Asan — Chung Ju-yung
Chung Ju-yung and his two brothers ate with a gusto that seemed almost blessed.
Sons of a farming house, they set upon a bowl of soybean-paste soup, mixed-grain rice, and kimchi as if the table were spread with rare delicacies. Hunger is the best sauce, as the old saying has it, and Ki-jo, falling in with them, ate every bit as well.
When that first meal of the day was behind them, he offered each man an American cigarette. The four of them stayed where they had eaten and began to talk over the smoke—though Chung Ju-yung alone did not light one. He was famous for taking no pleasure in tobacco or coffee, calling both a waste of good money.
"How old are you?"
"I was born in the year of Gyeong-o."
"Wait now. Gyeong-o... so that's the Year of the White Horse. A year older than Shin-yung, my fifth. That right?"
He looked to his brothers, and Soon-yung and In-yung both nodded.
"And earlier—what was it you said you wanted to do with me?"
"A partnership."
"Heh. I'm to join hands with you when I don't even know what line you're in?"
He said it that way, and yet Ki-jo could see that his eyes were bright with curiosity.
"I am building a brick factory in Yeoncheon."
"Brick factories are lying thick all over this country. Reckon you're putting one up to catch the postwar boom. Good clay, a good plant—even then the haulage will cost you dear. Yeoncheon's no short road from Seoul."
A businessman to the bone, he had put his finger at once on the weakness in the Cheongsan plant's site.
"That much, I can manage."
"Well, I'm sure you laid your plans before you ever started. But will you get anywhere making nothing but red brick?"
"In time I mean to add clay pipe, cement block, and roof tile, and broaden the line."
"Aigo. Clay pipe and block besides. You and Hyundai would get along. Ha!"
"I believe we would."
"Give it a few years and cement block will be what everyone wants. The work goes faster with it. Stronger than brick, too. Way I see it, block is where the promise is."
Even with ruin staring him in the face, Chung Ju-yung was looking past it. Ki-jo thought it was exactly like the man.
"So. What's the president of a brick factory planning to do, going partners with me? Hyundai Construction is pouring every ounce of the company's strength into Goryeong Bridge. We've nothing left to spare."
Ki-jo brought out the leather bag he had bought at Namdaemun Market, drew from it the memorandum of understanding General Martin had given him, and held it out.
"What's this?"
"Please read it."
"Hm..."
Chung Ju-yung studied the paper for a long while before he spoke.
"It's in English, so I can't say exactly what it means. But this isn't an important document, is it?"
"I beg your pardon?"
Ki-jo went cold.
"No contract sum. No deadline for the work. Without those, there's no meat on it."
Sharp as ever—that was Chung Ju-yung. He might know little English, but the moment a contract lacked the two things it could not do without, the money and the date, he had taken the measure of the memorandum. Ki-jo felt a hot shame that he had meant to win the man over with a scrap of paper.
"In-yung. See if this document is real."
He called his second brother, who had once interpreted for American officers. Chung In-yung had read English at a university in Japan and was one of Hyundai Construction's true assets. It was thanks to him that the firm had been able to grow in the midst of the Korean War. While Ki-jo was laboring on the docks in Busan, Chung In-yung had volunteered as an interpreter at the American command there and been attached to U.S. engineer officers; through those connections he had steered military contracts toward his elder brother and given Hyundai the footing on which it rose.
Chung In-yung took the memorandum and read it through with care.
"Typed on an American machine, without a doubt. The seal is U.S. Army ink, and the signature of the Seventh Division's commander is genuine."
When the appraisal was done, Chung Ju-yung asked,
"So does this scrap of paper have any value, or doesn't it?"
"It says that if the record of contracts won and the construction license can be confirmed, they will consider signing the principal agreement."
"Does it, now."
Chung Ju-yung rubbed his chin with a thick finger.
"Put the paper back in the bag. Army work pays handsomely enough, but as I said, we've no strength to spare, and we're on the point of going under."
"Lend me only the license. The building itself will be done by Cheongsan Development."
"Cheongsan Development?"
"Yes. The company I mean to found."
"Ha ha ha ha!"
The laugh sounded almost innocent. Then he turned to Ki-jo.
"Listen here, Mr. Lee Ki-jo. Even if Hyundai Construction collapses tomorrow, I mean to walk out with my credit in my hands. Be honest—you've never built a thing, have you? And you think I'd lend you our license and sit still while you drag our name through the mud? A company can be dying tomorrow, and I still won't have that."
Chung Ju-yung was an upright man.
Ki-jo abandoned, entire, the scheme of coaxing a cash-desperate Chung Ju-yung with a single memorandum. He was not discouraged. What rose in him instead was a question about the very credit the man was so determined to keep.
"President Chung. I know you mean to guard that credit as you would your own life."
"If you've understood, then clear out of here tomorrow morning."
"But why is that credit something you keep only for men with money, and for the government?"
The question put a look of pure bafflement on Chung Ju-yung's face.
"Look here, future president of Cheongsan Development. Credit is what you offer people who have money, so they'll trust you. A man who means to do business and doesn't know even a basic thing like that—what does he imagine he's going to accomplish..."
He clicked his tongue.
"That is the talk of a man who builds and nothing more. In the years ahead, do you not mean to make all manner of things and sell them to ordinary folk with thin pockets?"
"Well, me—I want to make cars, and I want to make radios. If the money were there, what is there I wouldn't want to make?"
"Then what of your credit with the ordinary buyer? Is a businessman still only a man who minds the trust of the wealthy?"
"Heh. This fellow does talk strangely. That's one thing, and this is another."
"Was there not a time, President Chung, when you yourself had no credit to your name? Remember those days. And if I were a swindler, would I have come to you at all, with Hyundai in such straits?"
"I never called you a swindler. The talk of partnership ends here."
Ki-jo was not a man to stop because he had been told to stop.
"President. I came all the way from Yeoncheon to Dalseong with nothing to trust but the credit of Hyundai Construction. Sell me only a part of that credit. I will buy the name of Hyundai Construction, and I will pay what it is worth!"
Chung Ju-yung looked at him for a long, silent moment. Sell the credit of a Hyundai Construction that was all but finished—he had never heard the like.
"No, listen, you. I'm saying this for your own sake. You bring that money to Hyundai Construction and you'll simply go down with the rest of us. That's what I'm telling you..."
"A mere seventy million hwan. Let us pay it back together over twenty years. Pay it together, and we can be clear of it inside of ten!"
"This man... he truly isn't in his right mind... a mere seventy million hwan. Ha. Ha ha..."
Chung Ju-yung laughed as if the words had left him speechless. And yet the eyes he kept on Ki-jo had gone more serious than at any moment before.
"Listen, President Lee. Suppose I do lend you the construction license. Someone still has to design the work, build it, and supervise it at the American base in Dongducheon, and as I said, every man we've got has to stay on the job here. Have you even got engineers worth the name?"
"I have."
"You'd say you had whatever I asked for. That, I can't make myself believe."
"There are two men aiding me."
"What matters is whether they're men I can trust. Who are they?"
"Professor Kim Moon-hwan of the College of Engineering at Seoul National University, and Colonel Lee Man-ik, Engineer-in-Chief of the Army Corps of Engineers."
At that, Chung Ju-yung lightly rubbed his earlobe.
"I'll look into them myself and take the measure of your credit. We'll talk business then."
"Please do. It is only right."
Ki-jo did not believe Engineer-in-Chief Lee Man-ik would refuse him. Work was desperately scarce in the 1950s, and for engineer officers with their discharge drawing near, a place at a construction company would stand first among their hopes. Knowing how his men were situated, Lee Man-ik was not likely to balk at letting them step for a time into a civilian firm and build a record there. If those officers did no more than look in now and then on the work at the American base, the job would go a great deal more easily.
"Mind if I ask, though, how you raised the money, President Lee? Me, I once ran off with the seventy won my father got for selling a cow. Anything but farming—I tried every scheme there was."
"Cattle and I are not unacquainted."
"That so? Then let's hear it."
Ki-jo told them how he and Jang Ma-ryang had gone out to look over cattle, fallen upon a crew of cheats and gamblers, stripped them of their money and their opium, and sold the haul to raise a brick factory. The three Chung brothers were caught up in the tale at once, and delighted by it. The eldest laughed loudest of all.
"This fellow really is a funny one. Ha ha ha! Still, it's a mercy you took money off a gambling crew and didn't pour it into wine, women, and gambling. So that's what you mean to put into Hyundai Construction?"
"What I made then will all go into the brick factory."
"What kind of factory eats every last coin in a kiln for baking brick? Sounds to me like somebody's swindled you..."
"Not in the least. I mean to build the finest kiln and turn out the finest brick."
"The finest brick? You've got the whole thing pointed wrong. Who told you to do it that way?"
"I decided it myself."
"There's a market for fine brick, I'll grant you, but it isn't a large one. These days, cheap is what carries the day."
"If it is cheap and good, it will sell all the more."
At that bold assurance Chung Ju-yung let out a short laugh.
"Listen, President Lee. You'd better see a doctor before you do anything else. The spirit of what you say is fine enough. Every bit of it is impossible."
"When you promised to carpet a U.N. cemetery in green grass in the dead of winter, did everyone not say you had lost your mind?"
"Hahang. That. Well. I put in barley instead of turf and fooled the Americans for a little while. But how did you know about that?"
"I was in Busan during the war myself."
"Ah. Were you?"
The memory of the fortune he had made by his own quick wit seemed to please him. A broad smile opened on his face.
In 1952, when a delegation of the United Nations Command visited Korea, the schedule included a stop at the U.N. cemetery in Daeyeon-dong, Busan. The Americans wanted the grounds newly dressed to receive the visitors, and they demanded that the cemetery be turfed with grass. Chung Ju-yung had asked whether it would be enough if something green were simply showing when the delegation passed. Told that it would, he bought up an entire field of green barley along the Nakdong River, loaded it onto thirty trucks, and had the ground greened within five days. Well satisfied, the Americans paid three times the construction fee they had promised and went on funneling the work of the Eighth Army his way.
"President Chung. Have you ever tried your hand at the finest brick? Have you ever taken a memorandum from an American division commander on the strength of a few words?"
Asked with such nerve, Chung Ju-yung laughed in great openhearted gusts and clapped the shoulder of Ki-jo beside him.
"Of course not, President."
Lee Ki-jo and Chung Ju-yung shook hands, and the partnership was half-agreed between them, when all at once a clamor rose outside.
A siren went up—wheeeeeee—and the headlights of vehicles raked back and forth across the tent at the work site.
"What—what's going on?"
Chung Ju-yung and his brothers stared at one another in alarm.