word a politician uttered and commit it to memory. A few essential points, a few sentences repeated until they stuck — that was enough. It did not mean the people were fools. It meant they were not politicians, and had no reason to store up a warehouse of rhetorical furniture.
Along the same line ran the Dongmaenghoe's slogan of the Three Principles of the People — the people as the foundation, the people's rights, and the people's livelihood. Thanks to it, the equation "Three Principles equals Dongmaenghoe" had been taking deeper root among the public by the day. The Donghak, driven into hiding under the same frost, were a welcome extra.
"Even now, at this very hour, the people of Joseon are suffering — losing their property and the families they love to the insolent outrages of Qing troops. And the court officials who ought to protect them, who ought to care for them, have abandoned their sacred duty!"
The criticism was so frank, so blunt, that every face in the crowd darkened and grew heavy. Into those faces I sent a roar that rose from the hot place in my chest, vast and rolling as a tiger's. The people of Joseon were not pitiable creatures. They were simply enduring.
"But do not be afraid. Still less should you give way to fear."
The ones who ought to be afraid were not the honest, hardworking people of Joseon. They were the traitors who meant to hand their livers and gallbladders over to the Qing — the ones who would, in due course, pay the price of betrayal.
"We are the majority."
A politician is a man who must point the way when the people, terrified and stumbling through a national catastrophe, have lost all hope and all destination. I was the shepherd who had to take up his staff and stand first against the wolf, for the sheep wandering lost in a dark wood. I clenched both fists, thrust them high into the sky, and let the shout tear out of me.
"We who are brave and we who are patient will go on fighting them! What we must fear is not the abyss!"
I leaned far out over the edge of the platform and began to meet their eyes, one by one. I had to share their feeling. I had to be with them. The light in the crowd's gaze grew slowly distant and dreamlike, and when I could feel even the smallness of their breathing, I spoke.
"What we must fear most—"
"Who said anything about submitting?"
Someone muttered. Someone else swayed from side to side, as if drunk on the declaration. But most of the crowd caught on the word submission and their faces twisted. Their expressions said it plainly enough. Suzerain? What suzerain? Those swaggering, hog-fat creatures had been our enemy only a hundred years ago.
I began throwing timber on that fire without mercy.
"Will you sell your daughters, your wives, your granddaughters to be their concubines? Will you make slaves of your sons, your husbands, your fathers?"
"No!"
"Will you let the property you spent a lifetime building — the little scrap of land you meant to leave your children — be stripped from you by greedy men, without a single blow struck in return?"
"No!"
Yes. That was it. I spread both arms and shook them hard, up and down, urging them to take the sourness rising in their hearts and let it out as rage, thoroughly and without remainder.
"I, Syngman Rhee, will stand with you! I, Syngman Rhee, will fight beside you against the traitors devouring this country, and against the Manchus who mean to swallow a nation with two thousand years of history as if it were a free meal!"
Waaaaaah!!!
"If those insolent creatures come knocking at our gate, I will take up an axe and fight to defend my family!"
"Fight! Fight!"
At that brave invitation to stand and fight, the murmur and the answering roar of the crowd swelled louder still, and the anger of people who had at last detonated years of swallowed grief swelled louder with it. The square was unified by a single feeling: rage.
The moment was ripe.
"Long live! Long live! Long live!"
Three thunderous cheers shook heaven and earth, and the heat of them filled Boeun to the brim. So it was that more than thirty thousand souls gathered in that town closed ranks around me, thoroughly and without a seam. It was the moment a vague enemy was at last named aboard the rotting ship called Joseon, which had been sinking of its own accord in the great ocean of nations.
A room wrapped in pitch darkness. Beneath the wavering glow of a single oil lamp, a figure struck his writing desk with a snarl that belonged more to a beast than a man.
"These treasonous dogs. How dare they."
The master of this room was also the master of this country: King Yi Hyeong. What lay upon his desk was none other than a copy of the Hanseong Sunbo. Confronted with the enormous photograph of a boy named Syngman Rhee, the thicket of annotations crowded beside it, and an article attacking the outrages of the Qing, the King gave his private feelings free and ugly rein.
"Insolent whelps. Not content with airing the gravest affairs of state in front of common subjects as if they were nothing, they dare pin the blame on whom? Tyranny? Outrage? I'll have their heads struck off this instant."
Though the night was already late, he spent a long while bellowing curses too coarse and too blasphemous to be spoken aloud — then, remembering the eunuchs waiting out in the corridor, he sank into thought.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk."
Was he simply to sit and watch these people? Or should he tear them up by the root, crush that root thoroughly underfoot, and govern them through terror — the true wrath of a sovereign?
But did he even have that kind of power?
"Eh?"
A stray, unclean thought surged up and shattered his reverie. Yi Hyeong started in spite of himself and touched his own mouth.
"Good heavens."
He had admitted, without meaning to, that he was powerless. He was startled by himself. When did I become this?
And then a face rose before him.
"Father."
In that brief unguarded moment, with his composure shaken, a defense rose up and showed him the face of a stubborn, greedy old man. Yi Hyeong began to stack his anger back up inside himself, layer upon layer. The mean old face grew sharp and clear.
Yes. It was you, wasn't it. All of this. Because of you this country is broken. My country.
"Idle thoughts. Nothing more."
Composure restored, the sovereign began to set his thinking in order again. For all the figure he cut, the King himself had come to find the Qing garrison more and more of a burden. Of late the Beiyang authorities and the Qing troops stationed in Hanseong had been making one unreasonable demand after another, interfering in domestic affairs as they never had before, and their intent to take the court in hand was plain for anyone to see.
"The Qing army has about outlived its usefulness."
Having resolved to be rid of them, the King decided to come at the problem from another side. First, the slogans of the impure and foolish crowd packed into Boeun were all of a piece.
"Withdrawal of the Qing troops, the purging of corrupt officials, and the abolition of the civil service examinations, is it."
There were other demands besides — the dismantling of various offices including the Grain Transport Commission, the restoration of the village granary system, enshrinement at the Confucian shrine, and so on, the wishes of many different ranks of people. But to Yi Hyeong, sovereign of a nation, these looked like matters that could wait, to be settled slowly and in their own time. What mattered most was the withdrawal of the Qing army, and the punishment of the corrupt officials — the royal in-laws among them.
Just then the King thought of Kim Ok-gyun, who was keeping a low profile in Japan over the matter of a foreign loan.
"And as it happens, the Enlightenment Party crowd are thinking along much the same lines."
Those hot-blooded creatures talked back even to him, their King, from time to time — but the men they despised above all others were the pro-Qing ministers.
They'll do well enough as a butcher's knife.
Yi Hyeong, master and ruler of Joseon, had himself come to feel in his bones that the corruption and greed of the royal in-laws were passing all bounds. And more than that—
Worse, those creatures have begun watching the Forbidden City more carefully than they watch me.
That, above all, he could not abide. Whose country was this, that they should look to anyone else for their cues? And after it was he who had given them their seats at court? Ungrateful wretches.
After a long silence and a longer weighing of the thing, the King reached his decision and took up the brush that lay upon the desk.
"Very well. We shall see."
Nothing in this world weighs heavier than a sovereign's wrath and a sovereign's resolve. For a long while, the only sound that escaped the royal bedchamber was the whisper of a brush dancing across paper.