Abuji closes his eyes. “I had to leave, get out of Hanguk. They put me under surveillance, tapped my phone. They tracked all my meetings with students and labor leaders. But that wasn’t it. It was my past, I had to escape it. The Dictator, intelligence, the oppression, the violence, the torture, and my hand in it, all of it. It haunted me. The blood on my hands, the guilt, the shame. Your umma, she’s the one who suggested a clean break, a fresh start somewhere far away. She cabled her cousin unni to invite us to America. That was it. That was eighteen years ago . . .” His words trail off in a sigh.
I ask if he wants to. Return.
“I can’t. Some things you can’t get back.”
Are fathers unknowable to sons? We grow up familiar with the shape of our father’s hand and the timbre of his voice, we learn to measure his pleasure or dissatisfaction with our latest accomplishment. Yet how little we know of his once-soaring hopes and roaring ambitions, his hot-breath desires, unsated yearnings, and the compromises and capitulations that hang from his life like dried-up grapes on a vine.
“Do you regret it—any part of it?” I say.
“Sometimes. Sometimes I think about what might’ve been. To have continued the fight . . .” He looks up. “But I had you. And your dongseng. I wanted my children to grow up in an open environment, knowing true freedom. To live without fear, without baggage. So we came to America, the land of fresh beginnings, where you could be free, to study and learn. To be good, wise people.”
Freedom, to be what I want to be? Not bound by the yoke of family tradition or the even more chafing shackles of a father’s expectations? Pursue what I want to do, be my own person? Yes, that would be freedom. Maybe sons are unknowable to fathers, too. We are of their blood and issue, but how much do they really know us, want to see and hear us? Do they hear our furious cry for independence?
I had expected pride on Abuji’s face when I walked across the podium in Harvard Yard to receive my MBA diploma. I had studied hard, earned Baker Scholar distinction. Instead, I saw disappointment, masked by a blank expression. Because it was not a PhD diploma in the Yard or a byustle for a high-ranking position those Lees of yore received? Because the greatness, in all its splendid possibilities, projected onto me by his unfulfilled ambitions is getting whittled down by the realities of my limitations or, worse, my own interests? His blinking, uncomprehending reaction at hearing of my plans to return to Phipps as an Associate after HBS. Playing with money? For rest of your life? Even then, he clung to the belief that I was destined, in the great Lee tradition, to be a scholar or at least a writer. We all bear the burden of our father’s expectations. For the jangnam in a Korean family, that burden has the weight of centuries of clan history.
The obscure warfare waged between father and son over years, a lifetime. The push of paternal expectations and the pull of desire to be your own person. The knots of father-son conflict get pulled tighter the more you tug at it. But it’s not a Gordian knot you can cut with one fell stroke. No, maybe resolution does not come until the son becomes a father himself. The father-son relationship is a Möbius strip, seemingly linear and two-sided, but, at some point, somehow, it turns on itself, becomes one. The stealthy, miraculous progression of life from father to you to your son. The Möbius progression is accompanied not by complete knowledge of each other, something unattainable perhaps, but an understanding of what it means to be father and son. And an acceptance born of that understanding. The acceptance that shines down in crepuscular rays and goes deeper than expectation, broader than comprehension, straight to the throbbing heart.
“I think I understand,” I tell Abuji.
Out here in the steppes, the connection between Abuji and me feels alive and true, and sufficient. The mutual acceptance, and the miracle of unspoken love that undergirds it, seems ageless, as much a part of nature as the howl of the gray wolf and the murmur of the grassland. The orange glow of the banked embers dims as we lie down to sleep our final night before returning home to America.
25
Early March 1998
The quiet in the lobby of Pyunghwa Industrial headquarters is not a peaceful quiet but an airless, stifling silence. It is not a comfort offered to visitors but a condition imposed on them for admission to a fort of official secrecy. Herein lie confidential defense contracts and clandestine operations and classified information that plumb the depths of the dark, violent human heart, privy only to those with clearance and others who would dare to know. Having arrived early at the offices of Pyunghwa (meaning “Peace”), I spend an uncomfortable half hour in the lobby atrium under the watchful eyes of two mute security guards. Abuji always said being early for an appointment is as discourteous as being late. So I wait, wordlessly in a soundless den of secrets.
When I’m brought up to the chairman’s office, I am given tea and left alone in the reception annex. The room is unadorned—with just a set of low armchairs, a glass table, and two framed photographs on a wooden shelf. One photo is of President Park Chung Hee pinning a medal on a young, crisply uniformed Lieutenant Chung, the other of President Chun Doo Hwan and CEO Chung cutting a ribbon at a factory opening. Both men wear large white gloves and grasp an even larger pair of scissors, calling to mind Mickey and Minnie Mouse at Disneyland.
The chairman comes in through a side door and sits in the head armchair. He wears a tan cardigan over his shirt and tie and indoor slippers. He motions for me to drink up, doesn’t say anything. He’s someone comfortable in silence. Much like Abuji. Or maybe he simply enjoys other people’s discomfort. I try not to fidget. Breathe, I remind myself.
Chairman Chung is called “Dragon Eyes,” and I see why. He has fire in his eyes, and they bore in on me, unblinking. They’re the eyes of a man who has conviction he can bend fate to his will. Once, when he found a defect in a tank belt produced in one of his factories, Dragon Eyes is said to have lined up all the supervisors and workers from the assembly line, and then he kicked them in the shins, one by one, right down the line. No faulty parts thereafter.
“I understand your father is an army man,” he finally says.
“Yes, sir,” I say. “For many years.” I don’t mention the role in intelligence or his voluntary discharge.
He’s too astute to press for details. “My dongsuh, the deputy prime minister, tells me you did valuable service to our country. In the government financing.”
“Kind of him to say, but I was just doing my job.”
He nods approvingly, takes a long sip of his tea. “Lee Yisa, my daughter, she’s very . . . special. I don’t mean just that she’s special to me. She is, of course. She’s always been the apple of my eye. What I mean is, she’s different.”
“Neh.” Can’t disagree there.
“She grew up thinking differently, always challenging conventions. Wasn’t afraid to stand up to me. You know she ran away from home during university? Got mixed up with some bad elements, student demonstrators. She stayed out on her own for two years.” He shakes his head. “Mother was worried sick. But I told her Jee Yeon would be fine. My daughter is a fighter, and survivor. And I knew she’d come back home. She’s her father’s daughter.
“I also knew one day she’d bring home a boy who was an outsider. I thought it’d be some poor Jeolla-do boy or maybe even a foreigner.” He leans in, trains his blazing eyes on mine. “I can tell you’re not one of those black-haired foreigners. Am I not right?”
When I first showed up at Eagle Stone Elementary, some of my new classmates came up to me saying they wanted to touch my hair. They’d never seen jet-black hair before. I thought the strange thing was having yellow hair or brown or, strangest of all, red hair. My black hair was a marker throughout my school years, signifying my otherness. In returning to Korea, I expected to see everyone with black hair, like mine. Instead, I found brown hair, blond, red, even blue hair all around, all dyed. Chairman Chung and men of his generation are the only ones with jet-black hair, theirs dyed, too, of course.
“Neh,” I say. I
’ve answered a negative question in the affirmative, which means no in English but yes in Korean. I don’t want to get kicked in the shins.
“She ever tell you why she left home?”
“Anyo.”
“Her freshman year at Ewha, she picked up somewhere that I had been involved in the 5.18 Incident.” He speaks deliberately, his words measured. “Gwangju Uprising back in 1980. I’m sure you saw in Western press about the . . . what happened there. Soldiers firing on demonstrators, killing some one hundred people, though reported numbers are exaggerated. She found out I was a colonel, commanding officer of one of the paratrooper units there . . .
“Jee Yeon is so idealistic, just so naive. I suppose she knew I was protégé of General Park Chung Hee, and I got started in business thanks to support from General Chun Doo Hwan. General Chun was Military Academy 11th Class, two years my sunbei. He was a leader, along with later president, Roh Tae Woo, in Hanahoe, that secret group of elite officers within ROK Army that had the patronage of President Park. Hanahoe plotted to take over the country, restore order. Chun sunbei took me under his wing, taught me everything I know about being a leader, and a patriot.”
You say Hanahoe, I say junta; but I keep the thought to myself.
“In 1979, 12.12, following the death of President Park, then General Chun and his Hanahoe cohorts succeeded in a coup d’état. As de facto leader of country, General Chun declared martial law. We needed stability in our country at that time.” Like many lifelong army men, Jee Yeon’s father evinces a sacred belief in the military as a moral authority, a necessary force in a disorderly, dissolute society. “Well, the students and citizens of Gwangju disagreed. They wanted freedom immediately. They were like children wanting their candy. General Chun decreed: order first, then freedom. Starting in April 1980, people started staging protests.” He closes his eyes.
I sense where this is headed, and my stomach clenches.
“At first, they were peaceful,” he says. “We let them do their childish venting. Demanding an end to martial law, and free speech, democratic elections, everything—right away. Then the protests spread, they got unruly. Daily skirmishes with local police. In mid-May, a student from Jeonnam University lit himself on fire, to protest US President Reagan’s support of Chun’s autocratic rule. Protest US support!” He opens his fiery eyes again. “Did this ingrate not realize where we’d be today without US intervention in 6.25 War? We’d all be eating gruel in unified Communist Korea!” He shakes his head.
The grainy photo comes back to me, a thin man burning himself alive in the middle of a thoroughfare in Gwangju. He remained sitting in a lotus position as flames swallowed his body.
“The student’s self-immolation lit the fuse. Protests just spiraled out of control. On May 18, about two hundred students who’d gathered at Jeonnam University overpowered thirty riot policemen. Protesters gathered a few hundred more people, and the mob marched on downtown Gwangju. It was then I was sent down there by Major General Chun to suppress the revolt. That’s what it was, a revolt. Threatened to undo everything we’d worked so hard to make. I was one of the two commanders of 680 paratroopers from the 33rd and 35th battalions of the 7th Airborne Brigade. We got intelligence there were radical elements, Communist sympathizers, including one Kim Dae Jung, among the organizers. They were a threat to order.”
One man’s revolt, I think, is another man’s democratization movement.
“We were there as a show of force, to deter further rioting. But when the mob saw real soldiers, they started throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at us. A few men under my command caught on fire. You ever smell burning flesh?”
“Anyo,” I say.
“We held the line until the 20th. That day, a huge, unruly mob gathered in front of Gwangju Station. They’d looted a police armory nearby, and many of them had M1 rifles and carbines. And, remember, these were not kids but dangerous people with training from their military service.”
“They shot first?”
“It was chaos. To this day, I don’t know who fired the first shots. But I can tell you, contrary to later reports, I did not get any official order from Major General Chun to shoot at the citizens. I did not order the shooting . . . Tear gas, yes, but not live rounds.”
“But someone did.”
“Lee Yisa, you’ve never been in battle. A battlefield is chaos. That’s what it was that day. There were shots, I don’t know from which side first, but my paratroopers did what they were trained to do. They overwhelmed the enemy with force.”
The enemy? “But they were innocent civilians,” I say, trying to control my voice. “Some six hundred of them got killed—”
He turns his dragon eyes on me. “Son, there were no innocent people that day.”
“I read the soldiers used bayonets on the people. I heard they were crazed from amphetamines and steroids the army fed them—”
“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers. We did what we had to do to protect our country. They grew into a militia, and it took us six days to suppress them, and restore order in Gwangju.” He sighs. “Dark chapter in our history. But a soldier does his duty.”
I remember the look on Abuji’s face when he heard the news of the Gwangju Massacre back when I was in junior high school. A look of black horror. “The curse on the country has finally come home,” he said. Soldiers killing our own people. He tried to hide the news photos. But I saw them. Men and women in civilian clothes getting clubbed, blood dripping down their faces, young men getting dragged by their hair by soldiers wearing gas masks, bloodstained corpses lining the streets. A wailing woman, carrying the limp body of a small boy in her arms.
“For shame, for shame,” Abuji kept saying. “Not even Kim Il Sung in North does this.” He condemned General Chun as “the Butcher of Gwangju.”
Abuji drank that evening. I can still hear the clink of the ice cubes in his glass of Chivas and see his tobacco-stained fingers as he smoked Marlboros all night. He said, “Today, I am ashamed to be Korean.” Words I thought I’d never hear from Abuji’s mouth.
“That’s why Jee Yeon left home,” Chairman Chung says. “She held me to blame for the atrocities in Gwangju. I had someone keep tabs on her, of course. Just to make sure she was all right, stayed out of big trouble. I knew she’d come back. She’d left her cello behind.
“And I have to give her credit—she never once came home to beg for money. Tough little cookie. Wish her brother had her toughness.”
Parents don’t choose their children, any more than we choose our parents. Their choice is in accepting who we are.
“My ttal, she has a good heart. She just needs the right man.” He reaches over, puts a heavy hand on my thigh. “Lee Yisa, I know you’ll take care of her.” It’s an order, not a request.
“I’ll do my best, sir,” I say. As if his daughter needed taking care of, this woman who found the music in her soul despite the dark secrets in her father’s past.
26
Mid-March 1998
As we enter the Ilsung Motors factory grounds in Changwon, we see smoke billowing out of the two tall chimneys that stand like minarets above the industrial complex. Jack and I have come to Changwon on a site visit as part of our seller due diligence—though I have my own reasons. The front gate is chained; behind it, a crowd, men with red bandannas around their heads, shouting in unison. We identify ourselves as “consultants,” and, after some checking, they let us through.
“Come one, come all,” Jack says. “Step right up and enjoy the show. Behold the wondrous acts inside the Ilsung circus tent.”
Inside the compound, we see the smoke is not from the chimneys. Someone has set fire to a container, its steel exterior melting like a wilting flower as it sends spirals of thick black smoke skyward. A helicopter whirs through the smoke. We pass the demonstrators seated on the ground in rows, chanting, fists pumping in rhythm. Many of them have ski goggles on their foreheads. There is debris all around, and the ground below them is uneven
, rolling, as in a Hundertwasser structure. I can taste burned metal on my tongue, and it makes me queasy.
The cheer has been wiped off Jack’s face. “Maybe we should come back another day,” he says.
“We’re here,” I say. “Let’s do our diligence.” I tell him to go find the CFO’s office, where we’re expected, and I’ll join him shortly.
I cross the compound in search of the paint and finish factory building. There is a fence along the perimeter, and on the other side I see green vinyl tents with hand-painted signs, HOPE TENTS. The women there are middle-aged and some elderly, leaning on canes, and their wailing has an undulating rhythm of its own. They wave handkerchiefs at their husbands and sons inside the compound. Their tear-soaked handkerchiefs barely flutter in the wind. Some hold up posters that read, WE ARE WITH YOU and COME BACK SAFELY. As I walk by, a couple of women, sobbing, plead with me to take some kimbap and bottled water to their husbands. One woman asks me to bring her son some Choco Pies. The sight of the distinctive brown-and-red wrappers stops me in my tracks. The chocolate snacks of my childhood. My madeleines.
When I was six, I limped home to Umma after skinning my knee from a bicycle fall. She brought out the red bottle of Akajinki, and I ran away. She coaxed me back with the promise of a Choco Pie. Umma applied the iodine tincture with a Q-tip, leaving an orange areola, and blew on it. Then she gave me, as a reward for being such a brave boy, a Choco Pie. The exquisite pleasure of my first bite of the chocolate-marshmallow sponge overwhelmed the senses. Licking the gooey chocolate off my fingers made me forget all about the sting. From then on, whenever something bad happened to me, Umma would give me the chocolate treat. When I got a polio inoculation or didn’t get invited to a friend’s birthday party, when Appa left for America, she was there with a Choco Pie. She said every bad thing that happened could be offset by a bite of Choco Pie.
Offerings Page 14
