Let the World Love the Hero
The event was over, and the banquet's afterglow had not yet thinned. I had climbed into the back seat meaning only to keep Grandfather company on the drive home.
And then—what was this?
The engine surged. The car was flying in the exact opposite direction from the house.
At this hour? What?
I never got the chance to ask. Grandfather turned to look at me. I had been sure he would want to know how it had felt, standing up in front of all those people. Grandfather, as ever, cleared my expectations by a wide margin.
"How'd you know Chairman Jeong was getting ready to run for president?"
"Sorry?"
"That's not something you could've picked up through Jo Sudeok. Am I wrong?"
"Ah. That."
Playing dumb and putting on a clumsy act was not going to get me anywhere.
"I didn't have information. It was just a feeling."
"A feeling?"
"He's such a big, openhanded man. Making parts was never going to satisfy him. He only feels right once he's built the finished product and stamped a huge Daebo mark across it. I thought he'd feel the same way about the country. Korea would have to be a finished product too, before he could breathe easy. Something like that."
It was not an answer that would convince him a hundred percent. Even so, maybe he decided there was something in it worth turning over. Grandfather sank into thought for a little while.
"Unless the country's competitiveness comes along with you, you can't win with finished goods on the international stage. So first you get your technology recognized in the parts market, and then you jump into finished products..."
Ominously enough, he walked back through what I had said, slow and careful.
Hm.
So the bad feeling had been right.
"Not just anybody gets to be the semiconductor company's biggest shareholder. I'll tell you that."
I had excuses ready, and no chance to use them. Grandfather turned his gaze out the window and left it there. Silence settled over the car. The Maybach, for its part, showed off that famous hush without holding anything back, and slid along the road for a long time.
The place Grandfather's car delivered us to was, to my surprise, Hyeon-gang headquarters.
"You been here before?"
"No. This is my first time."
"A majority shareholder, and the first time he sets foot in his own company. That sit right with you?"
He started walking, his face giving nothing away. Quitting time was long past, and still the lobby was full of people.
"Say hello. These are our executives."
I bowed, and Grandfather turned to them.
"You know who this is? Park Jihoon. Majority shareholder of the semiconductor company."
"I've heard a great deal about you. Yoon Iljung, director in Electronics."
"A pleasure to meet you. Kim Jinho, managing director, also Electronics."
"No use lining up to butter me. The boy already holds every last share of the semiconductor company."
At Grandfather's joke the executives burst out laughing and hurried to match the mood. The moment he moved again, the managing director scurried ahead and hit the elevator button. Grandfather went first. I followed. The executives fell into a single line and bowed, and they were still bent at the waist when the doors slid shut.
All that, just to ride an elevator.
A chime. Perhaps because the car was reserved for the chairman's office, it climbed toward the top floor without anyone pressing a thing.
Then the office came into view. The first thing my eye caught was the nameplate.
Chairman Park Yonghak
Beside it, an antique Oriental painting and a handsome orchid lent the room a quiet elegance. Grandfather took off his coat and led me to one side of the office. Through the glass wall the view opened without obstruction, and beyond it the Han River spread wide. To stand on the top floor of Hyeon-gang, I understood then, was to have the night of Seoul under your feet.
"Well?"
"It's a little frightening."
"Why?"
"We're so high up."
"You're inside a building. What's there to be scared of?"
Instead of answering, I fixed my eyes on the dark beyond the glass. Why had he brought me all the way here? Accept his offer, and all of this would be handed down to me. Was that the meaning?
Some kind of coronation?
Introducing me in front of the guests tonight. Going out of his way to show me the chairman's office. Maybe both of those things had come from the same reason. I was still keeping my silence when he spoke.
"You thought about it?"
He came to stand beside me.
"Didn't I say I'd ask what you wanted around the time you started middle school?"
"Ah. That."
Grandfather looked into my eyes, as if the answer might already be written in them. Before I had even spoken, the corner of his mouth lifted, just a little.
"Even if I told you all of this was yours, you still wouldn't want it. That it?"
"I told you. It's scary."
He gave a short scoff.
"You got something prepared?"
"Yes."
"You confident you can talk me into it?"
"My future's riding on it. I have to try."
"All right. Let's hear it."
As if he already knew the talk would run long, Grandfather made for the chair reserved for senior executives. I stood opposite him with my back straight. I had spent two years getting ready for this moment. Behind him the night city glittered. I drew one small breath, and opened my mouth with care.
"There's exactly one reason I'm not taking part in management. Hyeon-gang is better off if I don't."
"You know what your assets are worth, talking like that?"
"Three hundred billion won, give or take. But if we follow the vision I have, Hyeon-gang grows into a company with a market capitalization of a thousand trillion won."
A thousand trillion. In this age it might sound like pure fantasy. And yet, in time, Hyeon-gang would become a premier corporation worth six hundred trillion on the market. It was already a company with a brilliant road ahead of it. Add the knowledge I carried out of the future, and doubling that growth was not an impossibility.
Grandfather seemed to read the confidence in my eyes. He nodded, as if to say go on, and I continued, taking my time.
"There's an old saying in economics. Don't fall in love with your own stock. It means emotion has no business getting into an investment that ought to stay cold."
Hidden inside that line was a remarkable hint.
"Turn it around, and a businessman gets the most ideal goal there is."
"Ideal goal?"
"Yes. Make the public fall in love with our stock. Then they'll keep investing without stopping to ask a single question, won't they?"
"That's an interesting way to think."
The interest lasted only a moment. Then he raised the objection.
"If it was that easy, wouldn't everybody already be doing it?"
"It isn't easy. But there is a way."
He waited.
"We look to the classics. Humanity's inheritance."
If you had to name the figure every age of humankind has loved without fail, it would be the hero, and no one else. The Greek and Roman myths. The Iliad. The Odyssey. For a very long time, people have gone wild for tales of heroes. Wild enough that the twenty-first century would eventually roll out the X-vengers, every hero alive crowding into a single story. In every era, without exception, human beings have fallen in love with heroes.
Grandfather wanted more.
"And what do you think a hero is?"
"Someone who never bows to the world. Someone who means to change it, whatever it takes."
"So we put a man like that in the chair and make him the face of the company. That what you're saying?"
"Yes."
The case that fit best was Apple's Steve Jobs. Through the smartphone, Jobs brought about an enormous transformation. What people called Apple's sensibility was not some simple matter of design. It was the feeling of taking part in the revolution he had started. The feeling an iPhone gave you came, without question, from the man named Jobs.
After Jobs died, another heroic chief executive appeared. Elon Musk, in the early days of Tesla. He said openly, and often, that he was going to change the world. Electric cars that drove themselves. Starlink, promising internet for the whole planet and an end to the gap in information. All the way to SpaceX, and the vow to leave Earth for Mars. The early Musk was a hero of the twenty-first century.
The difference between Jobs and Musk was only this. The one who had already gone could make no further mistakes. The one still living kicked up a fresh scandal nearly every day.
In any case.
Those two would be the perfect examples.
In the Korea of the 1980s, they would sound like nonsense. I had to reach for a subject Grandfather could feel for himself.
"I said the classics held a hint, didn't I?"
"You did."
"Asia has a heroic epic of its own that stands with the best of them. Romance of the Three Kingdoms."
Perhaps because Lee Munhyeok had already serialized his own Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Grandfather showed an interest.
"Someone surveyed people in China. Who is the general you love most? An overwhelming number of them chose Guan Yu."
He said nothing.
"Across the whole long history of China, was there really no general greater than Guan Yu?"
Of course there was. The generals who had a hand in unifying China alone would make a considerable list. What was so extraordinary about one commander from the kingdom of Shu?
"So why do people go that wild for Guan Yu? The reason is simple. It's the Romance. Because Luo Guanzhong told the story with Liu Bei at the center, Guan Yu could become the very symbol of valor and loyalty."
Some people like to say the real history and the Romance are different things. I wanted to ask them back: what difference does that make? If the Romance had never been written, who would have spared a thought for some old war in China? What captivated people was the story Luo Guanzhong told. What the true Guan Yu of history had actually been like hardly mattered.
When I finished, Grandfather shifted in his seat. Where before he had been leaned back, now he bent his body toward me.
"Let's see. The public loves a hero, and a hero is born out of a story. So what we need is a storyteller who can make us a hero. That what you're saying?"
"Exactly."
"And where are we supposed to find a storyteller like Luo Guanzhong?"
"Right here. All of this came out of my head, didn't it?"
"Then who's Guan Yu?"
"My brother, of course."
"So you're the director, and Yugeon's the actor?"
"Closer to this. He's the executive. I'm something like an image consultant."
At that, Grandfather rose. The wheeled chair rolled back behind him as he spoke.
"Hyeon-gang gains more if you stay in the back and build the story than if you, Jihoon, take a hand in running it. That it?"
"Yes."
Here his expression changed, in a way I couldn't quite read.
"Wouldn't it be better if you wrote the story and played the lead yourself?"
"One man playing every part is the shortest road to losing your edge. Choice and focus..."
"And what story are you meaning to hand Yugeon?"
"Nothing's been decided."
"And what's that supposed to mean? You been talking pretty this whole time with nothing behind it?"
"Of course not. If I make the story first, then my brother has to live exactly the way I've drawn it. That turns him into a puppet. I could never allow it."
He was quiet.
"He moves in the direction he wants to go, and I make the story that fits him and support him with it. So that a great many people come to love him. And so that, in the end, they come to love the Hyeon-gang he leads."
For a long time Grandfather said nothing at all. His head was tipped a little to one side, and he had gone still inside his own thoughts. I couldn't have said how much time passed.
"You're the one who brought all of this up, Jihoon. That right?"
"Yes."
"And you're telling me the world's going to fall in love with Yugeon?"
"People don't remember Luo Guanzhong. They only love the Guan Yu he chose to light up."
I thought it was a thing he could accept. I had spent two years on it, hadn't I?
But Grandfather seemed to see it differently.