The Yeongwol Cluster
Hee-jun could not quiet the pounding in his chest. It was the same feeling that had taken hold of him when Kijo first proposed exporting Yeongwol's tungsten to America. That night, in the model house Kijo had lent him for lodging, he had not slept at all.
What if someone already knows about the coal at Dogye — the mine no one has opened yet — and breaks ground before we do? The impatience gnawed at him. He wanted to say it now, this very moment: buy the land at Dogye, and buy the mining rights with it.
Hee-jun steadied himself with an effort, and asked.
"Do we really have to lay conveyor the whole fourteen kilometers?"
"No. We put a coal yard in along the way, and the belt only has to run that far."
"A coal yard? Something like a reservoir?"
"A place to hold the coal we take out of the mine. We gather it there, then truck it on to the station. I think the yard ought to stand here."
Kijo drew a circle on the map. It fell where the mountains broke and the flat country began, on the far side of the ridge from the mine. The conveyor, then, would need to cover only six kilometers out from the pit.
"Well. I'd been afraid to think what the belt might cost. If it's only six kilometers, that's a relief."
Hee-jun brightened once the haul was cut by more than half. The tungsten venture had already swallowed a considerable sum. Had it been his own money, he could have spent it with an easy heart; putting his brother-in-law's capital to work left a weight on him, light as it was.
To that uneasy man, Kijo said,
"President Park, there's another resource that matters in this Yeongwol where we're doing business."
"Another resource? You mean there's something else we ought to be investing in?"
At the question Kijo nodded, and set a finger to a place on the map.
"There's a great deal of limestone buried around here."
"Limestone? You mean the raw material for cement?"
"Yes. Look at the map. Here, where the river bends."
"The water turns a full hundred and eighty degrees."
The ground Kijo had indicated was an uncanny thing. It looked like the Korean peninsula itself, ringed round by the sea.
"From this stretch on down to a place called Ssangyong-ri, the ground is packed with limestone."
"Ssangyong-ri? Twin dragons? Now that's a fine name. Two dragons — it sounds like the two of us, President Lee. Ha ha ha!"
Kijo laughed lightly at the joke. He knew that the Ssangyong of the Ssangyong Group would take its name from Ssangyong-ri in Yeongwol County, and that Ssangyong Cement Industrial — the firm that would begin by raising a plant on that very ground — would be the seed of the group itself.
He drew his finger along the railroad inked on the map, from Dogye in Samcheok clear through to Yeongwol.
"Coal dug at Dogye, tungsten from Sangdong Mine, and the limestone — all of it gathers in Yeongwol. Yeongwol becomes the place where every one of these ventures begins."
Hee-jun nodded.
"Then Yeongwol will be home ground for the partnership between AMKO and Cheongsan."
"That's right. What takes shape here is a cluster of the two companies."
Hee-jun's chest swelled. Tungsten, coal, limestone. All three minerals, overseen and worked from a single region. It was the foothold AMKO needed if it was to rise as a fully integrated mining company.
"But does limestone have to be won by driving tunnels, the way we do with tungsten and coal?"
"No. You simply cut the mountain down whole."
Kijo said it as a matter of course.
"Cut it down?"
"Limestone sits at the surface. What lies underground dissolves away into the groundwater. It's easier work than a coal mine. You blast the mountain with dynamite — and it won't be long before there's dynamite made here at home."
"Ah. I see."
Hee-jun looked at him with a smile of relief.
On the outside, Kijo was an ordinary man in his twenties. If anything about him caught the eye, it was a bright complexion, a clear and healthy gaze, and a face that was handsome in a neat, compact way. That was the whole of it.
And yet from the day Hee-jun had bound his fate to this ordinary young man, everything had changed. Kijo had saved his younger sister and his brother-in-law, turned the whole family's life around, and now he was helping Hee-jun toward the great enterprise he himself had dreamed of.
Born the eldest son of a wealthy house in Pyongyang, Hee-jun had at Kijo's age already been what his world called an intellectual — a man come home from study in Japan. But the one who seemed the true intellectual, the one who looked like a rich man's son, was Kijo.
How much he knew, this man who had never even finished elementary school. He set out the path of a business as if he were turning the pages of a plan already written. And the size of his nerve: vast undertakings he spoke of with perfect calm, not a shade of exaggeration, as if they were nothing very much.
Hee-jun watched him in wonder. This bond with Kijo seemed a strange thing, and a precious one.
"You'll have to ask your brother-in-law for more capital. Will that... be all right?"
When Kijo spoke of Roberts, Hee-jun's brother-in-law, the older man nodded.
"Of course. He'll look into it properly and decide for himself. Roberts strikes me as a man who invests boldly, once he sees the chance. He'll see clearly enough what Yeongwol can be."
Perhaps it bothered him that he had sounded so certain. A moment later he added,
"The decision on tungsten wasn't made lightly either. Roberts went into Korean tungsten in real detail. Coal and cement will be the same, I'm sure of it. I've learned my brother-in-law isn't as soft a man as all that. Ha."
Kijo had never supposed that a man of a banking house would be careless. Even so, he was sure of himself where the export of Korean tungsten concentrate was concerned. When the tungsten of Sangdong Mine had gone to America in 1947, a United States testing agency had gone so far as to call its quality the standard of the world market.
Whether Roberts would lend the money this coal-and-cement business required was another matter entirely.
He would not have settled on the tungsten venture merely because a brother-in-law had entered the family, nor out of sentiment for the Korea in which he had fought. High-grade Korean tungsten had simply been too sound a proposition to refuse. This time the business was coal and cement for the Korean market alone. Whether he would put the money up with a glad heart was an open question. He would have to be certain that capital sunk into Korea could be got back out again.
Kijo hoped he might lay before Roberts the future of Korea as he knew it, and bring the man to believe it.
Korea would keep on growing, even under the threat of war.
Take cement alone. Until 1970 the country would be unable to make what it needed, and would bring the rest in from abroad. In this year, 1955, there was not a single cement plant at work in the South. Only in 1956 would the one plant at Samcheok turn out 180,000 tons. By 1961 the plants would number three, and even then they would manage barely 720,000 tons. Not until 1971 — ten years after that — would Korea at last fill the 6.87 million tons it required. The cement business had room to grow thirty-eight-fold in sixteen years.
He hoped Roberts would look upon the bright years of Korea's postwar reconstruction and give the investment his approval.
Alone, Kijo had not the strength to raise both a coal operation and a cement plant. The brick business and the construction work for the U.S. Army had made him a good deal of money, but not enough to drive the two ventures at once. And yet if they waited until Hee-jun's tungsten began to pay, and only then bought the coal mine and the limestone mountain at Yeongwol, the price would leap clean out of sight.
Right now.
Before the railroad that would carry the coal was finished, and before the order disposing of mining rights took effect — this was the cheapest hour there would ever be.
Even so, Kijo let the wanting go. He had lived through more than one life, and he had learned that fretting changed nothing. What was meant to come would come. What was not, would not.
He was simply grateful to Roberts. The man had sent an oceangoing freighter, and he had put money into the tungsten mine. That was enough. Kijo had no wish to go on taking his help under the cloak of having once saved his life. From here on, he wanted the two of them to give and receive help as equals.
"When you go back to America, please tell Roberts I'm grateful. Be sure of it."
"Of course. I will."
"And give him this, as well..."
Kijo held out a document written in English. He had prepared it because he wanted to be of use to Roberts.
"What is this?"
"I understand the Roberts family is a house of investment banking. This is an investment report I wrote."
"An investment report?"
"I've cast it in the form of a letter. Ask him only to read it through once."
"Ah. If I tell him it's a letter from President Lee, my brother-in-law will certainly read it."
In the report, Kijo set down three places where the money ought to go.
The first was this. Roberts should go to San Bernardino, California, where his own bank did its business, and seek out a hamburger shop called McDonald's. If the hamburgers were good, and if he judged the business sound enough, he should find a man named Ray Kroc and invest in that man's franchise.
The restaurant company that would one day span the world was, at that moment, locked in a quarrel with the McDonald brothers. Ray Kroc had established a corporation of his own and was preparing to open his first store. The franchise had not prospered from the start. It lived from one shortage of cash to the next, and four years on, in 1959, an employee's embezzlement would drop it into a financial crisis of real severity. In the end it would take a transfusion of $1.5 million from three insurance companies, and pay for the money by signing over 22.5 percent of McDonald's stock.
It had come to that because banks too proud to bend would not lend to a restaurant franchise. But if Roberts's bank were the one to invest, that $1.5 million in shares would, by 1990, have leapt to an equity value of $1.6 billion. It was a story thirty-five years off. Kijo had lived those years, though, and he knew how quickly thirty-five years pass. If Roberts could only endure the wait, he would, sometime in his fifties, close his hand on a fortune of two trillion won.
The second point was that Roberts should turn his eye to the technology firms of Palo Alto, California. Palo Alto lay at the far end of Silicon Valley, the country that began up at San Francisco, and already, from the 1950s, technology companies were taking root there. Of all the firms in that place, Kijo named exactly one. Shockley Semiconductor, still a startup.
It was the company that would be founded by William Shockley, the man who in 1956 would receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the transistor. The firm itself would never grow. The engineers who came out of it, though, would set off the second semiconductor revolution. If the development of the transistor had been the first, the second was the integrated circuit — the IC — which gathered transistors together on a single chip. The great companies born of Shockley's children would be Intel and AMD.
Kijo advised Roberts to watch the engineers at their work more closely than Shockley Semiconductor itself. The place held a great many able men, he wrote; when they walked out on Shockley and founded companies of their own, that would be the time to invest.
The last of it was a suggestion that a McDonald's franchise be given to Hee-jun's father, Park Chang-hyun.
An Asian man, living under the discrimination of America, would have little he was permitted to do. Open a restaurant, Kijo recommended, where his father-in-law might busy himself and fill his days; it would be good for the old man's peace of mind as well. A McDonald's franchise did not require the owner to stand at the counter himself. Headquarters would train the staff directly, and the franchisee could manage the store and its people from out of sight. From the street, no one could tell in the least whether a Korean ran the place or a white man did.
McDonald's would go on growing for forty years and more, and the land beneath its stores would keep rising with it. Kijo wanted Park Chang-hyun — a man who would otherwise sit in America with nothing to do, and despair of it — to feel the joy of a life still being lived.
Hee-jun took the letter never guessing that Kijo had gone so far as to include a request on his father's behalf, and slipped it into his bag.
Kijo thought it would be all right even if Roberts read the letter and did not follow it. An American banker was hardly likely to fall in easily with advice sent by the owner of a brick works living in Korea. But in ten years, or in twenty, the regret would find him all the same — the thought that he ought to have done as the letter said. If Roberts came looking for him then and asked how to place his money, Kijo would still be able to point him toward the investments that suited the sixties and the seventies. Even short of that, it would be enough if Roberts simply came to know that the advice had been offered in earnest, and that it had been of use.
He watched Hee-jun, partner to him now and bright with the dream of it. The man was full of a businessman's daring, and of a businessman's diligence. To be in partnership with someone like that, he thought, was a blessing of its own.
He was still in that thought when Hee-jun spoke.
"It seems to me Cheongsan means to draw everything into one vertical chain."
"Yes. That's my aim for this year. Begin with cement and brick, and go on from there into construction. From coal, all the way to the boilers. I mean to build it from the first step to the last."
And Kijo showed him the confident smile that had become his trademark.