Kim Tai-sung of Shinheung Yanghaeng
March 28, 1961.
Ki-jo decided he would go and find Kim Tai-sung of Shinheung Yanghaeng, a dominant force in the Southeast Asian trade. He had reason to hurry. Once the May 16 coup broke, getting out of the country would be difficult for some time, and before that happened he needed to lock in a further supply of logs for the plywood business. Park Hee-jun was already furnishing timber from Indonesia, but if they were to ride the plywood boom about to burst for all it was worth, the more lauan they could lay hands on, the better.
A call to Shinheung Yanghaeng's Korean branch revealed that Kim Tai-sung was not in Vietnam. He had left the head office there and was presently in Hong Kong, though he would soon be moving on to Singapore. The man was, by any measure, a whirlwind of activity. Ki-jo arranged to meet him in Singapore on that schedule.
On March 29, with help from Minister Kim Young-sun, he obtained a Singapore entry visa at the British Embassy in Seoul. He flew on to Japan, bought a ticket in Tokyo for the flight south, and only managed to leave for Singapore on the first of April.
Arriving, he took a taxi from the airport to the hotel the Korean branch had named. The city's sweltering heat astonished him on the ride in. He cooled himself in the wind pouring through the taxi's wide-open window and forgot the heat by drinking in the foreign scenery. True to a Singapore shaped by the British, the larger buildings were mostly European in style, and the Raffles Hotel, their meeting place, was no exception.
Stepping out with a single bag, the first thing to catch his eye was the Indian doorman guarding the main entrance—uniformed, turbaned, dark-skinned, and wearing sandals like flip-flops. When Ki-jo offered a light greeting in English, the man, contrary to his stern look, smiled and answered in a soft voice.
Ki-jo went to the front desk, gave his name, and asked them to tell President Kim Tai-sung that he would be waiting in the coffee shop. He had just sat down to order a drink when a Korean whose face was tanned nearly black came over and asked.
"Excuse me—are you President Lee Ki-jo of Cheongsan Group?"
The moment Ki-jo saw him, he knew this was Kim Tai-sung.
"I am. A pleasure to meet you."
"You've come a long way. Singapore's terribly hot, isn't it?"
Tai-sung, in a white short-sleeved shirt, had been so browned by the Southeast Asian sun that at a glance he might have passed for a local. They shook hands and sat.
"I hear you'd like to talk business. What sort of work are you hoping to do in Southeast Asia?"
Ki-jo showed him the papers he had brought from Korea—import documents for raw timber, proof that he was running a plywood mill in Busan. Tai-sung waved them off.
"Ah, you don't need to show me any of that. Minister Kim Young-sun already told me about you. He said I could trust you a thousand percent and do business with you without a second thought. Ha ha ha!"
The minister had played matchmaker so thoroughly that there was no need for them to feel each other out. Ki-jo put the papers away and came to the point.
"I want to buy every log you can get your hands on, President Kim."
At that, Tai-sung bit the arm of the sunglasses hanging against his chest and fell briefly into thought.
"From a glance at those papers, you've been importing Indonesian timber. I deal in Malaysian logs."
"I know."
"You're aware of the price difference between the two countries?"
"Of course. Price doesn't matter. What matters is securing the volume."
Watching Ki-jo dismiss price entirely, Kim Tai-sung tilted his head a little. Ki-jo met him with a look of complete confidence. Indonesian timber was cheaper for now, but that would change. Whenever Indonesia or Malaysia fell into political turmoil, log prices swung wildly; concentrate on whichever country happened to be cheap, and those leaping prices could ruin you. Importing from both at once was the way to hold a stable purchase price over the long term.
He made one further proposal.
"And I'd like a long-term contract. Ten years or more."
"Ten years or more?"
Kim Tai-sung's eyes widened. He set down the sunglasses he had been toying with.
"I don't know what you were told about me back in Korea, President Lee, but to be frank, I'm nothing more than a middleman in Malaysian timber. How can you trust a man like me...?"
Ki-jo liked that he spoke so plainly.
"Even so, isn't it better to be overcharged by a Korean than by a Chinese or Malay dealer?"
He said it with a smile, as if it were a joke, and Kim Tai-sung laughed just as brightly.
"All right, then. Since we're the same people, I'll look after you at a special rate for our own. Ha ha ha!"
He was grateful that Ki-jo was willing to trust him outright and open a line of trade. That trust did not rest merely on Minister Kim Young-sun's recommendation. Ki-jo knew what was coming: that in 1963 Shinheung Yanghaeng would win the Malaysian government's forestry development concession in Sarawak, six hundred thousand acres of it.
In his previous life, as a dockworker, he had often watched ships loaded with the company's timber put in at Busan Harbor. Winning the Sarawak concession had been a sensation at the time, because a desperately poor Korea had secured the right to develop another nation's land. The Supreme Council for National Reconstruction had publicized the news on a grand scale, boasting that the feat had been made possible by the Council's guarantee of a loan of 1.6 million dollars.
Ki-jo had to secure Kim Tai-sung at all costs—the man who would be able to fell Sarawak's trees through 1980. Perhaps sensing that fervor, Kim Tai-sung spoke.
"I'm grateful you trust me, but you need to be careful in Southeast Asia. In Seoul they say a man can lose his nose with his eyes wide open. Down here, make one mistake and the nose may be all you have left."
Ki-jo answered the joke in kind.
"If I can't trust you, President Kim, whom in Southeast Asia am I supposed to trust? I believe you'll look after my nose."
The run of compliments left Kim Tai-sung laughing, a little shy. He pressed on, trying to explain how business worked in the region.
"The way things are in Southeast Asia, deals fall apart even at the closing stage more often than you'd think. Sign a long-term contract with me and the price can still swing."
"I'll accept that. I'll say it again—what matters to me is volume, not price."
Ki-jo understood the nature of the plywood business that was about to strike it rich. Korea, with cheap labor and a workable level of skill, was destined to lead the world's plywood industry for the time being. Southeast Asia, source of the logs, had neither the technology nor the capital to make plywood. China was lukewarm about exporting it. Japan scorned the trade as a polluting industry, and as the yen rose its prices would lose their edge. In that landscape, securing a supplier who could deliver large volumes over a long stretch mattered more than shaving a little off the cost of each log. That was why Kim Tai-sung—the man who would become Malaysia's timber baron—was the first person Ki-jo had to take hold of.
As he laid out that larger picture and carried the talk forward, Kim Tai-sung found him bracingly direct. They went on over cold drinks, still talking of Southeast Asia.
"President Kim, are there Koreans settled in Vietnam as well?"
"Of course. About thirty households. What's surprising is that they didn't arrive recently. They've lived there a good long while."
Ki-jo was astonished to learn that Vietnam already had a Korean community with a fairly deep history of settlement.
"Without those people, Shinheung Yanghaeng could never have put down roots in Vietnam."
The firm was localized to the point that its headquarters stood there. Ki-jo decided to test how deep the man's grasp of the country really ran.
"How do you see the situation in Vietnam at the moment, President Kim?"
Kim Tai-sung tilted his head and let his gaze rest for a moment on something far off.
"Ha... Every time I look at Vietnam, Korea of ten years ago comes back to me. The history is very much alike, but the present is far too close to the days just before the Korean War..."
He took out a cigarette and asked if he might smoke. Ki-jo nodded and asked for one himself. They talked on through the smoke.
"I know a war would open enormous opportunities. But I'm afraid that if things go wrong, Vietnam itself might be swept away."
"Why do you think that?"
Kim Tai-sung answered with a rather grave face.
"The regime down there is far more rotten than the Korean government ever was. The corruption is beyond words. The Syngman Rhee government that was driven out last year was a child beside Ngo Dinh Diem's."
He spoke of how deep the rot went.
"Any country tends to go bad when people can barely eat, but this one still has a class structure Korea doesn't."
"A class structure?"
"Yes. There's something like an aristocracy. They've got the army in their grip, and they run companies on special privileges. People like that have no interest in anything outside Saigon."
Ki-jo nodded. Kim Tai-sung wet his mouth with his drink and went on.
"So the country people have little interest in the government set up in Saigon. Its power reaches the capital, but once you go out into the provinces its presence fades. Strictly speaking, they hate it. Saigon folk come down into the countryside and commit every kind of outrage."
It was a deeply serious account.
"If a war does break out, what do you think will happen?"
"A long one, I'd say. The country runs a very long way, and it's full of rugged mountains thick with tropical jungle. Fighting a war there will be several times harder than it was in Korea."
Ki-jo could see that Kim Tai-sung had a remarkably accurate grasp of the place. When the Vietnam War actually came, most Koreans assumed it would be over within three years, like their own. With mighty America going in, they believed that even if North Vietnam could not be utterly crushed, the South could be held with ease, just as Korea had been. Kim Tai-sung, though, feared the country itself might be blown away, and he was already worried that the Americans would struggle and the fighting drag on.
He took a long pull of his cold drink and continued.
"Vietnam is a country I truly hate to see wasted. Use nothing but chemical fertilizer and you can farm four times a year. It's a blessed place. The coastline is long, the sea is wide, and both the catch and the crops are abundant. That a country like that should be in this state... it's a pity."
Ki-jo understood then that the man across from him was not merely an energetic businessman, but someone of real depth.
"President Lee, I hear Cheongsan is in logistics and construction back in Korea. If you want to enter Vietnam, lay your network early. I'll help you."
It was Kim Tai-sung who proposed the venture.
"The way I see it, the Americans will be sending troops in force before long, and once they're in they'll be desperate for contractors they can trust. Hand the work to locals and they either show no sense of responsibility, or they join hands with government officials, skim everything, and run."
Tai-sung was making the very offer Ki-jo had meant to put forward, and he was grateful for it.
"There are no Japanese firms in Vietnam yet, and no Chinese ones either. And the Vietnamese dislike the Chinese and the Japanese intensely. They've suffered a great deal at the hands of both."
The longer they talked, the more certain Ki-jo became that he had found the right partner. He went straight to the heart of it.
"What's the trucking situation like down there?"
"Trucks are even scarcer than in Korea. The rail network is thin and the country is mountainous, so trucks are king."
They lost track of time in talk of Vietnam. When the hour for a meal came around, Kim Tai-sung went up to his room and came back with a bottle of ginseng liquor—stock he had brought to sell in Singapore. Bottle in hand, he led Ki-jo to a restaurant near the hotel that he knew well, and they went on talking with the liquor as their table wine.
Ki-jo was glad to have met a man like him, someone who would appear only faintly in the economic history of Korea, yet had gone abroad early and thrown himself into the work. Drinking Korean ginseng liquor in Singapore was moving in itself. In the 1960s, when the country had hardly a single decent export to its name, here was a man straining however he could to sell Korean goods overseas—and watching him, Ki-jo felt a powerful sense of kinship.