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  * * *

  When they met the following year, Shin gave Choi a fresh belief in herself, while she gave him inspiration. They fell in love. Soon enough the talk made its way back to Kim Hak-Sung, who threatened to beat up both Choi and Shin if they didn’t break off the affair. He leaked gossip to the papers, which ran headlines about Choi Eun-Hee, the infamous adulteress, who was now abandoning her crippled husband to run off with a younger man. Shin was accused of callously stealing an elder’s wife, a shameful display in a country deeply steeped in Confucian values of respect for family, marriage, and one’s elders. The young director found himself frozen out of the mostly conservative South Korean film industry.

  But now Choi had finally had enough. The affair becoming public had almost been a relief. The guilt had tortured her, but now it was all in the open, and with Shin’s unwavering affection, she was ready to stand up for herself. She sued for divorce and won. The moment she left the courtroom, she went straight to Shin. Chased by journalists, who had pitched camp at every friendly address at which they might turn up, the couple dashed into the first cheap motel they found and took a room. “Please remember today,” Shin told her, as he pulled her to him. “March 7, 1954. Let today be our wedding day.” He didn’t believe in institutions, but they held to it as to any commitment made in a church. The next morning they woke up covered in bedbug bites, but with huge smiles on their faces. To Choi, the motel was the most beautiful honeymoon spot in the world, insect-ridden mattress, thin dirty walls, and all.

  * * *

  Shin and Choi’s union would prove to be as professionally successful as it was personally fulfilling. They made four films together in the first three years of their marriage. The fourth, A Flower in Hell, starred Choi as a yangbuin girl and was shot in a neorealist style influenced by the Italian director Roberto Rossellini. It received rapturous critical praise, and critics still consider it the finest Korean film of the 1950s. The next year, 1959, he directed his wife again in the melodrama A College Woman’s Confession, in which Choi played a poor, orphaned law student who is taken in by a local official’s family and rises to become a judge. The film was a smash hit, running in cinemas for over a month. That same year Shin directed five more films, all of them melodramas starring Choi and all of them, in the span of just twelve months, box-office hits.

  The film that clearly established Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee as the leading lights of the Korean film industry was the The Tale of Chunhyang, a big-budget adaptation of one of Korea’s most beloved folk tales, which Shin decided to make in 1960 even though Hong Seong-Ki, the most bankable Korean film director of the day, was already making his own version of the story, starring his own wife, Kim Ji-Mi, the country’s most popular actress. Hong owned the largest movie house in Seoul, and because of the market value of his and his wife’s names, he had already been able to block-book his film in theaters across the country, guaranteeing that it would be given a major release on a vast number of screens.

  None of this fazed Shin. He had decided he would be making his own Chunhyang, and not just that: he would be making it in Technicolor and CinemaScope, the first CinemaScope film in Korea. The process would cost nearly three times more than the biggest-budget film of the day, using expensive Kodak film stock that had to be sent to Japan to be processed. And he would let Hong release his film first, on Lunar New Year’s Day, 1961, then release his own ten days later. It was an unprecedentedly bold decision, considering how high the stakes were: failure would bankrupt Shin Film.

  The films shot almost simultaneously, and the industry whipped itself up into a competitive frenzy trying to predict who would come out of it triumphant. There were reports of sabotage between the two productions; just days before Shin’s version was to be released his office was broken into and one of his staff members briefly kidnapped, in a failed bid to force Shin to delay the release of his film.

  New Year’s arrived. Hong’s film was released. Its ticket sales were disappointing, and after fourteen days it was pulled from screens. Ten days after Hong’s film was released Shin’s Chunhyang, starring Choi, hit the screens—and broke every record. It played to sold-out crowds in Seoul’s Myongbo cinema for seventy-four straight days. Nearly four hundred thousand people—more than ten times the audience of the average film, 15 percent of Seoul’s entire population—came to see it in the capital alone, a record that stood for seven years. Later that year, two more Shin Film productions, including the melodrama The Houseguest and My Mother, sold upward of 150,000 tickets each. As one of Shin’s associates put it, “We couldn’t count how much money [we] earned. Every morning, several bags of cash were delivered. We could do whatever we wanted.” The same year, Shin shot a huge-budget historical epic, Prince Yeonsan, in twenty-one days, because he wanted to release it on New Year’s Day again, to repeat the previous year’s success. It became 1962’s highest-grossing film, and Shin became known as the New Year’s Day Showman. Five months later The Houseguest and My Mother won the top prize at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival, Shin Sang-Ok met President Park Chung-Hee, and a decade of unprecedented dominance over the country’s film industry by one man (Shin Sang-Ok) and one company (Shin Film) had begun.

  3

  Shrimp Among Whales

  The South Korea of the 1960s was a deeply wounded nation. An independent, sovereign nation for over a millennium, Korea had the misfortune of being at the meeting place of three of the world’s greatest nations—Russia, China, and Japan—all of which fought and competed over it for centuries. It was Japan, in the end, that successfully annexed the peninsula in 1910, to use it as a launchpad for the invasion of China. The Empire of the Rising Sun had a brutal way of assimilating new colonies. It turned Korea into a gigantic armed camp, deposing the Korean king and replacing him with a repressive military government, which immediately launched a series of mass executions and imprisonments as an example to the local people. Koreans were made to take Japanese names, to worship at Japanese shrines, and to learn Japanese at school. The Japanese army even drove metal spikes into the nation’s sacred hilltops, to destroy what the Korean people saw as their land’s spiritual energy. Heavy taxes—over 50 percent of every harvest—were levied on every farm to support the wars being waged throughout Asia and the Pacific. Men and women were drafted and shipped off to serve the war effort in the army and in factories, and Japanese soldiers stationed in Korea freely and forcefully helped themselves to any Korean girls they wanted for sexual services.

  Japan’s wars of expansion lasted until the summer of 1945, when the U.S. Air Force dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima and Fat Man on Nagasaki, finally bringing a war machine known for its war crimes and suicidal fanaticism to its knees. When Japan’s emperor, Hirohito, surrendered over the radio on August 15, 1945, acquiescing to a treaty that formally required him to accept that he literally was no longer a god, many Japanese locked themselves in their homes, sobbing. Others committed ritual suicide, unable to cope with a world in which deities could be deposed by signed treaty. The people of Korea, for their part, ran cheering through the streets and threw spontaneous parades, waving both Soviet and American flags, unsure where their liberators had come from but sure of their gratitude. The first men of the U.S. Army to arrive in Seoul found a nineteenth-century city of single-story buildings, horse-drawn carts, and charcoal-motored vehicles, with not a single European face to be seen. The human excrement Koreans still used to fertilize the rice paddies gave the country a distinctive, thick stink in the clammy summer air.

  Back in Washington, the realities of geopolitics took over. The Soviet army was already marching into Korea from the northern side, and President Harry Truman tasked his secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, with coming up with a plan to favorably determine Korea’s fate. Stettinius, who had run General Motors and U.S. Steel and had participated in the creation of the United Nations, allegedly had to ask his staff where exactly Korea was. Stettinius’s men came up with a plan to divide Korea in half, forming a temporar
y trusteeship—the Soviets looking after the North, the Americans after the South—until a further plan had been agreed. Looking on the map for the best place to partition the peninsula, the American administrative officers scratched a line across the thirty-eighth parallel.

  Never in its history had Korea been divided in this way. That the Korean people, innocent bystanders of the war who yearned for freedom, were about to see their country carved up and occupied dumbfounded them. It also felt uncomfortably similar to the way the Japanese occupation had begun. The Japanese emperors, from Meiji to Hirohito, had seemed uninterested in Korea itself, viewing the proud nation as little more than a stepping-stone to China. Now Moscow and Washington faced off on Korean soil. It is one thing to undergo decades of horror and degradation as a conquered enemy. It is another to be an afterthought, of no real worth even to your oppressor.

  The Koreans had an old saying: in a fight among whales, a shrimp’s back always breaks. Korea had been a shrimp among whales for centuries. In May 1948 the United Nations oversaw elections in the South, which installed Syngman Rhee as the new Republic of Korea’s first president. Rhee had lived in exile in the United States since 1904, had studied at George Washington University, Yale, and Princeton, and had married an Austrian woman. The elections took place against a backdrop of violence, instability, and corruption. In the North, Stalin installed as leader a baby-faced thirty-six-year-old Korean officer of his Red Army, Kim Il-Sung, who had joined the Soviet forces in the late 1930s when his own independent guerrilla efforts against the Japanese had ended in failure. Kim had no political experience and was no intellectual, but he was a self-disciplined and promising officer, with a reputation for reliability, bravery, and pragmatism. He spoke Korean, Chinese, and Russian, and was popular with the resistance fighters and Soviet-Koreans who would form the core of North Korea’s first leading elite. A parallel government to Syngman Rhee’s was created and called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), committed to the principles of Marxist socialism. Kim Il-Sung was declared its first premier.

  Koreans might have expected that their suffering would end there and that now, even if divided, they would be allowed to rebuild. Not so. As early as June 1950, Kim Il-Sung made an armed attempt at reunifying the peninsula, sending his men, in Soviet tanks and with Soviet advisers by their side, rumbling across the thirty-eighth parallel and into South Korea. The South Koreans were taken completely by surprise, and within two days the DPRK army had occupied Seoul, unfurling huge banner portraits of Stalin and Kim Il-Sung on the government buildings. In the four months it took the United States to put together an army to fight back, the North Koreans committed mass murder, killing over twenty-six thousand South Korean civilians—an average of sixteen hundred men, women, and children a week. They threw open the doors of every prison they encountered, unleashing criminals, from political prisoners to murderers and rapists, onto the streets with authority to form People’s Courts to try and condemn innocent civilians.

  In October 1950, the combined forces of the United States, South Korea, and a coalition of foreign nations, fighting for the first time under the United Nations flag, liberated Seoul and marched north, crossing the thirty-eighth parallel and taking Pyongyang. China, under its new leader, Mao Zedong, joined the fray on the side of the North Koreans, pushing the Allies back and retaking Seoul for the Communists. The UN forces, like a football team returning a punt, pushed back up the field again. In March 1951 they retook Seoul—the fourth time the city had changed hands in under a year. This was the way things would remain for the next two years, with the Communists holding Pyongyang and the Allies holding Seoul, their armies fighting back and forth across the thirty-eighth parallel. It was a brutal and traumatic time for the entire nation. In the countryside, villages and farms were burned to the ground lest they provide shelter for the enemy. Wandering across the razed fields were columns and columns of almost feral refugees, hundreds of thousands who had been left homeless and starving.

  While negotiators worked out small points of argument, the North Koreans wasted time with ridiculous claims and absurd filibustering—one day, the North Koreans stared at their UN counterparts in silence for a full two hours and eleven minutes before standing up and walking out. The armistice, finally signed on July 27, 1953, essentially reinstated the pre-war status quo, except that five million people had died, more than half of them civilians, with many more millions left orphaned, widowed, and homeless. The border at the thirty-eighth parallel was fortified into a 160-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide no-man’s-land of barbed wire, surveillance turrets, and land mines known as the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). And for the first time in a thousand years, the Korean people—who called themselves danil minjok, one people, priding themselves on their sense of unity—had fought to conquer and kill each other.

  * * *

  When Park Chung-Hee took power in 1961, eight years after the end of the Korean War, South Korea was the largest beneficiary of American aid in the third world and fast losing its race for legitimacy with the North, whose gross national product per capita was twice that of the South in spite of much more limited resources. Seoul was one gigantic slum. The country was in dire need of escapism, and there to provide it were Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee.

  Within a few years of founding his company, Shin had become the industry’s leading commercial director and its most influential producer. He ran Shin Film like a Hollywood studio, with directors and screenwriters under contract, working on his own back lot and soundstages, with his own distribution system and its own star system, Choi Eun-Hee its brightest light. He was the first Korean to make a film in Technicolor, the first to make a film in CinemaScope, the first to use a lens as wide as 13 millimeters and a zoom as long as 250 millimeters, the first to attempt a fully synchronized sound film. He made the biggest-budget films and paid Choi the largest fees ever paid to a Korean actress. He became involved in coproductions, most notably with the Shaw Brothers of Hong Kong, long before it was the norm. He allegedly even participated in the writing of President Park’s Motion Picture Laws, which aimed to build up and standardize the practices of South Korea’s film producers to enable them to compete with the giant corporations of Los Angeles and Tokyo, and which many filmmakers—including, eventually, Shin himself—found impossible to work under.

  He made melodramas, thrillers, historical epics, martial arts films, even Manchurian westerns. Some of his films were big and lurid, filmed in bright colors and full of frantic zooms and moving cameras. Others he shot in restrained black and white, the camera still, the compositions painterly and deliberate. In the same year he might make a tame melodrama and follow it up with a film so erotic it threw censors into disarray: he found box-office success with both. He adapted Maupassant novels and then made ludicrous horror movies about vampiric cats, or about demon snakes transforming themselves into beautiful women in order to seduce Buddhist monks. He brought the spaghetti western to Korea, importing Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and making them huge hits, along with Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs and Bruce Lee’s The Big Boss. He held highly publicized talent searches through which he discovered new faces who quickly became the biggest stars in Korean films. He gave dozens of young film directors their start. At its peak in the mid-1960s, less than half a decade after opening for business, Shin Film employed more than three hundred people and turned out thirty films a year. In 1968 Shin bought the huge Anyang Film Studios south of Seoul, a twenty-acre facility that had been built a decade earlier but was unused since because of its scale, and put every stage and studio there back to work. He started a record company, a theater troupe, and an acting school, the latter of which was run by Choi Eun-Hee. In all of it Choi was an equal partner, inspiring the vast majority of Shin’s stories and often investing her own money into the projects.

  All this success was built on Shin and Choi’s ability to deliver escapist fantasies to working people, so recently traumatized by occu
pation and war, who longed to escape the struggle and hard graft of their daily lives. They also delivered in their personal lives. Shin and Choi were South Korea’s most glamorous couple. Shin was strikingly tall in his expensive suits, tailored in a style more French than American, his collar casually open at the neck and his hair in a Richard Burton–like splash over his forehead; Choi was always in the latest fashions, her hair cut in the trendiest styles.

  The cinemas themselves were a popular place to be: air-conditioned and cool during Korea’s hot, muggy summers, warm and cozy during the blisteringly cold winters. For a low admission price, especially in the provinces, families could escape their poorly insulated homes and spend the whole day in the cinema, watching the same film sometimes two or three times in a row.

  Shin’s films were the most popular in the country. And his loyalty was only to film, not to any politician or ideology. It’s difficult to know what exactly Shin believed in, other than himself. He mocked peers who wanted to be auteurs while clearly craving the epithet himself. He made films that clearly called for women’s liberation while publicly stating that to think his films did that was “just wrong,” adding, “I personally admire Confucianism.” He valued screenwriters, paying them huge sums of money and buying up all the best book and radio properties to adapt, but at the same time claimed that his films were mainly visual and that he wished he could screen them backward so as to negate their plots. “I really despise these pretensions of being an artist,” Shin said during that period of success, “and pretending to have some sort of social conscience, that’s just the worst.…”