In Order to Beat Lee Byung-chull
Ki-jo stood before the door of Room 300 at the Bando Hotel. The room served as the office of the West German Embassy in Korea. Unusually, Germany had never raised an embassy building of its own in the country. It had always rented space in someone else's, and only in 1976 would it settle on the eighth floor of the Daewoo Building across from Seoul Station and keep that single address for decades. It struck him as a thoroughly German notion—rational, and practical. He knocked on the door of Room 300 with the papers he hoped would persuade such a people.
A Korean member of the staff opened the door.
"Welcome, Chairman Lee. Please come in."
He stepped inside, and Michael Graf, who had been hammering away at a typewriter, sprang to his feet and offered his hand. The other German staff recognized Ki-jo as well and greeted him. Every one of them was a face he had come to know at the West German Day held at Mac O.
"You've come to see the Ambassador."
"Yes. It is an honor to be invited to the embassy."
Rather than leave it to the Korean clerk, Michael showed him in himself. Whenever he brought his family to Mac O, the manager looked after them down to the smallest thing, and he had been wanting to return the kindness somehow. Graf, the commercial consul, stepped up and knocked on Ambassador Hertz's door.
"Mr. Ambassador, Chairman Lee Ki-jo has arrived."
"Come in."
Graf smiled and held the door open. As Ki-jo stepped into the ambassador's office, Hertz welcomed him warmly.
"Good of you to come. A little cramped, isn't it?"
The room was crammed with Korean things, for all the world like a folk museum. It resembled the study of a scholar of Korea far more than an embassy office. He was, in fact, a doctor of philosophy, and a student of Asian civilization besides.
"Thank you for the invitation, Mr. Ambassador."
"The honor is mine, that I am able to invite you, Mr. Lee. Please, sit."
Seated across from him on the sofa, Ki-jo brought out the small gift he had prepared—a dol hareubang, one of the stone grandfathers of Jeju, carved at his request by Director Oh Seok-mun in Busan. Ambassador Hertz took it and broke into a bright, delighted smile. Ki-jo used the moment to glance around the room. There was no dol hareubang among the ambassador's things. A relief.
"And what is this little stone figure meant to signify?"
As he had expected, Hertz was interested.
"It is a stone figure of a man, made only on Jeju Island. It fills much the same role as the jangseung on the mainland, the guardian posts set at the entrance to a village."
As he spoke, Ki-jo indicated a photograph hanging in the room: Hertz himself, posed before a jangseung. Other pictures from Gyeongju lined the walls as well, taken before Cheomseongdae, the ancient stone observatory, and before Seokguram, the grotto shrine.
"I see. A totem, then. Jeju must have a great deal of basalt."
The ambassador ran a hand over the dol hareubang as he said it.
"It does. They say that if a woman rubs the nose of that totem, she will bear a son."
"Is that so? Then I shall have to lend it to Consul Michael for a little while."
He laughed.
They talked on warmly about Jeju, and Ki-jo smiled to see the ambassador set the dol hareubang with care upon his desk. Even so, he wondered why the man had sent for him. If any time remained once they had spoken, he meant to hand over the materials on the fertilizer plant and take the matter up.
Ambassador Hertz spoke as if he had caught the thought.
"You seem to have brought some papers with you."
"They concern fertilizer. I hoped to hear what you had to say first, and to pass them along afterward."
"May I see them?"
Ki-jo undid the cord binding the documents and handed them over, and Ambassador Hertz read straight through the business plan. A smile spread over his face as he read. It was hard to tell what feeling had put it there.
He set the papers down.
"There have been exactly two Koreans who ever raised the subject of fertilizer with me."
Ki-jo thought he knew who they were.
"You, and Mr. Lee Byung-chull. Now that I think of it, you are both Lees. You aren't brothers, by any chance?"
Hertz grinned.
It had surely been meant as a joke, but Ki-jo answered in earnest.
"We are neither brothers nor kin. But I wish we were."
"Are the two of you close?"
"Not precisely. I have often thought, though, that it would be good if we went into business together. Join our strength, and we could accomplish still greater things."
"I see."
Hertz nodded, a searching look on his face, and then put a question to him.
"Do you envy Mr. Lee Byung-chull?"
It came out of nowhere, but Ki-jo answered honestly.
"Yes. I do."
"In what respect? If the question struck you as rude, allow me to apologize."
"Not at all. It did not feel rude in the least. I envy Mr. Lee Byung-chull because he is a major shareholder in one of Korea's large banks. That he owns a bank means..."
"That when he brings a commercial loan in from abroad, he can obtain a payment guarantee from a bank he himself holds."
"Precisely."
Ambassador Hertz had seen clean through to the purpose of his visit. It occurred to Ki-jo that Lee Byung-chull might already have called on the ambassadors of one country after another, earlier than he himself had known, in pursuit of a commercial loan. A man as thorough in his preparations as Lee Byung-chull would have done that much, and more.
"Have you heard of an organization called the Korean Economic Reconstruction Research Institute?"
Ambassador Hertz asked.
"Yes. I have."
Ki-jo knew what the body was, and who had founded it. It was a research institute Lee Byung-chull had established, a gathering to which men of influence were invited to dine, debate the questions of the day, and talk. Lee Ki-poong belonged to it. Nor was that all. Senior politicians of three terms and more, a former governor of the Bank of Korea, ministers both sitting and retired, men of letters, professors—the membership took them all in. It was the think tank of Samsung in its early days, and a social circle for the powerful.
"I was invited to that gathering once. Mr. Lee Byung-chull spoke at length then on why Korea needed a fertilizer plant. It left a considerable impression."
Ambassador Hertz said it with a smile.
Ki-jo had a bad feeling. Where the building of a fertilizer plant was concerned, Lee Byung-chull was far ahead of him. All Ki-jo possessed was the knowledge of a shortcut the other man had not yet found.
"What you have brought me, and what Mr. Lee Byung-chull said, are remarkably alike."
With that, Hertz proceeded to rattle off what Ki-jo had set down in the latter half of his materials.
"Of the two hundred and fifty million dollars in aid that Korea receives, something on the order of a hundred million goes to importing fertilizer. And chiefly from Japan, at that."
"That is correct."
"Korea is an agricultural country, and the rice consumed per person is the highest in Korea, China, or Japan. It ought to run past a hundred and fifty kilograms a year, and yet production cannot keep pace. A shortage of fertilizer is one of the causes."
"Yes."
To hear the ambassador pour out, fluently, the contents of a report he had not even finished reading left Ki-jo faintly cowed. True to a man who had come up through scholarship, the mind was a formidable one.
"I have been told that within ten years fertilizer output must be raised above four hundred thousand tons, if the country is to cope with a growing population."
"Yes. Which is why a fertilizer plant must be built in Korea, without fail. If American aid is reduced, or cut off, there will be no dollars left with which to buy fertilizer."
"Quite so. The money spent purchasing fertilizer comes to a hundred million dollars a year, and with even half that sum one could build an enormous fertilizer plant in Korea. Yet the United States is not cooperating. They tell you to buy your fertilizer from Japan and make do, and the only plant they have seen built for Korea is a very small one."
"That is correct."
Ambassador Hertz grasped Korea's position so completely that it was hard to say who was the Korean, and who was the man set on building the plant. Ki-jo was glad of it. At the same time a chill prickled his skin, for nearly everything the ambassador was saying had come out of Lee Byung-chull's own mouth. He felt like the Monkey King, who leapt what he thought was the end of the world and found he had never left the Buddha's palm. Byung-chull's shadow was far larger, and far wider, than he had imagined.
Hertz held his eyes.
"Mr. Lee Ki-jo."
"Yes, Ambassador Hertz."
"I am sincerely grateful for the kindness you have shown me, the staff of this embassy, and every German in Korea. I mean that."
Ki-jo kept his mouth firmly shut and looked at him.
"But I believe that nothing in this world comes free. There must have been a reason for what you did. Why did you extend us that kindness?"
Asked outright to say why he had treated the Germans so well, Ki-jo was silent. Ambassador Hertz seemed already to have the reason in hand: that Ki-jo meant to build a fertilizer plant, and hoped to obtain a commercial loan from Germany in order to do it; and that Lee Byung-chull of Samsung was already at work on the very same thing. Which was to say that Hertz also knew who held the advantage in securing such a loan—a man on close terms with the powerful in politics and government, and the owner of a bank besides.
To Ki-jo, the question sounded like this.
Is there any reason I should help you, rather than Lee Byung-chull?
It was not a question he could answer lightly. Regrettably, at present Lee Byung-chull surpassed him in every respect. He had already built more than three great factories, and one of them, Cheil Wool, had been raised in close partnership with a West German firm. To set himself beside that man was to stand at a disadvantage.
The only road that might put him ahead of Lee Byung-chull was to meet Erhard, West Germany's minister of economics, before the other did. Erhard would not know Korean affairs as Ambassador Hertz did, and to his eye Ki-jo and Lee Byung-chull would look much the same—nothing more than businessmen from the East, come out of a backward country. And this was a season when the man was under pressure from the United States. Neither the West German government nor the American had announced anything to the press, but with the meeting of the OEEC, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, drawing near, officials at the working level would be ironing out the differences between them. Like it or not, Erhard knew he would have to send a certain sum, in dollars or in deutsche marks, to the underdeveloped countries of the free world. He would be searching for nations to receive the loans, and the candidates were few. Among the underdeveloped countries of the free world, those standing against communism would be given priority, and Korea was certain to be among them.
This was the best possible moment to catch Erhard's interest and persuade him. Ki-jo had to convince the man that a loan to Korea would offer both the soundest justification and the greatest effect.
He opened his mouth.
"I had hoped for your help, Mr. Ambassador."
"And what sort of help did you want?"
Hertz asked it calmly.
"Please make it possible for me to go to West Germany and meet Minister of Economics Erhard."
Hertz nodded. He had already taken the man's measure: a businessman who wanted a fertilizer plant in Korea, and wanted to ask the West German government to bear the cost. Putting him in touch with Erhard would not be especially difficult. Erhard was a close friend of his. He need only say that there was a Korean businessman eager to build a fertilizer plant, and ask that Erhard spare the fellow a brief meeting.
What he could not gauge was how this man meant to persuade Erhard, vice-chancellor of West Germany and its minister of economics. Hertz himself agreed that Korea had a pressing need of a fertilizer plant, and that a West German loan, spent on the building of one, would be money put to excellent use. The single misgiving was whether anything would come of recommending Lee Ki-jo in place of Lee Byung-chull, the businessman who stood for Korea.
So only one thing remained to be confirmed. He would hear the strategy by which Lee Ki-jo proposed to persuade Erhard.
From all that Hertz had learned of Lee Byung-chull, the man was exceedingly seasoned, and cautious. At the same time, when boldness was called for, he could be bold enough to astonish everyone around him. Only he never poured all he had into a thing until the conditions around him had fully ripened. Hertz was curious what method Lee Ki-jo would produce—a man short of Byung-chull in capital, in connections, and in experience alike.
His personal regard for Lee Ki-jo was more than ample. But if the answer offered by a young man of barely twenty-nine fell short of what was required, then however much he might regret it, he could not help him.
"How do you mean to persuade Minister Erhard? I will hear that first."