A Fiery Temperament
Ki-jo and Maeng-hee did not go far after leaving the bank. Hanil Bank's head office stood on the very ground where the Avenuel wing of Lotte Department Store would one day rise, a short walk from the Bando Hotel. If he was going to sit down over a cup of tea with a man who had spent seven years in Japan and four in America, Ki-jo meant to do it in the finest place Korea had to offer. It was only a first impression, but the young Lee Maeng-hee did not strike him as an easygoing sort, and meeting that man at his own level would take nothing less than the Bando.
In the hotel coffee shop, Maeng-hee ordered a glass of ice water. When it came he drank it off in great gulps, as if he meant to quench a temper still burning from his quarrel with the tellers. Ki-jo watched him closely. The man across the table was, for the present, first in line to inherit Lee Byung-chull's Samsung, and Ki-jo had no wish to miss so much as a gesture or a turn of phrase.
"Hah. That's better."
Maeng-hee set the empty glass down.
"You saw me making a scene at the counter before you knew anything else about me, so I wouldn't blame you for forming a prejudice. But I had my reasons for raising my voice."
He seemed eager to explain what had happened, and Ki-jo obliged him.
"What was it?"
"You know as well as I do that I'm Samsung's eldest son. Do you really imagine a man in my position picked a fight with the tellers because he wanted another paltry twenty-six thousand hwan on his paycheck?"
Maeng-hee spoke of his station without the slightest hesitation. There was sense in what he said, and Ki-jo nodded.
"I studied in America for four years and came home with a doctorate. A man at the doctoral level ought to be paid more. I consider that obvious."
Ki-jo gave him his full attention.
"A bank is a business. If you want to hire superior people, you have to pay doctoral-level talent more than the rest. Otherwise, why would anyone bother earning a doctorate and deepening their expertise? Why would people who studied abroad ever come to Korea? Treat them well, and they study harder — and the ones who went overseas come home."
His insides seemed to be burning again. He flagged a passing waiter, ordered another glass of cold water, and pressed on.
"The tellers assume I earn more simply because I'm the owner's son, and they condemn me for it. I can't stomach that. They're hopelessly shortsighted. These are supposed to be the finest people Korea could select, and it grieves me that this is all the level they're at."
Ki-jo decided to look at the whole matter from Maeng-hee's side, and once he did, the argument made sense.
"Shall I tell you one peculiar thing about Korea?"
"Please."
"Some years back, Hanil Bank had a young director. Not even thirty, they say."
"Promoted early, then."
"That's right. And the reason was that his father was a high official in the Liberal Party days, and he set his son up in a high seat."
"Was he?"
"He was. Now — did the Hanil staff denounce that man and rise up against him, the way they did with me?"
Ki-jo shook his head. He doubted it very much.
Maeng-hee brought his palms together with a sharp clap.
"Exactly. Not one of them. Not a whisper of complaint. Oh, I'm sure they cursed him over drinks among themselves. But what struck me all over again after I came back to Korea is this. Koreans bow to power, and they hate the rich."
Ki-jo let his face show that he agreed.
"I find it baffling. If you ask me, the people who hold power do more wrong than anyone — and yet no one cares how they came by that power. The moment a man has it, they duck their heads and crawl in. But."
His gestures were American. He shot one finger into the air to drive the point home.
"When they deal with people who have money, they suspect them on principle. That fortune must have been made by crooked means. Therefore that rich man must be a bad man. That's how it goes."
Listening, Ki-jo turned the question over. Why had he come to think this way? The likeliest answer, he decided, was the sight of his own father branded a wicked industrialist and denounced by the world. No son enjoys watching his father reviled.
"As for me — if I ever run a company, the people who do the work well will get the best treatment there is. The notion that everyone who joined the same year, or holds the same rank, must be paid exactly the same belongs to the Joseon dynasty, or to a communist state. On that score, Korea's thinking still hasn't woken up."
The outburst seemed to have drained some of the grievance out of him, and Lee Maeng-hee's expression eased. Ki-jo studied him. The living man had a fiercer temperament than the Lee Maeng-hee he had looked into in his previous life. Long years abroad, and a failure yet to settle back into Korean society, accounted for some of it — but he was genuinely angry at the absurdities of Korea.
"I've done nothing but talk about myself. If I've been rude, forgive me."
True to that hot-blooded nature, the apology came quickly. Ki-jo took his side at once.
"Not at all. Hearing you out, I can see how much you had to be angry about. Of course it came to that at the counter. That's what I thought."
Maeng-hee broke into a wide smile, grateful to the man who had understood the injury.
"Getting all of that off my chest in front of you, President Lee, the tightness in my chest is gone. Thank you."
Still wanting to keep the conversation going, he changed the subject. They were talking business when staff from the West German embassy passed through the coffee shop and greeted Ki-jo warmly, and Korean and foreign businessmen who kept offices in the Bando Hotel nodded to him as an acquaintance. Maeng-hee took note.
"You're on good terms with foreigners as well. And your English is excellent."
"Hauling freight in Korea, you end up knowing a few people here and there. That's all it is."
Ki-jo offered it modestly, without flourishing his connections, and Maeng-hee nodded.
Just then Ko Wang-chul, fresh from a wig-export meeting at the Bando Hotel, caught sight of Ki-jo and called out.
"President! I just signed a contract — ten thousand dollars' worth of wigs, bound for America!"
Flushed with the deal, Wang-chul came bounding over.
"Well done, Manager Ko. We'll go over the details back at the company. First, let me introduce you. This is Mr. Lee Maeng-hee, who works at Hanil Bank's head office."
Ki-jo presented Wang-chul, who ran Cheongsan's wig business, and the two exchanged greetings. As Wang-chul made to leave the hotel, Ki-jo asked after him.
"Manager Ko, have you eaten?"
"Not yet. It isn't time..."
"Then eat here before you go."
Told to take a meal at the Bando to mark the contract, Wang-chul brightened.
"President, would a steak be all right?"
"Of course. Ha — put it on my name."
"Thank you, President. Only... would it be all right if there were two of us?"
Ki-jo laughed outright. The man plainly wanted to bring a woman along, but he nodded all the same.
"Thank you, President!"
Wang-chul hurried out of the coffee shop to place a call. Watching Ki-jo treat a subordinate with no reserve between them, Maeng-hee spoke.
"Your style is quite different from my father's."
Ki-jo gave an awkward smile.
"I mean it as a compliment. Samsung's hierarchy is so strict that a department manager wouldn't dare act spoiled with the president."
The word spoiled snagged on him, but Ki-jo smiled through it.
"We've been through life and death together. We've become family."
He was thinking of the beer runs from Incheon to Busan. Maeng-hee, who could know nothing of that history, simply took it to mean that Ki-jo treated his people like kin. Having only just heard that Ki-jo was in the wig trade, he turned to the American market.
"Something I picked up while I was living in the States — Jewish merchants have the American sundries market locked up tight."
It was an accurate reading.
"That's right. This contract will have been with a Jewish firm as well. With wigs, if you don't go through Jewish hands, you can't get the goods onto the shelves."
Pleased to find that Ki-jo understood the American market, Maeng-hee brightened further.
"The trouble is, once Jewish interests have a monopoly, it's hard to turn a profit supplying into it. They're relentless bargainers, as a rule. I've heard they even force you to take a loss on the first delivery."
"Yes. That's why Cheongsan is thinking of opening another channel. We're looking at building a sales network around the beauty salons that Black customers frequent."
Hearing the plan, Maeng-hee tapped the table lightly.
"You've seen it exactly. White Americans hardly wear wigs. It's Black people, with their curly hair, who like them. Break into that market and you'll see real results."
He had known only men who lived like frogs at the bottom of a well, shut up inside Korea. Set beside them, Ki-jo — a regressor, and rich in knowledge because of it — impressed him, and he wanted to go on talking. They spent the time on the American market. After about two hours Maeng-hee exchanged cards with him and proposed they meet again. Ki-jo was not displeased. They were nearly the same age, and in the give-and-take he had found a certain fineness in Lee Maeng-hee as well.
"President Lee, I'll be sure to pass along what you asked me to tell my father."
"I'd be grateful if you would. Let me get the tea."
"Don't be absurd. You're the man who rescued me from that bank. I'll pay."
Maeng-hee settled the bill before Ki-jo could object. They said their goodbyes in front of the Bando Hotel and went their separate ways.
On the way back to Cheongsan headquarters, Ki-jo turned Lee Maeng-hee over in his mind. In the original history he was the ill-fated crown prince who fell out with his father, Lee Byung-chull, and lost the succession. In this history, Ki-jo had already removed the cause of that rupture, for he had swept Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo off the road to power early.
Lee Byung-chull's second son, Lee Chang-hee, had reported their father's wrongdoing to the Blue House, and by coincidence Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo had been there at the time. Because the two were friends of Lee Maeng-hee, Lee Byung-chull came to suspect his eldest son fiercely, and in the end convinced himself that Maeng-hee had colluded with Chang-hee and filed the report in order to drive him out. It was also the aftermath of the saccharin smuggling scandal, when Lee Byung-chull's footing had narrowed badly and he had little choice but to suspect his sons — a season in which he suffered the very human dread that the eldest and the second son might strip him of control over Samsung.
But now, even if the saccharin scandal were to break out all over again, and even if Lee Chang-hee went to prison in his father's place, was treated coldly, grew to hate him, and reported Lee Byung-chull, there would no longer be any cause for that suspicion to fall on Lee Maeng-hee.
Even so, Ki-jo still thought it likely that Maeng-hee would be pushed out of the succession. His temperament was too fiery, too unbending, to suit the running of a company as intricate and finely made as Samsung. He was a man better fitted to Hyundai than to Samsung.
Maeng-hee's rejection by his father had been, in the end, a misunderstanding born of circumstance. And it was possible that Lee Byung-chull, once some time had passed, came to know that his eldest son had done no such thing. Even then he refused him the succession, citing as his reason that Maeng-hee had never come to ask forgiveness. Would a man as meticulous as Lee Byung-chull really have cast off his eldest son for a reason so emotional?
Ki-jo thought of King Yeongjo and Crown Prince Sado. Perhaps Lee Byung-chull had judged his eldest unfit to inherit Samsung, and had seized on that pretext in order to remove him from the company. It was only Ki-jo's speculation — the first impression left after meeting the man. What the future would actually bring, no one yet knew.
He wanted to keep a good relationship with Maeng-hee, Samsung's heir apparent, and to work with him if the man ever became master of Samsung. If Cheongsan and Samsung could cooperate well, it would be a very good thing for the Korean economy.