A Small Key Opens Big Doors: An Autobiography of an Industrialist Kim Hyang-Soo

2013

Chapter 1

YOUTH

My Hometown Kangjin

My hometown of Kangjin is a scene from an Eastern painting. It is known for its purple mountains and pristine water. The famed Jiri Mountains split up west and east at Kangjin Bay, a long and narrow bay along the South Sea. The mountains and the sea meet at a wide plain called Kangjin Plains. Two rivers meander across the plain: the Tamjin River, which originates from Mt. Wolchul, and Kangjin Stream, which begins its trek from Mt. Seo Ki.

Come spring, deep blue pines and blooming flowers cover the region, and the golden morning fog floats around the lazy ships in the bay. Add the spring breeze blowing over the crimson azalea in the meadow by Mt. Su In, the new tea leaves, and the spring wheat that begins to turn the fields dark blue, and you have a picture of paradise. Come summer, the pine fresh breeze cools off your sweaty brow and cotton white clouds whiter than winter snow refresh your eyes.

This exceptional scenery has always attracted many literary giants. Song Siyeol (pen name Woo Am, mentor to Bong Nim Dae Gun) spent a number of years at Baek Ryun Temple in 1689 on his way to exile on Jeju Island. Kangnam School was built in his honor, along with a hall in commemoration of his work. People called the village Young Dang to perpetuate his memory.

Jeong Yak-yong (pen name Dasan) began his life of exile here in 1801, during the time of King Soonjo. He wrote many books here, including Mok Min Shim Seo, describing his life and philosophy.

Nine years after Jeong Yak-yong’s arrival in Kangjin, another great man of letters came. His name was Kim Jeong-hee (pen name Chusa). He was also en route to exile on Jeju Island. He stayed at Dae Heung Temple in beautiful Mt. Du Ryoon for several years, where he became friends with the famous monk Cho Ui Seon Sa.

These literary greats had enormous influence on the village, and tiny Kangjin produced exceptional scholars for years to come, including ten or more who went on to study at Tokyo University and thirty or more who studied in Seoul. Among them was Kim Yoon-shik (pen name Young Rahng), famous for his poem Till the Peony Blooms.

My Family

I was born in a village called Ji Jeon Ahn-deul, a plot of meadows northeast of Kangjin. The neighborhood was called Song Jeon-ri, owing to the dense pines surrounding it. It was also called Ja Rae Bu-ri because the area was shaped like a turtle. Pine trees must have thrived nearby in the old days. The village behind it, at the foothill of Mt. Woo Du Bong, is called Sol Chi (or Blessed Pines).

My father came to Song Jeon-ri following the Dong Hak Revolt. He had lost everything he had in Kangjin due to the fires during the revolt, and he settled in Song Jeon-ri after he rode out the maelstrom in Mt. Seo Ki.

According to the ancient writers, Kangjin’s geography resembles a bull laying down for a rest, which means that the area is blessed with rich crops. If you stand at a spot called Doraboki-jae in Chil Lyang-myeon, Songso-ri, and look at the shape of the village, you see a mountain peak called Mt. Woo Du Bong that looks like a bull’s head, while the village’s shape resembles the bull’s face. The well in front of the county office building makes for the bull’s nostrils, while the office building forms the bridge of its nose. The large well at the west side of the village is the bull’s left eye.

I was born in a three-room house with a thatched roof overlooking the evergreen bamboo forest by a stream that flows from Woo Du Bong peak. I was born on December 22, 1912, eighteen years after the Dong Hak Revolt and two years after Japan had annexed Korea, while Terauchi was the governor.

It was a time of sadness for the twenty million Korean people, a time of forced occupation by the Japanese military. It was also a time of hunger. We resorted to eating roots, wild plants, and tree bark to sustain ourselves before the spring wheat crop came around.

My ancestry goes back seventy-two generations of the Kim clan of the Kimhae region, which began with King Suro. There are sects within the Kims of Kimhae, and I belong to the Pando Panseo or the Samhyeonpa sect. Samhyeonpa signifies the presence of three sages among the names in its genealogy. The three sages are: Kim Geuk-il, who distinguished himself as a loyal subject toward the end of the Goryeo dynasty and at the beginning of the Joseon Dynasty; Kim Il-son, the great scholar during the early Yeonsan era of the Joseon Dynasty; and Kim Dae-yu, who contemplated nature and poetry during King Sungjong’s days in the Joseon Dynasty.

Among these Kims, Il-son in particular was recognized as a great Confucian scholar when he was thirty years old. Yeonsan the King punished him severely for criticizing King Sejo, who had ascended to the throne by assassinating King Danjong. But when Yeonsan was purged and Joongjong took the throne, Kim Il-son was reprieved, taking back his old post. At the academy where he studied, the King personally wrote the sign over the entrance gate. The King also had a monument erected to remind everyone to dismount from their horses in front of the school out of respect for Kim Il-son. The academy is called the Ja Gye Academy of Cheongdo.

Originally, our family started out in Cheongdo, in the province of North Gyeongsang. Then, about 350 years ago, an ancestor by the name of Ho Jang moved to Kangjin and began a new clan. He came to Kangjin as a seventh generation descendent of Kim Il-son, during the middle period of the Joseon dynasty; the presiding Chief of the area paid homage to Ho Jang in respect for Kim Il-son.

Father

My father, Kim Jae-hwang, was the sole male descendent over three generations. My grandfather had passed on early and my father grew up under his grandfather Kim Young-yu, who was a high government official. In those days, corruption was common among the local officials who assessed taxes at their own whim. At the same time, the yangban (noble) class mistreated commoners and regarded public property as their personal property.

The yangban class also persecuted rich people for the purpose of wrangling money out of them. Thus, common folks regarded the yangban class and the local officials as evils from another world. My great-grandfather always told my father, Never become an official. My father followed this advice and avoided any position in an official capacity, which led him to poverty, and he struggled as a lowly farmer. His first wife died young, five years after giving birth to a son named Byung-yoon. Still only in his twenties, my father remarried to my mother, who then gave birth to five sons and one daughter.

I remember my father repeatedly traveling to Cheongdo and Kimhae to take care of family affairs as representative of the Kim clan, this despite the poor traveling conditions in those days. He was keen on Chinese studies as well as herbal medicine. He was the caretaker of the family’s health, and I seem to have inherited his skills in herbal medicine. I have acquired enough of a knowledge base to advise people on herbal medicine.

My father was not very tall, but he was very active and forthright in his decision-making. He was very strict and became known as the Kangjin Tiger. He never caved in to the Japanese law requiring all males to cut their hair short. He maintained his sangtu, the traditional topknot hairdo, till the end of his life.

Mother

My mother hailed from the Park clan of Milyang. An elegant maiden of exceptional beauty, she received many marriage proposals, my widower father among them. She was ten years younger than my father.

Her family was not keen on my father’s proposal, but he managed to persuade her father by the strength of his yangban character.

In my mother’s family, there were a number of patriots who had fought for an independent Korea during the last days of the Joseon Dynasty. One of her cousins participated in the Dong Hak Revolt, and his sons were in turn involved in the independence movement against the Japanese military, suffering numerous incarcerations and torture. His third son Park Il-chun had organized the March 1 insurrection in Kangjin. The villagers later dedicated a monument to him for his bravery.

Poverty stricken, my mother struggled all her life, taking care of her scholar husband and seven children with admirable patience and a powerful focus and dedication. She was a proud person, never accepting a single grain of rice from anyone else. On the days of ancestral rituals, she would clean the house inside and out and prepare a humble food tray as the ancestral offering: a stem of green onion trimmed meticulously, along with a dried pollack, and a bowl of pristine water. I can still remember the atmosphere she created. She always gave her best, despite her meager resources.

I was the youngest in the family. She braided my hair until I was five years old, while my siblings watched. Often, she would tell us tales while she braided our hair. I still remember one story she told us then, her dream about my keun omoni (my father’s first wife).

There were two wells near our house. One was by the village shade tree, and the other was near her parents’ house. Mother usually washed clothes at the stream flowing by the bamboo forest. She used to fetch water from the well next to her parents’ house for us to drink. The well water came from the foot of Mt. Woo Du Bong and it never went dry, even during the drought season. The water was cool during the summer and warm during the winter.

One day in her dream, Mother was drawing water from the well. A tall young woman with a birthmark on her face approached her and told her not to use the water from the well. But Mother was never one to pay attention to her dreams, and she continued to draw water from the well. Some time after, one of Mother’s eyes began to go bad and formed a white cataract. Then the tall woman reappeared in mother’s dream and scolded her severely, Look here, so much moss in this water, and you’re still using the water!

Mother finally told my father about the dream, and straight away he identified the tall woman with a birthmark on her face as keun omoni. Mother paid heed to keun omoni’s advice and stopped using the well. Her eye returned to normal. She was very grateful to keun omoni and often repeated that story for us.

My Older Brother

When I was going to normal (elementary) school, my big brother lived straight across the meadow in a village called Shin Hak-ri, where white herons covered the hill in the back of the village.

He was well off and always able to save enough rice to last for three years. He stored his rice in a round bin made of rice straws, sturdy enough to protect dozens of heavy rice bags from the rainstorms.

When he harvested new rice grains, he immediately stored them in the bin in the backyard, consuming the old rice first. For this reason, the rice from three years before smelled and tasted stale. Yet he never flinched; he was obsessively committed to his frugal ways.

In the countryside, they used to cover the dirt floor with bamboo mats. Being a frugal person, my brother used the same mat until it deteriorated to the point that dirt would puff up through the mattress seams whenever you stepped on it.

Occasionally, my big brother would tell me, No one in my village is going to starve to death, no matter how bad the harvest, explaining the reason for his frugality. It is unthinkable now, but often in those days, people died of starvation because of bad harvests. That was why my big brother did what he did.

My Youth

People called me Bok-nam, meaning Fortunate Boy. Being the baby of the family, I received much love and affection from my mother. My father was a stern man and my older siblings never dared to go near him. I, on the other hand, stayed with him in his room, prompting my older brother to say, It’s all right for Bok-nam, he is the baby. I always thought that I benefited the most from my father and his wisdom. It is not to say, however, that he was soft with me. For instance, I don’t recall ever feeling comfortable enough to sing a song in front of him, which made, I think, for bad marks when I studied music in school. As a businessman later on, I was expected to entertain clients, which included drinking parties and singing in front of the group. I always dreaded having to sing at these occasions.

When I was five years old, I learned Chinese characters at the village school. This was a time when I was carefree, roaming the streams, the mountains and the meadows. Mt. Woo Du Bong stood about 600 feet tall behind my village. At the top of the mountain, I could look southward and take in the romantic sight of the islands that dotted the sea. On a clear day in autumn, I could see Mt. Halla on Jeju Island in the far distance.

In the springtime, boys snapped off pine sprouts and ate them. We called the fresh sprouts on pine trees song ku, and we peeled off their skin and sucked the juice from them. Pipi was another delicacy we relished. We found them near rice paddies and in the middle of grass fields. Pipi flowers bloomed in late spring like the white reed flowers, and we picked them before they bloomed. We enjoyed the tender meat of the plump bud.

As we grew older, we went after persimmons, chestnuts, and sweet potatoes for snacks. We would sneak off with these treats wherever we saw them, but no one minded our pranks.

Fishing was fun. In May or June, every year, rice plants grow tall and drain water overflows along the ditches. We would drape fishing nets across the ditches in the evening, and come back early next morning to find all kinds of fishes caught in the net. We would find carp, catfish, eels, mudfish, and others flopping around in the net. The grownups wrapped some of the fish in sesame leaves and lettuce and ate them raw with chili pepper, dipped in soybean paste. They boiled other kinds of fish in hot and tangy broth and ate them while drinking rice wine.

Rivers flow into the ocean near Kangjin, which makes it an ideal place for freshwater eels. Among all the freshwater fish, sweetfish is the top of the line. In the old days, sweetfish was an item on the menu of kings and queens. Most people from Kangjin have fond memories of fishing.

I was weak physically from an early age, never caring much for athletics. When my buddies and I went to play in the rivers, I merely splashed water, never venturing in to swim. I was a quiet, shy boy.

The stream by the bamboo forest always had water. It didn’t carry a huge volume of water, but it never dried up, and we washed clothes with its water. The stream also fed into the rice paddies, making them the most desirable rice paddies in the area.

Occasionally, birds came out of the bamboo forest to drink water in the stream. The prettiest bird I saw was a fishing bird with a sky-blue body and a pointed beak. I would catch these birds now and then. I would take a minnow and a piece of tough grass called goksari and tie them together with string. I would then float it in the water, and watch the minnow swim around while I hung on to the string. Out of the bamboo forest, a fishing bird would dive straight down for the minnow and swallow it whole. At that moment, I would reel in the string and the bird.

Friends from My Youth

My childhood friends and I have drifted apart and I can hardly recall their names. I do remember my cousins on my mother’s side, especially Hanbawoo (meaning first rock) and Ttobawoo (meaning another rock). There weren’t any close relatives on my father’s side because he was the only male child for three generations.

I had two uncles on my mother’s side. Hanbawoo, just one year older than me, was the son of the older uncle, while Ttobawoo, the son of the younger uncle, was just a few months older than me. Ttobawoo became a tailor in Seoul, and he passed away before liberation. That was the extent of my close friends in the village. But I always remember one episode whenever I think of Ttobawoo.

There is a fish called a durongi in Kangjin. It is a cross between an eel and a snake, ugly and unappetizing. Its reddish appearance turned everyone off, and no one could bear to eat it.

One day, ten of us little tykes caught nine eels. We roasted the eels and ate one each. After everyone had finished, Ttobawoo yelled, "Someone ate a durongi!" and ran away. We had caught nine eels, but ten of us ate one each. No doubt someone had eaten a durongi. Everyone felt like he was the one who had eaten a durongi, and we were all ready to throw up. I still laugh when I think of the confusion Ttobawoo had caused.

Later on as an adult, I came across the Buddhist saying, "Everything in this world is made to flow from mah-eum (the state of mind and heart)," and for a moment it made me think of the durongi episode.

There was a famous Buddhist monk named Won Hyo. He was journeying to China, at the time of the Tang Dynasty. In Liaotung, he happened to be near a tomb when night fell and so he went to sleep by the tomb. He got thirsty in the middle of the night and looked around for a well, but to no avail. Then he saw something shining in the moonlight and walked towards it. It was a bowl of water. He drank the delicious water in one big gulp. Come light next morning, he saw that the bowl of was a piece of skull with dirty water in it. This incident led him to enlightenment. He wrote a song about mah-eum.

Mah-eum must come before all things and Buddha’s teaching;

With dead mah-eum, I am no different from the skull.

One summer, a short time after I came back from my studies in Japan, Ttobawoo and I took a bicycle trip from Seoul to Kangjin. I don’t remember how long the trip took us, but we started out at dawn and went through Yongsan, over the Han River Bridge, and on southward. Before we got to Pyeongtaek, one of us had a flat tire. We fixed the flat with the gear we had brought with us: rubber glue, a patch, and a pump. We continued on to Pyeongtaek, Jochiwon, Cheonan, Daejon, and the Honam Plains. The summer sun was hot, and we ate watermelons to cool off along the way. We toured