Amazing Manchuria

A few years passed.

The nineteenth century came to an end and the dawn of the twentieth broke; Joseon declared itself the Korean Empire.

Not a single soul alive could stand against Gojong, the iron-blooded monarch who had bathed in the blood of countless reformers.

Gojong, riding high on momentum, sent an army to Gando to annex it — and the great powers just snorted at him.

"Who do you think you are, Dordsin?"

Gojong slunk back home in a sulk, forced to admit all over again that he was, in fact, a nobody rotting in the corner of the world stage.

And then, as a bonus, thepowers-that-be all turned their eyes to the fresh new "opening for business" sign on the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Korean Empire and served it up on their dinner tables as gochujang-marinated bulgogi.

And what was I doing during all this?

Hmm.

"Commander! We've already got too many mouths to feed in this militia — why in God's name did you pick up a kid?!"

"He's right, sir! Just dump him back out in the wasteland where you found him."

"Can it, will you? There's a whole bandit gang eyeing our village as we speak, and this is a sharpshooter who put five bullets into five bandit heads. Why wouldn't ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠I take him? Besides, he's just a brat — he doesn't need to know anything. Feed him three squares a day and he's set!"

And that is how I got "voluntarily enlisted" into the self-defense militia of one Zhang Zuolin.

Yes. Better than dying, I suppose.

Damn it all.

At first we could barely communicate, me scratching out a handful of Chinese characters, but after a few years my spoken Chinese was native-level. And I immediately went to Zhang Zuolin and begged him to take me off kitchen duty and cleaning duty and laundry duty and night watch.

"Why would I? The men wouldn't like it."

"Commander, you must respect my talents. I speak Korean, Chinese, and English fluently, passable French besides, and using me for menial chores is like honing a blade on gold—"

The truth was, the original militiamen didn't much care for me.

Natural enough, really — the unit was a closed circle built from men who'd all lived in the same village.

Which meant that the moment the commander discarded me, I would starve to death out in the vast, empty Manchurian wilderness. I had to prove myself as a lackey or as a valuable asset — anything, whatever it took.

"Not one man in this militia can read or write, can they? My head works just fine."

"...Fine. Let's see what you can do."

Zhang Zuolin, still shy of thirty, handed me a few village administrative chores — partly to offload his own burdens — and I, drawing on the training of a Republic of Korea Air Force officer required to file Ministry-of-Defense-style reports after every sortie, turned in document after document polished down to the font size.

"Not bad."

From that day on, I graduated from odd-jobs boy to boarding and working in Zhang Zuolin's own household as a kind of... staff adviser.

"Hey."

"You called, Commander?"

"Read this."

"Yes sir. Ahem, so it says—"

"Newspaper-reading machine" or "Bionic E-book Reader" doesn't have nearly the ring of staff adviser, does it?

Please, somebody call me an adviser. Secretary would even do.

Anyway, having become Zhang Zuolin's bionic E-book reader, I made a discovery: for a leader of a border-village militia, this man Zhang Zuolin's conduct was anything but ordinary.

In a China now maxed out on anti-Western hatred, the mere act of tracking down English-language newspapers and devouring them for intelligence already marked him as no common man.

And he lived hundreds of kilometers from Beijing, no less.

I understood perfectly, Zhang Zuolin. Your ambitions are enormous.

When I was scooped up, Zhang Zuolin's militia had started with barely ten men; it had since swelled to the point where it could storm and raze bandit strongholds of over a hundred.

And Zhang Zuolin — who surely wanted something even bigger than that — was reading the winds with exquisite sensitivity, refusing to take on unnecessary risk.

Which was all to my benefit, and never to my detriment. I knew only the broad trunk of history, or at best a few faint scraps of it, and this was a golden opportunity to suck up information and judge the situation for myself. And the more of the situation I read, the more a certain conviction blossomed in me: in this insane world, this place was the best — perhaps the only — place where I could be safe.

In Germany, aspirin was synthesized and marketed as a medicine for the first time, and to commemorate this monumental achievement, the German Empire dispatched the one group of experts with unrivaled promotional flair — the German military — to Qingdao, China.

Qingdao, now under German occupation, had become the German-leased Kiautschou Bay Territory.

Naturally, the Chinese were furious. The Chinese now formed the Yihetuan — the Boxers — and began killing every Westerner in sight.

Beijing — where I had once planned to board a ship to America alongside the missionaries — descended into anarchy amid murder, looting, and arson directed at Westerners and their "collaborators."

Whereupon the Eight-Nation Alliance — Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Russia, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Japan — steamrolled that anarchic city along with the Boxers.

Anyone who passed the Boxers' ideological vetting — that is, anyone who wasn't killed by Boxer hands and was instead out there playing soccer with Western skulls — well, they deserved to die too. That was the logic.

And so a massacre answered a massacre.

Around the time Britain's Joseph J. Thomson proved the existence of the electron, reserving himself a seat at the not-so-distant Nobel Prize in Physics, British soldiers on the far side of the globe — together with the Germans who had first spread the gospel of aspirin's greatness — looted Beijing in honor of that shining achievement.

From the Summer Palace, a garden built by embezzling thirty percent of the Qing navy's funding and the imperial treasury, every last statue, every last artwork, vanished into the pockets of the Allied troops.

Here in Manchuria, if I was to reach America as I'd promised Seo Jae-pil and Hulbert, I would have to punch straight through that portrait of hell and make it all the way to Shanghai — and by any measure, that was impossible.

Once the Boxer Uprising more or less wrapped up, the Empire of Japan openly began provoking small-scale clashes with the Russian Empire across the northern Korean peninsula.

For now it was nothing but brawls — shoving matches, or one or two men clubbed to death with rifle butts. But soon, very soon, war would erupt between the two: the Russo-Japanese War.

Having heard my briefing, Zhang Zuolin snorted with laughter and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠rose from his seat.

Sunlight glanced off his gleaming queue and stabbed me right in the eyes.

Gyaah! My eyes! My eyes are burning!

"Strange, terrifying times we live in. ...An age of chaos, wouldn't you say?"

"Indeed, sir."

He took out his razor, looked into a mirror, and trimmed his beard as he spoke.

"What did General Shengjing have to say?"

"That unless we register with the authorities within a week, he'll treat us as bandits and send troops to suppress us."

"Suppress? Suuuppress? Hahaha!"

Laughing so hard he tipped back in his chair, he finished his beard, stuck his long-stemmed pipe in his mouth, and spoke.

"Turn private into public!"

That was the slogan being handed down by General Shengjing, who now held both civil administration and military command over Manchuria.

In other words: having neither the administrative muscle nor the military force to round up all the gangs infesting this Manchuria-Western — the village militias, the bandit companies, the whole vermin-infested lot — the General would simply hand government posts to whichever gang registered first.

"What do you think?"

"Do you wish to become government troops, Commander?"

"Government troops. Government troops, hm."

One second.

Two seconds.

Three seconds.

"The Qing is as good as dead already. What's to be gained by becoming the government army of a fallen nation?"

"That's a strange thing to say, sir."

"Why?"

"Because if you'd never intended it in the first place, you wouldn't have asked me."

Zhang Zuolin, who until now had been staring at nothing but the smoke curling off his pipe, shifted his gaze and began boring holes into me.

"And why do you think I asked?"

"Look at yourself, sir. You're not refuting me — you're hunting for evidence."

Zhang Zuolin. Stop looking at me like I'm your bionic E-book reader.

If you've got ambition that big, then learn to recognize my worth. In this squat little border village, I'm the only head sharp enough to be worth consulting.

"You said the Qing is a dead country. Correct. I think so too! But doesn't that husk mean a 'new government' will rise to take its place?"

As long as this Manchuria wasn't the heart of the continent like Beijing or Nanjing, that new government would have no choice but to keep using the men already performing the role of its army — merely reissuing their name cards.

Hearing this, Zhang Zuolin shot to his feet—

"You motherless dog."

"..."

"How dare you wag that filthy tongue of yours, clouding the heavens of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the Great Qing and dragging the noble ideals of General Shengjing through the mud! I'll jerk your jerky and pickle it in brine!"

A vein bulged at his temple and fire kindled in his eyes. His beard trembled; the muscles in the hand gripping his pipe like a weapon knotted and bulged.

And I —

Clap. Clap. Clap.

"Flawless."

I applauded.

"You've lost your mind."

"A performance that good will fool even General Shengjing. Don't worry, sir."

Thud.

Zhang Zuolin dropped back into his chair and went back to puffing glumly at his pipe.

"Fine. What do you want out of serving a madman like me?"

"Survival."

"That's all?"

No. Far more than that.

I have no intention of dying easily.

I know, because I've died once. It was incredibly anticlimactic, for the record.

Maybe it was God, or maybe something inexplicable, that flung me into this world a century back — but I still remember, perfectly, what I was thinking the moment before I died.

'I just wanted to see their faces one more time.'

That hasn't changed.

I want to see them.

I want to know.

I want to ask — why did you abandon me?

And I want to hold them, just once.

The original Lee Tae-oh was born in the mid-to-late nineties, so if I lived to nearly a hundred, I might get to see the original me.

But even in the 2020s, few people made it to a hundred.

So this is... probably an impossible dream.

And yet.

And yet — couldn't the future 'me' maybe grow up warm and whole in a parent's embrace?

If the Republic of Korea bloomed wider than it had in the original history. If it got a fairer start.

If every single event that wrecked a generation — or several — of modern Korean lives were hunted down and erased, root and branch.

Then wouldn't at least 'I' get to live without sitting alone in a classroom doing remedial study because I couldn't afford the field trip, without getting into a bloody fistfight over whispers that I had no parents?

Nothing is absolute, of course. But I could raise the odds. I didn't know whether my parents had been victims of history or simply crushed by hard lives — but if I lifted the entire floor of the population called Koreans, if I raised the lower bound itself...

Couldn't it be possible?

So that's what I decided.

I would build a Republic of Korea greater than the original history, and leave it to the future.

And to do that, I would need, in this Asia, a power that no one dared touch — achievable only after the Second World War, when imperialism met its end and a new Zeitgeist awoke.

So how would I get there?

Why had I ended up like this? I thought about it every single day after being scooped up by Zhang Zuolin.

Why had I been forced to feel mortal terror from that idiot Gojong and flee for my life?

Why, when I warned Seo Jae-pil and the Independence Club about Japan's designs, had Syngman Rhand become a burned scarecrow and the Independence Club detonated and died?

The conclusion, after long agony:

I don't know history well enough. Which means my warning to Seo Jae-pil might, just possibly, be what led to the Independence Club's destruction.

And if I got carelessly swept into that colossal historical tsunami lined up one after another — the Russo-Japanese War, the Eulsa Treaty, the Japan-Korea Annexation, the First World War — ...I die. Without question.

Seen that way, Manchuria was a place connected not to the great, epochal events, but to a thousand tiny, microscopic ones.

Astonishingly, once the Russo-Japanese War ended, not a single soul paid Manchuria any attention right up until Mao Zedong conquered China. Except Japan.

And even Japan, until the Manchurian Incident of 1931, did little more than scatter its tentacles here and throw its weight around.

Unless a Korean became the ruler of this Manchuria — or the indispensable core beneath him — Japan would tread the exact path of the original history.

Which meant I had to hide, thoroughly and absolutely, that I was Korean.

I had to deceive them. Make them believe I would never stand in the way of their future.

Only in this crude free-for-all — where a gang becomes the government army and the government army becomes a bandit company — could my goal ever be achieved.

Zhang Zuolin didn't know the details, but he seemed to have guessed at my pitch-black insides, because he flashed a crooked grin.

"Fine. I don't know what you're nursing in that skull of yours, but I'll use your talent for my own sake. From today, you're my household steward. Your ambitions need my ambitions realized first anyway, don't they?"

"That is what I hoped for, sir."

His eyes changed — the look of a man appraising a business partner.

"Good. There's a man serving under General Shengjing named Zengwen. That fellow asked him: 'Zuolin, my boy, how many men do you command?'"

"And what did you answer, sir?"

"One battalion."

What? One battalion? Two hundred fifty men? The militia doesn't even number a hundred — you inflated it nearly threefold?

"What? Sure, this Zuolin's an ignoramus, but I've got the brains to size up a man's mettle. The newly posted General Shengjing and his toadies are idiots."

"Idiots can still do addition and subtraction, sir."

"Troop numbers can be filled in later."

He knocked out his pipe, produced a map of the surrounding area, and spread it open.

"There's a bandit cur around these parts called Kim Su-san."

"Is he Korean?"

"What difference does it make whether the bastard's a Goryeo dog, a Manchu, or a Han? We're killing him either way."

"Then why have you left him alive until now, sir?"

"And because I left him alive, here comes the opportunity. The grand design is already laid."

He tapped the map lightly with the dead pipe.

"Nothing left to wait for. Twenty villages are paying that cur protection money. We take his head, take over his territory, and then every idle loafer in the land gets 'voluntarily enlisted' into the ranks of the kindhearted 'Battalion Commander Zhang Zuolin of the Shengjing Army.'"

Ah. Voluntary enlistment.

How terrifying a concept it truly is.

"It's a new moon tonight, so it'll be dark. Let's move immediately."

"Coming with me?"

"I was taught to earn my keep, sir."

"I like that. Manly. We ride out at sunset."

Needless to say, unless it was something as drastic as dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, I had not the slightest intention of staking my life before reaching adulthood.

Before the raid on Kim Su-san's stronghold, Zhang Zuolin quietly called me over.

"You stay in the rear for this one."

"Commander, I can fight too."

"Bullshit. If you die, I'll be back to arguing with men whose heads contain nothing but 'when the food's too bland, add salt.'"

Of course, sir. I was just performing the lip service, you see.

After I took my revolver and fell in at the very end of the column, Zhang Zuolin cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed:

"Zhang Zuolin, Battalion Commander of the Shengjing Army, has come for the bandit chief Kim Su-san!!"

""Long live General Zhang! Manse! Manse!""

Hold on, hold on, hold on. You said there was a grand design — and it's shouting impersonation-of-an-official at the top of your lungs?

That's way too flimsy. There's no way that works.

"Government troops, my ass! Go get laid!"

"You bastards couldn't even guard a market stall — have you lost your minds?!"

And sure enough, bullets came flying from the bandits.

Ah. Is this where the future-savior Lee Tae-oh must step forward? Reroute the formation now, strike the vulnerabilities per 'Small Unit Tactics Manual, Republic of Korea Ministry of National Defense'—

"Fire the artillery."

"Yes, Commander!"

At Zhang Zuolin's signal, a shell traced a lazy arc — pheeewwng — and dropped into the stronghold.

BOOM!!

"It's artillery! Artillery!!"

"GYAAAAH! It's the government army! The real government army!!"

"RUUUUN!!"

"......Why does a village militia have artillery?"

"Deserted with it a few years back, when the government army fought the Jap devils. I was an NCO to begin with, you know.

What? You want me to take Kim Su-san's head or not?"

"Y-yes, sir."

Astonishing, the twentieth century.

Astonishing, Manchuria.

A few days later.

"The General of Shengjing's grace shall be carved into our bones and never forgotten."

"Good, Battalion Commander. Have you a man to serve as your strategist?"

"There is one clear-headed man under my command."

"His name?"

"Lee Tae-oh, sir."

"Then Lee Tae-oh is appointed battalion staff adviser."

Until the Russo-Japanese War, one year remained.