The Opportunity the Typhoon Made
The damage left by the typhoon sent an aftershock rolling through the industrial world. It was October, a month when factories lay in ruins, consumption shrank, and bankrupt firms went under one after another, and Ki-jo threw himself in earnest into the contest to acquire them.
His first target was Kia Industry. The company that had made the bicycles given away in Miwon's promotional prize events had lost its factory entirely to the typhoon. The plant stood near Yeongdo Bridge, and the damage there had been especially severe.
Kim Chul-ho, president of a Kia Industry teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, needed capital on the scale of founding the company all over again. People believed in the potential of a firm that built bicycles so well and were willing to lend, but the trouble lay on the borrowing side. He wanted to save the company, yet the interest was so high that he hesitated. In those days even a business, unless it was a major concern, could not dream of a bank loan, and the whole of the sum required would have had to be taken as high-interest private debt.
That was when Ki-jo went to him. He offered to supply every bit of capital Kia Industry needed, in exchange for eighty percent of the shares, and in return he promised to guarantee Kim Chul-ho his right to manage the company.
Kim Chul-ho agonized over it. Was it better to take Ki-jo's infusion of funds and start the business again at once, or to hold on to his ownership?
To the hesitating man, Ki-jo proposed a partnership as well. He asked him to take charge of the bolt-and-nut division of Cheongsan Precision.
Ki-jo trusted Haksan Kim Chul-ho, the man who had founded Kia Industry. Looking at the life he had lived, trust was the only possible answer.
During the Japanese colonial period he had crossed to Japan and taken work at an ironworks in Osaka, a shop that manufactured bolts and nuts. Recognized for his diligence and the skill of his hands, he had worked there in steady security until his mother's illness brought him back to Joseon. When he later returned to his old workplace, the owner was dead, and between the Great Depression come out of America and the ravages of the Great Kanto Earthquake, the company was on the verge of closing its doors.
He went on working like the proprietor himself, though he drew no wages. He called on the customers, brought in orders, and kept making bolts and nuts. The late owner's widow, seeing what manner of man he was, went so far as to entrust the company to him.
Ki-jo believed in a Haksan who had lived a life like that. Nor was that all. He had once hidden an independence activist and very nearly gone to prison when the Japanese police caught him. Fortunately he was released on the personal guarantee of the ironworks' mistress, but he had no choice but to leave the shop. Left jobless for having helped a fighter for independence, he founded a company called Samhwa Works and made bolts and nuts with his own hands. After the firm was established the Manchurian Incident broke out, the business grew, and the quality of his bolts and nuts even drew him into Japan's munitions industry.
Haksan's diligence and technical skill were precisely what Cheongsan Precision, which Ki-jo owned, required. To the man who still hesitated, Ki-jo made one offer more.
"President Kim, do you mean to spend your whole life making nothing but bicycles? You ought to be building motorcycles, and automobiles as well. I will back you with everything I have."
In the history as it had first unfolded, Kim Chul-ho had shown an ability that might fairly have made him Korea's Soichiro Honda. He had copied Japanese motorcycles to produce a domestic machine, and he had built the three-wheeler K-360, which set off a wave of innovation in the 1960s. Back him properly, and there was more than enough potential to turn Kia into Korea's Honda.
After days of deliberation, Haksan decided to accept. He worried over the livelihoods of workers who could not work with the factory in ruins; the interest on private loans was brutal; and above all, the partnership Ki-jo had set before him was attractive. A man with capital was offering to push not only the bolt-and-nut work that was his own specialty, but a line of business running from bicycles through motorcycles to automobiles. It was worth placing his hopes on that.
Ki-jo's reputation in Busan already spoke for itself. People praised him, citing how he had helped others every time a typhoon struck, and called him a man one could trust.
"President Lee, I'll take your hand, and yours alone."
When Kim Chul-ho agreed, Ki-jo felt as if he had laid a stepping-stone between the 1950s and the 1970s.
The motorcycles and three-wheeled trucks Haksan would build were products with real competitive strength in the Korea of the 1960s, where national income was still low. A proper passenger car or truck was premature for that decade. A sedan was a product for a thin layer of the wealthy, and to a petty shopkeeper a truck was no more reachable than a rice cake in a painting.
Bicycles, motorcycles, three-wheeled trucks. Those three were the means of transport suited to a Korea of the sixties whose purchasing power was still thin.
Having acquired Kia Industry, Ki-jo immediately bought land on which to raise a plywood mill. In the typhoon's wake, waterfront prices had fallen, and he was able to pick up a coastal lot in Yongdang-dong cheaply. Dongmyeong Timber's seaside plant had also taken severe damage, and plywood production there had stopped. Even if he built a factory now and began turning out plywood, it would not be too late. Join the wood-processing machinery and techniques he had arranged to receive in cooperation with Krupp to the plywood-bonding methods he had learned in his previous life, and he was certain he could build a plywood company the equal of Dongmyeong Timber.
While Ki-jo bought up, one by one, the damaged factories crowded into Busan, word went around that he was acquiring companies at random. It was not true. He bought only firms he had carefully chosen with an eye to how far each business could grow. He took over only companies of outstanding technical skill run by upright presidents, guaranteeing them their management rights, and he selected only trades he could link to his other ventures.
When he acquired a rubber plant, for instance, he was already considering the shoe industry and the tire industry. When he acquired a shipyard, he had in mind the powered fishing boats he had bought before the typhoon, and the deep-sea fishery that would one day earn dollars.
All of it was a business opportunity Typhoon Sarah had made. He felt a pang of conscience at buying companies sunk in suffering, and yet for the owners to whom he left the management, it was also the gift of a new chance. Under the name of Cheongsan, he was binding related firms together so that synergy would arise, and raising each company's prospects for growth over the long term.
The acquisitions were finished, and it was the day before Ki-jo was to go up to Seoul. He ate supper at Oh Yang-soo's house, then sat talking on the low wooden platform in the yard.
"Little brother, powered boats have dried up clean across Gyeongsang. The only powered fishing boats left are the ones we've got secured."
Ki-jo nodded.
"That's why I'm thinking we ought to start a fishing company. Plenty of men have lost their boats and would take work even as hired skippers, and the fish market's in an uproar because it can't get any fish."
Ki-jo nodded at the proposal to found a fisheries company. Watching him do nothing but nod, without a word, Yang-soo asked,
"Has it been hard on you all this while?"
"No, Brother..."
"Then why've you got no strength in you? All that's left now is making a fortune out on the sea..."
At the question Ki-jo gave a bitter smile. He let out a sigh and at last set before Yang-soo the heaviness he had not spoken of until now.
"While I've been in Busan, I feel as if I've taken every curse I'm ever going to hear in this life..."
He had been badly misunderstood while taking over companies and factories driven to the brink of default. Men bristling with hostility had turned him away at the gate, and there were times when, however he argued, he could not in the end dissolve their distrust. On those occasions he heard a great many cutting words. He understood that it might be so—he was asking people who had lost everything overnight to hand over the businesses they had cherished—but the words piled up inside him and wore at his heart.
Once Ki-jo had emptied out what he had been holding in, Yang-soo wanted, somehow, to lift his spirits.
"They're only saying it because they're sick with envy. Don't pay them any mind. Put those same people in your place, and you think they wouldn't have done the same...?"
Having said it, Yang-soo called loudly to his wife in the kitchen.
"Dear! Set us a table for drinks, will you? Grill a few dried pollack and bring them out."
"All right."
Hearing her answer, Yang-soo went on to Ki-jo, who still looked ill at ease.
"Have you ever wasted a single coin of what you've earned? Didn't you take money you made by your own effort and put it right back into building better companies? You've raised factories, hired people, made jobs—and who's cursing you for that?"
Even as he said it, Yang-soo thought Ki-jo must have felt as if he had taken what belonged to others. So he comforted him in a stronger voice.
"I'll say it plain. Men who've made less than you build villas where the view is fine and fill their houses with foreign goods."
As he spoke, Yang-soo's wife came from the kitchen with liquor and grilled dried pollack set on a small soban, a low tray-table.
"Thank you, sister-in-law."
When Ki-jo thanked her, she dropped onto the platform and said,
"Dear, give me just one cup tonight."
His wife, who ordinarily never involved herself in the men's affairs, was acting unlike herself. Yang-soo looked at her steadily, then said,
"Well, all right. Have a cup yourself."
Oh Yang-soo poured for Ki-jo and for his wife. Taking hers, she filled her husband's cup as well and said,
"I'll drink just the one and go back to the kitchen. But I'll say one thing before I go."
"Go on, then."
At that she lifted her cup first, and the two men touched theirs lightly to it. She drank, and whether because it had been a long time, she squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again.
From the kitchen she had caught the gist of what her husband was saying, and she understood. There was something she wanted Ki-jo to hear.
"Yeongsu's father?"
"Yes, sister-in-law."
"It's nearly ten years now that we've lived bound up with Yeongsu's family. You remember when the two of you came to our house with Yeongsu in your arms, saying you'd come to return the umbrella?"
"Yes. I remember."
"You may not know it, Yeongsu's father, but after that Sunrye came to our house often. She didn't tell you, did she?"
"No..."
"She didn't come to ask for anything. She just came to say how grateful she'd been then, and then she went home."
The Sunrye of those hard years rose before him, and his heart tightened.
"Back then I used to slip yakgwa into her hand in secret—those little honey pastries—and tell her that if she was nursing the baby she had to eat well, and that only the mother should eat them, without her husband knowing. Sunrye always told that story. She said she'd been so grateful."
The shape of those hard days rose vivid before his eyes.
"But do you know something, Yeongsu's father?"
"What is it?"
"The two people I saw then haven't changed, not even ten years on. You've made a great deal of money since, and you're the sort who could look down on people like us wherever you went—and yet whenever you meet us, you're grateful the way you were in those days, and you treat us with care."
Yang-soo nodded, as if he agreed with what his wife was saying.
"Just now I happened to hear what you were saying, from the kitchen. Hearing it, what I want to tell you and Sunrye is this. The two of you aren't people who would harm anyone, even if you lived exactly as you pleased. So just live as you like. Don't hold back."
Yang-soo burst out laughing at his wife's words. She had said what he himself had wanted to say, and his chest opened wide. Proud of her, he said,
"My beautiful Jeong-hui, have another cup from me. Today of all days, you look even prettier."
When he turned mischievous, his wife, Heo Jeong-hui, waved him off and stood.
"Oh, enough. I'm not drinking any more. Why men like something this strong, I don't know. Honestly..."
She went into the kitchen. Oh Yang-soo, watching her back, asked Ki-jo,
"Don't you think I married well?"
Before Ki-jo could answer, Yang-soo was already nodding to himself, as if telling himself that he had.
"You heard my wife. Just live the way you want to, little brother. I've got nothing else to say to you but that."
"I understand, Brother."
Something knotted inside Ki-jo came loose, and he was able to answer with a smile.
To the brightened Ki-jo, Oh Yang-soo said,
"These days, you know, the Japanese are pushing all the way out to the South Pacific and bringing back maguro. Freeze it, pack it in cans, and the Americans buy every bit of it, no questions asked."
"Maguro?"
"It's a big fish they also call tuna. Let's bring in a used oceangoing boat from Japan and give it a try. The way I see it, just catching tuna and selling it would make us more money than putting up a few factories in this country."
"Understood, Brother. Please find us an oceangoing fishing boat."
"I will. You can count on it!"
Ki-jo and Yang-soo laughed and knocked their cups together.