Nishio Ayaka, the Japanese Auntie (3)
Assistant Manager Choi of the Quality Control Team poured soju into Kim Chirok's glass.
"I hear we're the same age. Is that right?"
"Year of the Pig."
"Then we really are the same age. You're from Seoul?"
"That's right."
"I'm from Cheonan. I overheard the Managing Director talking with the Plant Manager — they said you do good work, Mr. Kim."
"Did they? The Managing Director said that?"
"He also said he couldn't figure out why a decent-looking guy like you never went to college. Did you really never go?"
"I went for a little while, actually. Then I stopped."
Chirok let the answer trail off, deliberately vague. These days, just about anyone went to university.
Choi's mouth tugged into something like a smirk.
"A Seoul boy who ended up at some no-name local college — no wonder you don't want to talk about it. Still, if they're already saying you do good work, you'll make Assistant Manager someday. Maybe even Department Head. But you'd better be careful at this company."
"Careful?"
"The place is on shaky ground. A lot of debt, a lot of unpaid bills. I hear the President started this whole thing on borrowed money."
"Starting a company takes a lot of capital. That wouldn't be unusual."
"Which is why I'm just going to pad my resume here and jump ship to something near Cheonan. If I can land somewhere as a Manager, I'll be making a lot more than I do now. Not that it'll ever match what a staffer at a conglomerate like H Chemical pulls down."
The name H Chemical landed like a small jolt. It was the company Chirok himself had once worked for.
"You know H Chemical well?"
"We did business with them last year. That's where we got our raw materials. Then we couldn't pay, and I think that's when they cut us off."
"Then the people here must know the H Chemical executives pretty well."
"Nah, I doubt it. It was all through an H Chemical dealership. They wouldn't know the actual officers."
A dealership. Chirok felt a quiet rush of relief. The H Chemical plant in Incheon didn't sell to ordinary consumers — it moved product through dealerships.
"This is my first rubber-parts company. Quality control even more so."
Choi shrugged, putting on a knowing air.
"If you never went to an engineering school, you wouldn't know. The truth is, at a parts manufacturer like Hyangnam Tech, quality control is everything. But this company keeps fussing over all the wrong things."
"That doesn't sound good."
"What I'm handling right now is the environmental certification — ISO 14001 — and IATF 16949, which the automakers require. Nobody else gives a damn. They just tell me to do it myself."
"Are those really necessary?"
"They are. Without them, the buyers won't take your product."
"So the parts we turn out here end up in cars — Hyundai, Kia, companies like that?"
"Eventually, yes. But we don't deal with the big manufacturers ourselves. Everything goes to a Tier 1 Vendor called Mitsutek Co., Ltd."
"Mitsutek?"
"Company in Pyeongtaek. They take parts from little factories like ours, assemble them, and ship them on to Hyundai and Kia."
"So Hyundai and Kia only deal with Mitsutek, then."
"That's right. And Mitsutek itself is no small operation, once you see it. It's a publicly listed company."
"Is that so?"
Chirok almost mentioned the rumors — how the raw-material suppliers had been coming into the President's office lately and picking fights — but he let it go.
When Choi's glass ran dry, Chirok filled it at once.
"If Mitsutek is a listed company, they must pay on time. So why is this place struggling?"
"I don't know the details, but they say the debt load is huge. You'd get a better answer from the Accounting Manager — you sit with her, after all. She's been doing the books so long they call her a three-tailed fox."
"A what? Three tails?"
"Haha. I wouldn't know about that. But the Plant Manager says it now and then. 'That three-tailed fox.'"
"Sounds like he ran up expenses and she wouldn't reimburse him. Said there was no money."
"That's why people say you'd better stay on the Accounting Manager's good side — more than the Managing Director's, even. Though I suppose that doesn't apply to you, sitting right there with her."
Chirok gave a wry smile.
So even here, wherever people gathered, there was friction. Joy and anger, sorrow and pleasure — the whole messy range of it.
He found himself wanting to dig deeper into this company. He was going to start one of his own, after all. And when he did, he wouldn't be hiring people like himself alone. He would have to hire men like Choi, sitting across from him now. He would have to hire foreigners whose faces looked nothing like his.
"Most of the Hyangnam Tech people live here in town, I suppose."
"Plenty of them in studios, too. The foreign workers sometimes board together. And someone like Auntie Ayaka — the Japanese lady — lives in an apartment."
"An apartment? So she lives with her family. What does her husband do?"
"I don't know for sure, but I heard the Plant Manager say he works in administration at a middle school around here."
"Middle-school administration — that's a civil service post, then? Their life must be pretty stable."
"I'd imagine so. I don't much care for that woman, though."
"Why not? She seemed like she had a nice way about her."
"She keeps telling me to believe in Jesus. And not just any church — the Unification Church."
"Haha. Is that right? Then her husband must be a Unificationist too."
"Probably. That's how they got married, I'd bet — two Unificationists matched up."
"She laughs a lot, though. She seemed cheerful."
"Everyone else around here is miserable, and she's the only one in a good mood. Look, she might be a decent person, but I don't like being told to find Jesus. You don't go to church, do you, Mr. Kim?"
"No. I don't."
"I've noticed you stay after hours reading in the office. You're not prepping for the Grade 9 civil service exam, are you?"
"Ah, no. The office is just a better place to read than my studio. I'm not studying for any exam. Just light novels, that sort of thing."
"Civil service isn't a bad life, though. Make Grade 9, land a desk at city hall — that's a solid gig. Just last week the inspectors came out here over the wastewater, and you should have seen them throwing their weight around."
"I don't know. I don't think civil service would suit me..."
"Anyway, Hyangnam Tech is not a place to grow old in. They even held up our pay last year."
"It's that bad? Supplying a listed company — you'd think at least one client would be rock solid."
"The rubber parts we mold don't go straight to Mitsutek. They need a ring fitted into them, so everything has to pass through a company called Ilryung Precision first."
"Is that so?"
"So even if the unit price looks decent, once you subtract what Ilryung Precision charges for the rings, there's nothing left."
"I see."
"Bottom line, pad the resume and get out. That's the winning move. And if you want to raise your market value, Mr. Kim, go to college. A cyber university, even. Just go."
Go to a cyber university?
Chirok smiled a bitter little smile.
If the company was carrying that much debt, the financing costs alone would be eating them alive. And even a healthy sales figure wouldn't mean much once Ilryung Precision had taken its cut.
If the President left a conglomerate as a Director and came out here to start his own company, he probably never had that much money to begin with.
An apartment and his severance pay — that was likely the extent of it. Director Park at H Chemical had been a conglomerate executive too, and that was about his level.
But looking at the scale of the factory, he must have poured billions of won into the place. And he had started far too late in life. He was an old man now.
The two young men drinking together that evening could not have been thinking more different thoughts. One was already planning to put in his time and jump ship. The other was already planning to study the company more closely.
Monday came, and with it a new week.
If he was going to learn this business, Chirok decided, the first thing was to make a good impression. He took to greeting the factory people before they could greet him. There was no cleaner assigned to the office, so he took the initiative there as well — wiping down the Managing Director's desk before the morning started, then the Accounting Manager's.
The Japanese woman who handled shipping and receiving inspection on the factory floor came up to the office now and then. She would sort through the outbound slips and inbound receipts, the invoices and the tax invoices. She sat at a logistics-team desk across from Chirok, the seats empty during the day because those staff were all out driving trucks to clients.
The Accounting Manager was at the tax office that day. Chirok quietly walked over and held out a cup of coffee. The Japanese woman looked up, and her face lit with delight.
"Oh my! You brought me coffee! Ho-ho-ho. I'll enjoy this."
"Your given name is Ayaka — what's your family name?"
"Ho-ho-ho. Nishio."
She really did laugh at everything. He had only asked her surname, and she laughed.
"How do you write it in Chinese characters?"
He handed her a slip of memo paper, and she wrote her name. Seomi Seohui, in the Korean reading of the characters.
"Ah, Seomi Seohui. So Seomi Seohui is Nishio Ayaka."
"Ho-ho-ho. You know your Chinese characters, Mr. Kim. Plenty of Koreans can't read these at all. Ho-ho-ho."
This time Chirok asked in Japanese.
"Obasan no okosan wa nan-nin desu ka? How many children do you have?"
Her eyes went wide.
"Oh my! You speak Japanese!"
"I learned a little."
He had asked in Japanese, but she answered in Korean.
"Three. In a True Family of our church, having children is a blessing."
From there he kept asking in Japanese, and she kept answering in Korean.
"How old is the eldest?"
"Ho-ho-ho. Starting university next year."
"The children all do well in school, I bet."
"Ho-ho-ho. They're all right."
"Where did you meet your husband?"
"Ho-ho-ho. At church."
"I heard you're with the Unification Church. They say they match people up whether you like it or not. Is that true?"
"Ho-ho-ho. The True Parents decide, but you can decline up to three times. We said yes to the first match, though."
"He must have looked like someone you could trust."
"Ho-ho-ho. Something like that."
"Your husband is a civil servant, isn't he?"
"Ho-ho-ho. That's right. The children's father is a civil servant, and I was a nurse back in Kochi Prefecture."
Chirok had no idea what the Unification Church's divorce rate looked like after marriage. But it occurred to him that when they matched people, they probably paired those of similar standing. That alone might keep the divorces down.
In the old days, Koreans had married partners their parents chose — people they had never even seen. And those marriages, they said, ended in divorce far less often than today's love matches. Perhaps the Unification Church worked on the same principle.
If I had been a Unificationist, and Oh Ha-young and Bang Mihee had been Unificationists too, would they have tried to match me with one of them? Would the man they call True Father have done that?
The thought drew another wry smile from him.
She had just said she had been a nurse in Kochi Prefecture before she married. Chirok wrote the Chinese characters for Kochi on the memo paper.
"This is how you write Kochi Prefecture, isn't it?"
"Yes! That's right! Ho-ho-ho. Mr. Kim, your Japanese is excellent, and your Chinese characters are so beautifully written."
She even clapped as she laughed. She really was a woman who laughed at everything. And then something surfaced in Chirok's mind, sudden and clear.
Hirosue Yoshiko, in Kyoto, was from Kochi Prefecture too.
The Japanese woman was still smiling.
"What a waste."
"I'm sorry? What is?"
"You know your Chinese characters, you speak Japanese, and you're so handsome. What a waste. You would have done so well at some big hotel in Seoul. Ho-ho-ho."
"I like it here at Hyangnam Tech."
"Don't the big hotels pay much better, though? Ho-ho-ho."
That was as far as they got. The Accounting Manager walked in, and the conversation ended there.