The Brutality of Songdo Street, Part 1
Taesu crouched down in front of the child.
“Hey, are you all right?”
Apparently the kid was. With a sudden, lively motion, he scooped up a handful of dirt from the ground and flung it into Taesu’s face, then sprang up and ran.
If the boy had been only as tall as Taesu’s waist, that might have been a clever move.
Taesu caught him with nothing more than a few long strides. His arm shot out and came back, and the boy ended up hanging in the air by one leg, dangling helplessly.
The child screamed and, still upside down, swung his fists at Taesu’s face.
That didn’t even tickle. Ignoring the tiny fists jabbing at his cheeks, Taesu turned his head.
No one stepped forward to stop him or pull the boy away.
In fact, there were hardly any onlookers at all. Everyone avoided looking in their direction as if the two of them weren’t even there. In Joseon, that was strangely unnatural.
[No one likes pickpockets, after all. But if you rush in now just to seize the chance and rough up the child yourself, you might end up inviting trouble from the street thugs behind him.]
As if to be sure Taesu heard him, the boy shouted, “If you lay a hand on me, my gang will cut you to pieces and scatter you in the gutter!”
Regardless, Taesu kept looking around for something.
Before long, he spotted what he’d been searching for.
He flung the pickpocket boy aside with a dull thud, then kicked off the ground and sprinted toward the alley on the other side.
There, the child’s so-called “gang”—other pickpockets—were pointing this way and watching.
The boy, his hand injured, sat down on the ground and stared blankly after him.
The first thing that made Taesu suspicious was the fact that the kid had acted alone despite having companions.
When the others distracted Taesu, the odds of a successful attempt were much higher. Unless there was no other choice, a team was the basic tactic for pickpockets.
His certainty came when the rest of the boys merely cackled and watched from the sidelines.
The boy who’d been caught was clearly lower in the hierarchy for some reason, the one being exploited rather than the exploiter.
No doubt if he stole something, they would shake him down for it, and those pickpockets in turn would be paying tribute to the organization backing them.
That kind of outfit would be closely tied to the loan sharking Taesu planned to build. Whether he was going to avoid it or crush it, he needed to know.
Questioning the pickpocket himself would be useless. At the very least, he needed the leader of the pickpocket gang if he wanted any worthwhile information.
The whole chain of reasoning had moved more by instinct than logic.
Maybe modern Korea’s capitalism hadn’t advanced beyond Joseon’s, but schoolyard bullying certainly had.
Taesu’s guess was right.
The one who looked like the leader, with a dark smear across his philtrum, sneered like a bully hauled in front of a disciplinary committee.
“The pickpocket’s that bastard, so why are you barking at us? Looks like—”
Thwack!
Before he could finish, Taesu’s upturned military boot slammed into the leader’s jaw.
It was nothing more than a soccer kick without any real technique, but the effect was more than enough.
The leader spun half a turn purely from the force of the blow. Showing a spectacular midair twist like a village acrobat from a traveling troupe, he landed face-first exactly where he’d been standing.
As the underlings flinched, a second-in-command-looking bastard drew a dagger in a hurry.
“You piece of— how dare you look down on a kid like—”
Smack!
Again, before the sentence was finished, the satchel Taesu swung cracked into his temple.
Inside it was the axe the boy had almost used to rob Taesu earlier.
Taesu had shown mercy because the opponent was a minor, but wrapping a grenade in bubble wrap doesn’t make it any less lethal.
The second-in-command collapsed as if he’d heard an angel’s trumpet. Not long ago, some local Christian huckster whom Taesu had shaken down after threatening to report him on false charges of being a cultist had said that heaven belonged to children. Well, the kingdom of God really did seem to be right in front of him now.
Taesu turned his head.
But there was no number three.
The pickpockets had already bolted, scattering like they’d illegally fled the Kaesong school violence committee.
Even looking down at the two fallen leaders didn’t bring much satisfaction.
The leader’s condition was so bad Taesu wasn’t even sure he was still alive. The second-in-command, too, was twitching grotesquely, as if some vital part of his head had been damaged.
Interrogation seemed pointless. Taesu shook his head and turned away.
But there, standing in his path, was the pickpocket boy from earlier, wearing a solemn expression.
The boy bowed deeply.
“My name is Son Yu-jak. What happened earlier was never my true intent. My family was shattered and I fell in with a vicious crowd, and in my confusion I committed a rude offense. Please forgive me.”
Neither Taesu nor the boy himself yet knew that this Son Yu-jak was the father of Son Bong-sang, the man who would one day be remembered in history as Kaesong’s ginseng king alongside the Kong family.
* * *
Taesu looked over the dagger he’d taken from the pickpocket gang.
It was a cheap, half-star piece of junk, but getting stabbed with it still wouldn’t feel great.
Kids these days really are terrifying. I guess Joseon doesn’t have the same laws as my hometown, where no matter what a kid does, you can’t punish them.
[No, it does have such laws. Very old laws, in fact, handed down from the Rites of Zhou and the Book of Rites. Children and old people are not to be punished.]
So that’s why the kids are just like the ones back home. Anyway, what about the patrol office? Taking him there wouldn’t do any good either, right?
That would indeed be pointless, but not because Joseon had a system of criminal minors.
After all, the patrol officers hadn’t seen the Rites of Zhou, the Book of Rites, or even the Gyeongguk Daejeon any more than most Joseon people had.
The real reasons were simpler.
First, the patrol office didn’t investigate ordinary public safety crimes, and second, a child with no parents had no bribe money worth shaking down.
[If every one of those cases had to be settled in prison, the nation would soon run out of clubs and cells. When children do wrong, it is the custom for their father or the elders of the neighborhood to discipline them. If this boy had family elders, they would have dealt with those pickpockets instead. Even if he’d been beaten a little, the authorities wouldn’t have interfered much over something like that.]
Taesu listened carefully to the explanation. Then he applied it immediately.
He looked at Son Yu-jak, who was trailing beside him.
“If anyone asks, say I’m your maternal uncle.”
[You really are a wretch, aren’t you, learning only the worst things the quickest.]
But unlike the Mountain Spirit, Son Yu-jak didn’t complain.
After all, Taesu had even taken the trouble to dig out some of his precious ointment from his pack and rub it on the boy’s wounds. Not even a real uncle would have done that much.
Son Yu-jak looked at the bandage Taesu had wrapped for him, then lifted his head.
“Everyone in the neighborhood knows I have no maternal uncle. Since I only have an older sister by blood, wouldn’t it be better to call you my brother-in-law?”
“Yeah, yeah. Call me whatever. What does it matter?”
Taesu answered absently as he left the market behind.
Then he began gently coaxing the boy, who had become the only lead in his search for a loan shark.
The results far exceeded his expectations. When Son Yu-jak heard Taesu’s explanation, his eyes widened.
“How did you know? The Kaesong branch school magistrate, Kim Sang-jun, is a famous usurer around here, and he’s the very man who murdered my mother.”
Taesu did not cheer. That would have been rude.
So when he asked his next question, his face looked pretty terrifying.
“Tell me everything.”
* * *
Son Yu-jak’s father had simply been an ordinary man who grew ginseng and supplied it to major merchants like Cha Un-hong. You could call it a typical Kaesong household.
But the gambling had been the problem.
Joseon gambling dens, much like those of the modern era, had a thriving habit of lending money on the spot.
It was horror finance—interest at one hundred percent per round, beyond monthly or daily rates. One slip, and there was no turning back.
“When he couldn’t repay the debt, my father fled in the dead of night, and Kim Sang-jun dragged my mother away, locked her in a private prison, and beat her.”
Taesu wasn’t especially surprised. In the twenty-first century, loan sharks kidnapping, confining, and assaulting people as a matter of course—and even raiding police stations under protection when things went south—had apparently been an ancestral tradition.
The boy kept talking.
“My mother couldn’t endure the torture and died, but Kim Sang-jun had his underlings strangle her and then claimed she’d taken her own life. He had the body dumped out there. My sister went to the authorities herself, still a maiden, but Kim Sang-jun had ties to high officials in Seoul and...”
The high officials who heard Kim Sang-jun’s appeal rendered a fair and righteous judgment.
The classic case of Joseon forensic science, The Newly Annotated Record of Wrongful Deaths, was applied with rigorous precision.
“The mark around the neck proves it was suicide!”
Evidence of assault that looked like livor mortis, or the fact that there was only a single rope mark on the beam dust where the body had supposedly hung, with none of the struggle marks a suicide victim would normally show, were all rejected as “suspicious” and therefore unfit for consideration.
When in doubt, rule in the defendant’s favor.
That is the principle of presumption of innocence, the heart of modern criminal law.
Clearly, Joseon forensic science was advanced.
But the legal order was even more advanced, so it was all useless. The Europeans of the opening ports who went around yapping that East Asian justice was too backward and that consular jurisdiction was necessary needed a harsh dose of self-reflection.
Even by the evidence, Kim Sang-jun’s innocence was obvious.
Why would the one who’s owed money kill the debtor?
That had been the logic forcefully argued by Heo Jeok, the prime minister of the time, when a similar case arose during King Sukjong’s reign.
Would a leader of the Southern Faction, who had once been a rival to Song Si-yeol, have said anything frivolous? Anyone claiming that Heo Jeok had taken bribes from a loan shark would have to fight a whole other round of ritual-argument hell.
Following the precedent from two hundred years earlier, Kim Sang-jun was sentenced only to a ten-nyang fine for assault. Even that was never actually enforced and quietly fizzled out.
A branch school magistrate was not a lofty post. If one advanced from there, the next step was Neung Cham-bong, the keeper of royal tombs.
But it was still an important office because it served as a kind of regional gateway credential for entering the central bureaucracy from the Kaesong literati.
Fearing that Kim Sang-jun’s image might be damaged, the various seowon and hyanggyo of Kaesong all fell silent in unison.
Taesu also gritted his teeth at the very words “presumption of innocence.”
So he could already see, as if it were right in front of him, what had happened afterward.
“That Kim Sang-jun bastard surely took revenge.”
“He did. Soon after, he said he still hadn’t recovered his debt and needed to repay the humiliation of being falsely accused, then seized my sister. I tried to get hold of any money I could and joined the pickpocket gang, but they told me to prove my nerve once, so they made me—”
That pickpocket gang was probably one of Kim Sang-jun’s lower-level organizations, after passing through several layers.
“They never intended to pay you in the first place. They probably used you up, then tossed you away so that if you got caught by someone like me, you’d be beaten to death.”
“Yes. I was foolish. But seeing your, no, your brother-in-law’s spirit now, I understand my shame. I’ll do anything to wash away this grudge, so please, show some of that righteousness and help my family.”
Taesu hesitated for a moment, then asked, “Anything?”
“Yes.”
“Even if you didn’t say so, I was planning to go find that Kim Sang-jun bastard anyway. But if you’re the kind of guy who—”
Taesu pointed behind him with his thumb. There lay the fallen leader and deputy of the pickpocket gang.
“—the kind who clings to whoever looks strong and then runs the moment things turn bad, that won’t do.”
“I would never—”
Then Taesu tossed the dagger he’d taken earlier to him.
“No more words. I’m not telling you to go and kill Kim Sang-jun yourself. If you could do that, you’d already have done it. Instead, kill the pickpocket gang—Kim Sang-jun’s underlings.”
At that brutally direct instruction, with no hint of evasion or roundabout phrasing, Son Yu-jak’s face hardened.
“Those are the men who fooled you, used you, and were going to kill you in the end. If you do that, I’ll protect you like my own nephew, or like my brother-in-law. If your sister is still alive, I promise I’ll save her too.”
It was hard to tell whether Taesu was sincere. But at the very least, there wasn’t a trace of hesitation or joking in his expression.
“He’ll probably try to block with his arm when you stab him. Don’t waste time trying some impossible knife trick—just go for the arm. Once the blood starts pouring out, you can run. He’ll be dead before he can even chase you.”
As he said that, Taesu pointed to Son Yu-jak’s brachial artery. The vivid modern medical lecture from a reincarnator turned the boy’s face pale.
“If you can’t do that, then just run away. Live by telling yourself you had no choice because you weren’t strong enough. In truth, a lot of people live that way.”
After staring at the dagger for a long while, Son Yu-jak finally spoke with difficulty.
“...Among those boys, it isn’t only the wicked ones. There are kids like me too, cornered and desperate...”
That was the rebuttal Taesu had been waiting for. He lowered one knee and brought himself level with Son Yu-jak’s eyes.
“That’s exactly for you to decide. Who deserves to die, and who deserves to live. Use a standard you’d be willing to turn on yourself, and you won’t hear me complain. But if you’re going to leave the decision to someone else, don’t call it revenge. Other people will tell you it’s wrong.”
If you reject the law, then you need a standard that can stand above it. If you can’t judge for yourself and take responsibility for yourself, yet still refuse to bow to the law, then you’re nothing more than a thug or a delinquent.
Taesu stood up.
“There’s no reason to drag this out. I’ll wait at the market until closing time.”
The patrol office had no reason to step in over pickpocket scum like this, whether they lived or died.
But if the leaders who’d been beaten today reported it upward, Kim Sang-jun would prepare in one way or another. If he was going to do it, he needed to strike now and finish it in a surprise attack.
Taesu turned his back. It was a clear sign he wanted the conversation over.
“I’m not saying you absolutely have to kill them. This business of saying courage only counts if you beat people senseless and stab them—that’s the sort of nonsense those pickpocket bastards were spouting. Living rightly takes greater courage. Whatever you decide, I won’t blame you.”
He still wasn’t fully accustomed to Joseon speech, so a few modern words had slipped into his explanation, but not so many that a nineteenth-century man couldn’t understand him.
Son Yu-jak standing there in a daze wasn’t because he hadn’t understood Taesu’s words.
The boy swallowed hard.
Then he clenched the dagger tightly.
Author’s Note
1. It is true that Kim Sang-jun held the post of Kaesong branch school magistrate at this time. However, the usury murder case was a fictionalization inspired by the historical figure Cham-bong Lee In-han from King Sukjong’s reign. In reality, Lee In-han also escaped punishment thanks to the vigorous defense of Prime Minister Heo Jeok.