Chapter 117
TITLE: Lim Dae-hong
Hyun-su, the man who had dismissed Lim Dae-hong, brought him back with Seogwang. When the jeep rolled into the factory yard, Kim Seogwang hauled Lim Dae-hong out by the arm as if he were a criminal under arrest. The sight pained Ki-jo, but there was nothing to be done. He had wanted to tell them, when they went to fetch the man, to treat him with proper courtesy — and yet he had known that if they did, Dae-hong would never come quietly.
Ki-jo walked up to him as he stepped down from the jeep, bowed, and introduced himself.
"How do you do? I'm Lee Ki-jo, president of Cheongsan Seasoning. If my people were rude to you, I apologize. Allow me to apologize properly."
Lim Dae-hong was thrown by the courtesy. All the more so, because he was the one who had come to Ki-jo's factory meaning to steal the manufacturing process. Ki-jo could feel that unease in him.
"Please come to the office with me. There's something I'd like to discuss."
Shown into an empty office where no one else was about, Lim Dae-hong sat down at the conference table and watched Ki-jo with an anxious face.
"Some time ago, you were selling a seasoning you'd made yourself on the streets of Jongno, weren't you?"
Ki-jo began with the old story.
"How did you...?"
"Right after you stopped by the seolleongtang house in Jongno, I tasted the soup with the seasoning you'd made stirred in."
"Ah, that was..."
Color rose in Lim Dae-hong's face.
"It was a rough product. The market closed on you almost at once. I imagine it was the Ajinomoto the smugglers were selling."
Ki-jo could not bring himself to add that he had been that smuggler. It would have been too cruel. Instead he offered something meant to lift the man.
"It was perfectly good, though. The owner said he wouldn't use it, so I bought it and put it in the doenjang soup and kimchi stew I made at home. For household cooking, it did very well."
"Did it?"
A little of the tension left Lim Dae-hong's face. He let out a sigh and said, "I apologize for trying to steal the technology from this factory."
"No. It's all right. The truth is, we stole the manufacturing method from Japan ourselves."
Dae-hong drew a little strength from that.
"Actually, I meant to go to Japan myself this year and bring Ajinomoto's technology back. Then I heard the talk about this place and came to see it, and the factory was put together so tightly that I just..."
"I understand. I would have done the same."
When Ki-jo brushed the matter aside as if it were nothing, Dae-hong's heart grew considerably lighter.
"Would you care to look around the factory with me? Please feel free to check whatever you wanted to know."
"Wh-why would you show me that? It's a trade secret..."
Ki-jo was stifled. With Dae-hong staring straight at him, he could not say the thing outright and be done with it. He had been able to build the Cheongsan Seasoning factory only by following, step for step, the path Lim Dae-hong had walked in the original history. He thought of the man as a benefactor, and he wanted to lay before him every part of the process he had learned in Japan. He would not have minded if Dae-hong copied it and raised a factory of his own. He was confident. They were already well ahead in making glutamic acid by acid hydrolysis, and if competitors caught up, he would simply pull ahead again with fermented seasoning.
Dae-hong, who could know nothing of those plans or of the debt Ki-jo felt he owed, looked at him strangely.
"I'd like you to go into business with me. I have ties in the Gyeongin region — Seoul and Incheon — and in Busan, but none in Jeolla or Chungcheong."
At that, Lim Dae-hong nodded. He owned a leather factory in his hometown of Jeongeup, in North Jeolla, and in the original history he had built the Miwon plant in Gunsan. That had come much later, in 1986, and it had been a factory turning out LS lysine, a feed additive — but his roots did lie in Chungcheong and Jeolla. In the old days North Jeolla and South Chungcheong had passed districts back and forth, and the line between them had never been a clean one.
"You mean each of us takes the ground where he has roots, and handles the sales there?"
"Yes. And we'd share the trademark."
Ki-jo showed him the Miwon logo and mark kept in the office. A sign painter had drawn it.
"Miwon, you say?"
Lim Dae-hong tilted his head over the very trademark and logo he himself had made in the original history. To Ki-jo's surprise, his face said he did not care for it.
How can this be?
Ki-jo was thrown.
"This is altogether too much like Ajinomoto..."
He was pointing out the likeness to the logo he had created in that other history. Ki-jo rubbed his jaw and wondered whether this was some butterfly effect his return to the past had set loose. When Lim Dae-hong's answer proved lukewarm, he tried another offer.
"You don't have to take the partnership. Come and look around the factory with me. Stay as long as you like."
He had not even agreed, and yet here was Ki-jo freely opening the very technology he had come to steal. Lim Dae-hong stared at him, bewildered, as if he suspected a trap somewhere in the kindness. Even so, he rose and went with Ki-jo out onto the factory floor.
Ki-jo showed him every corner of the gluten processor and the stone kiln, and walked him through the process.
"Splendid. Truly splendid..."
Watching him marvel, Ki-jo felt a tight corner of his heart loosen a little. Lim Dae-hong, studying the machines in detail, spoke as if to himself.
"At a scale like this, you could sell everything you turn out across the whole country... Why offer a partnership at all..."
The moment Ki-jo heard that tone, he knew the man would not go into business with him. Even so, he wanted to help him as far as he could.
"For a seasoning plant, you'd do well to build in Gunsan, in North Jeolla, where there's a port."
He was advising him to set the factory near a harbor, so that the fermented seasoning which would soon become the mainstream would be easier to make.
"And take one of the stone kilns with you. We can always build another."
"You're simply giving me a stone kiln? Why would you do that?"
Lim Dae-hong's face said he could make no sense at all of the goodwill being shown him.
Just take it, you stubborn man. I'm doing this because my conscience won't sit still.
Ki-jo swallowed the thought and said, "The reason I went into the seasoning business at all is that I learned you were making a domestic seasoning. Please take it as a token of respect for the man who gave me the motive to begin."
It was the most rational account he could give.
"Hmm..."
Lim Dae-hong considered a moment, then spoke with a set face. "I'm grateful for the offer of partnership, but I must decline. And I won't take the stone kiln either."
Refusing even the kiln was unexpected, but Ki-jo accepted the decision without argument. The Lim Dae-hong standing before him matched the man he had studied and pictured in his mind. Even in Japan, seeking the technology, he had turned down technicians who offered to hand it over if he only paid. He refused the short road. However long it took, he meant to make every part of it with his own hands. Reading that story, Ki-jo had thought: here was a man who could not rest until he had understood and carried out everything himself. It suited the chairman the Miwon Group would one day have — a man who shut himself in the laboratory, built another lab at home, and worked straight through the holidays.
"Are you quite certain?"
"Yes. I'm sorry I tried to steal the technology from the Cheongsan factory. And my temperament is rather particular. Please understand."
"Not at all — understand? I'm the one who should apologize, for failing to be of help."
"Far from it. You've helped me a great deal. I could close my eyes now and see the whole glutamic-acid process at a glance."
In truth he knew the machines, and still did not grasp the process in any detail. Ki-jo had wanted to pass along even the know-how Hyun-su had brought back from Japan, but he let it go.
"I hope that from here on we can compete in good faith. I'll be a worthy rival."
Dae-hong, too, spoke as he took Ki-jo's hand. "Even with the same equipment and the same method, the quality won't be the same. I'll make the finest product I can, as well."
And so the two of them brought the talk to a close. Ki-jo was confident of the contest ahead, but he did not look down on Lim Dae-hong. Even Chairman Lee Byung-chull of Samsung had said there were three things he could not bend to his will — golf, his children, and Miwon. That was the measure of it.
Coming out of the factory, Ki-jo said, "When you go home, let me drive you."
"No. I'll walk. There's too much to think about. I have to decide what to do about a trademark, for a start. Ha ha."
Lim Dae-hong looked unburdened. Ki-jo saw him as far as the factory gate and watched his back as he went. A man who dug a single well — where seasoning was concerned, Lim Dae-hong seemed likely to prove a sterner rival than Lee Byung-chull, who sold whatever breeze happened past.
When Ki-jo turned after seeing him off, the four department heads were loading a wooden crate onto the jeep.
"What's that?"
"Oh, this? A present."
Seogwang said it with a wide grin.
"A present?"
"For the staff and the managers who had such a hard time hauling the beer. The Busan managers pooled their money and bought it."
At that, a sting rose in the tip of Ki-jo's nose.
"Gupo noodles, Japanese gum, and sugar," Dae-ik said.
"Thank you. I had no idea you'd prepared something like this."
"Once I got down to Busan, the noodles were something else. These Gupo noodles — quite the local pride, aren't they? Ha ha."
Seogwang laid it on cheerfully.
"Of course. When it comes to noodles, Busan is first."
Ki-jo, who loved milmyeon — Busan's cold wheat noodles — was glad to agree. During the Korean War, American flour had flooded into Busan, and the city had become the liveliest center of noodle-making in the country. There were several noodle factories there, but Ki-jo had always been partial to Gupo noodles.
"Sir, I'll drive you all the way to Seoul. You can hardly board a train carrying this crate."
Seogwang said it as he ushered Ki-jo into the jeep.
"Already? I could just as well go tomorrow."
They were fairly pushing him along.
"Get home quickly. Madam is worried."
Dae-ik helped Seogwang get him into the jeep. Once Ki-jo was in the car, Seok-mun spoke.
"On the fourteenth, the younger madam telephoned here. She asked what had happened in Busan. She sounded very worried."
Ki-jo nodded. Ma-ryang would have gone home without telling the whole of it, but Soon-young would have caught the scent all the same.
"I didn't say much," Seok-mun went on. "I told her the shipment had gone through safely, and that you were busy with business in Busan."
"Thank you, Manager Oh."
"You're the one who's had the hard time of it, sir."
The jeep Seogwang was driving eased out of the factory yard. Ki-jo spoke to him, knowing the long road ahead.
"Thank you for driving. Let's switch off along the way."
"I'll do the whole of it. Thinking of seeing my wife and my boy, I don't think I'll even notice I'm tired. Ha ha ha."
Ki-jo set off for Seoul in the jeep beside him. Seogwang drove and talked — his impressions of a Busan that had been strange to him, and how he was settling into it. The finest piece of the chatter was this.
"I think I finally see why you changed so much after you'd lived in Busan and come back, sir."
He said it in the gathering dark, when they were nearly to Seoul. Ki-jo was curious what would follow.
"Coming down here, seeing the sea every day and meeting these lively Busan folk — it grows a kind of generous spirit in a man, doesn't it? I think the reason you turned into such a fine figure, compared with when you lived in Deokjeong, is that you lived in Busan. I feel myself getting smarter every day, too. Ha ha ha."
It was nonsense, but Ki-jo laughed and allowed that there was something in it.
"By the way, sir. After you met that Lim Dae-hong, your face brightened. Did something happen?"
"Ah, nothing much. I just felt easy."
"Easy?"
Ki-jo had to put it in terms Seogwang could accept. "Yes. That man nearly went under because of me. When he made a homegrown seasoning before we did, he had to fold the business on account of the Ajinomoto we smuggled in and sold."
"Ah... because of the seasoning you sold in Seoul..."
"I've been sorry about it ever since. Seeing him not ruined — seeing him living and working hard — set my mind at ease."
Seogwang nodded along. When at last they reached Seoul, he set Ki-jo down in Hannam-dong and raced on toward Jongno. At the thought of seeing his wife and his son Yeong-bae for the first time in two months, Seogwang could not keep the grin from his face.