Offerings Read online

  Copyright © 2020 by Michael ByungJu Kim

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Lyrics from “Morning Dew” by Min Ki Kim, copyright © 1971 by Min Ki Kim, reprinted by the kind permission of the Korean Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019957246

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  ISBN: 978-1-950691-62-3

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-950691-69-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Abuji

  Table of Contents

  I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  II

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  III

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  Acknowledgments

  The week before graduation, I told Abuji I was headed for Wall Street. The modern world, I said, as rehearsed, revolves around business, and its epicenter is Wall Street. It’s Rome at the peak of the Roman Empire, the place to be for the best and brightest today.

  “Where . . . what is Wall Street?” my father asked.

  There are people in the world who have capital, I explained, and there are people who need capital. Investment bankers put them together. And, I mentioned, we get paid handsomely for it. I showed him the offer letter from Phipps & Co., presenting it like a winning lottery ticket.

  Abuji took out his reading glasses and read the letter, slowly. When he was done, he said only, “Never been about money in Lee family.” He was quiet for a long time. Then, “You’re not going to get PhD?”

  “Maybe later, Abuji,” I said. And in the moment, I meant it.

  He put his eyeglasses back in the breast pocket and calmly recited, in Korean, the long tradition of distinguished scholars in the Lee family, going back generations. Learning, wisdom, service, all his favorite themes, echoes from my childhood. He was too gentlemanly to cite then sah-nong-gong-sang, the prescribed Confucian social hierarchy: sunbi scholars at the top, followed by farmers, then artisans and, at the bottom, merchants—businessmen.

  “Trust me,” I wanted to tell Abuji. “For once, believe in your son. It’s not giving in to mammon; I’m not selling out. I’m buying in. To this exciting new thing, even if it’s not noble or high in the Confucian order, even though it’s a road not taken by my ancestors. Or because it’s not. I’m following my destiny, my own.”

  But there was too much in his face, the weight of years and illness, of expectation and hope and disillusionment. A father’s judgment is a jagged stone in a stream, hard always but smoothed in the currents of time. I didn’t argue. It would only have added to his confusion and disappointment. Time, I told myself, will make him understand.

  I didn’t know then time was one thing Abuji did not have. His mysterious illness would soon be diagnosed as pulmonary fibrosis. Like his father before him, Abuji would fall victim to the Lee family curse.

  “I’ll get to travel the world,” I told him at the time. “Who knows, maybe even go back to Hanguk.” He looked blankly at me.

  Years later, this would come to pass. All the half-truths I told Abuji about Wall Street and being a merchant came to be realized, long after I had stopped believing them. I found myself, through that bright miracle of chance that shines on the world, in the right place at the right time. A time of national crisis and reckoning. I served our homeland. And my own destiny blossomed, rock flower-like, through it all. But was it too late for him and me? For real resolution, reconciliation perhaps, or at least acceptance?

  That is the question I ask myself even today, as I stand on our family mountain, Eunsan, outside of Seoul, holding my son’s small hand. I take a deep breath and, together with my jangnam, kneel on the damp ground and do a ceremonial bow to Abuji and all the ancestors before him.

  I

  Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

  Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;

  But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

  When two strong men stand face to face,

  Tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

  Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West”

  1

  December 2012

  On a snowy day fifteen winters ago, I came home.

  Asia was in crisis, and I came to save Korea. Land of my birth, home of my ancestors, my gohyang.

  We touched down early at Gimpo, dawn uncurling its rosy fingers outside. “Welcome to the Land of Morning Calm,” the PA said. Snow fell lightly; a blanket of white covered the giwa rooftops of the houses lining the runway.

  They had told me in New York to pack my bags for Seoul, saying, “You are Korean, aren’t you?”

  There was a low hum at the airport. Visitors shuffling in line, officers tapping keyboards, bags circling on the carousel. Beneath it all, a stillness. The stillness of my childhood that used to fill our classrooms. When we were taught to be quiet, and not move. Words unspoken, thoughts unexpressed.

  The officer at Passport Control looked from the eagle on my blue passport to me. “Koondae?” he asked. Military duty.

  When I was twelve, I asked my father why we had decided to immigrate to the United States. “For your and your dongseng’s education,” he said, tousling my hair. One night, Abuji came home, Chivas on his breath, and he told me, “Today, you’re naturalized, an American citizen. So you will not grow up to be one of them,” he said. “Never serve in That Dictator’s army.”

  I shook my head. “American,” I told the officer. Wordlessly, he stamped my passport, waved me through.

  One day back in Seoul, I came home from school to see Abuji standing by a small fire in the backyard of our house. He was burning a bundle of clothes. I could make out his officer uniforms, once so crisp, now a wrinkled heap, throwing off black smoke. I saw the medals of honor glow, then burn in the embers. I knew Abuji’s job had been in the army, in intelligence. Through the smoke, I could make out tears running down his face. It was the first time I saw my father cry.

  I made my way through the arrivals area, where there were no
t many people. There was no one to greet me.

  “Home is where you start from,” Abuji said, when he came to see me off at Kennedy Airport. “Over twenty years since we left, but it’s still your gohyang.” His face looked suddenly aged, already weak from disease, but the light there still. The light of a will to struggle, against his illness, and time. “Just need to keep breathing,” he said, tapping his frail chest.

  Outside, the morning fog rose, dissipated with the distant rumble of jets flying into the sky. On the Olympic Highway, the snow started to fall again, lightly, the thickening white carpet punctured by green bristles of rice plants.

  The air felt heavy, as though weighed down with the burden of history. I felt the tiredness of the long flight. I rolled down the window in the taxi, and I saw snowflakes descend silent, and soft, and slow, Longfellow’s poem of the air, revealing the secret of despair, and I thought of the centuries of foreign invasions of Korea, the colonial occupation by Japan, the Korean War, pitting brother against brother, leaving two countries at war still, a people divided. The long Han River snaked along beside us. I imagined the spirits from the war roaming the hills of Namsan and the ghosts of the tortured dissidents haunting the Blue House, where Park Chung Hee launched the headlong prosperity drive that produced the Miracle on the Han. All the ghosts of the past. I felt light-headed, fatigue creeping over my body. The tenth-wealthiest nation in the world, now on the brink of a sovereign default. I closed my eyes and held my breath in. I waited for my consciousness to dissolve.

  I was back home, where I started.

  2

  December 27, 1997

  Destiny, its seeds sown in the weepy rice paddies and dusty textile mills of a small, poor but big-dreaming country in the 1960s, has brought me by way of Wall Street to the banquet room of the Koryo Hotel. Four folding tables have been arranged into a neat rectangle. I sit with the rest of the Phipps & Co. working group at one long table; across from us is the team from Sterling Brothers. Two dozen knights in Savile Row armor, Mont Blanc swords drawn, ready for battle. There are no windows, no sunlight, just the heater going full blast. Like the heaters in the winters of my childhood. Koreans love their heat.

  “Lookee all the muckety-mucks,” whispers Jun, an associate from the Phipps Seoul office. He has tidy, closely cropped hair, but a cowlick sticks up in the back, making him look younger than he is. “Must be something big.”

  “Something sexy,” Jack chimes in. “A merger with North Korea maybe. Better yet, a hostile takeover.” Jack is a Corporate Finance vice president from New York. We were in the same associate training class when we became drinking buddies. His real name is Heathcliff Walker III, but his Cottage House brethren took to calling him Jack, short for Jackhammer (of a pair with his girlfriend, the Slab).

  Jack has a sense, as we all do, of why we’re here. Korea is in a financial meltdown. The Thai baht has already collapsed. Indonesia is effectively bankrupt. They’re starting to call it the Asian Financial Crisis. Korea has been downgraded by Moody’s to Baa3, borderline investment grade. Its stock market has plunged by 40 percent. The won in free fall. Three of the largest banks have gone under; several leading chaebol groups are rumored to be next. These family-owned conglomerates dominate Korean business, and the fate of the economy is tied to their survival. We, the Phipps and Sterling bankers, have been sent from New York to work out a rescue package for Korea. Before the contagion spreads across Asia, and beyond.

  As we take our places, beepers go off, in a chorus of chirps and buzzes. News flash on BlackBerries: Kim Dae Jung projected to win the Blue House. DJ, as he’s known, is a reform-minded liberal, and his presidential victory will be the first by an opposition candidate in the brief history of free elections in Korea. As a dissident under the Park Chung Hee regime, DJ was tortured by the Korean CIA: he still has a limp in his walk to show for it. He is famous for having said in prison, “They can choke the rooster, but the sun will rise in the morning.” He ran his campaign on a platform of a “sunshine policy” toward North Korea. He advocates warming the North with sunny policies of engagement rather than the historical approach of blowing harsh, cold sanctions at them. People say he’s either after a Nobel Peace Prize or a closet Communist.

  We look up from our devices as a tall, wiry man strides into the room. He’s in his midfifties, sports wire-rim glasses. A man in tow, half a foot shorter, announces, “The Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Korea.”

  The Koreans rise to their feet, and the rest of us follow, a bit uncertainly.

  The minister takes off his glasses, wipes the lenses on his tie, rubbing small concentric circles. “Gentlemen,” he says. “Our country is in crisis.” The minister speaks in a barely audible voice, forcing us to concentrate on his words. He is used to being center stage.

  “The Big Dawg,” Jack mutters.

  “All that’s standing between him and the Blue House is a miraculous economic recovery,” Jun adds.

  The man trailing Choi intones, “What honorable minister is saying is our country is in, how you say, desperate measure.” Yoon is director-general at the Ministry of Economy and Planning, MoEP for short. He has dyed jet-black hair, and his furtive, eager-to-please glances at the minister betray a career bureaucrat. “Foreign reserves of our great country are down to US dollar fifty billion.” He pauses, counts off the zeros on his sheet again, corrects: “I mean US dollar five billion.” He turns to the assistant behind his shoulder, who nods in approval of his superior’s zero-counting prowess.

  “Country going down,” Jack says under his breath.

  “If we do not find a solution to current problem,” says Choi, still barely above a whisper, “our country will be . . . bankrupt.” He scans the room, seems to zoom in on me. “It is up to you, the best and brightest in world of finance, to save our country from ruin.”

  “Your two most venerable houses have been called here,” Yoon adds, “to advise government of Korea on development and execution of a financing strategy.” He takes his jacket off, revealing braided leather suspenders with clip-ons, and rolls up the shirtsleeves, his short arms requiring only two skinny revolutions of fabric. “Now, let’s get down to bidness.”

  The government officials share a seriousness and a sense of duty, a sacred condition that holds them aloft, pulled down only by anxiety and panic from the imminent peril facing their country. Glory will be theirs presently, if they could just get over this economic crisis.

  First to speak is the silver-haired senior banker from Sterling. Gandalf the Grey —a nickname he bestowed on himself and enforces among his colleagues—came from the State Department, where he was assistant deputy undersecretary of state. Or rather, Gandalf opens his mouth to speak with a loud “Ahem,” but he’s cut off by his counterpart from Phipps, Ignatio—a.k.a. The Monkey. The Monkey has a round face with features slightly off center, like a reflection in a spoon. He also has a beard, uncommon among bankers, which has declared war on the entire face, threatening to conquer the last bare epidermal holdouts, nose and eyelids. The Monkey is a figure of respect and revulsion, known equally for his deal savvy and his abusive treatment of subordinates. Unlike Gandalf, he is never called by his nickname.

  “What we have here,” the Monkey squeaks in his distinctive high pitch, “is a perception problem, not an economic fundamentals problem.” He waves a hairy hand for emphasis: “Let’s not forget, Korea is still the tenth-largest GDP in the world, with growth rates of—”

  “At the end of the day, though, it’s really a credit problem,” Gandalf rumbles in the rich baritone on which he prides himself, the voice of experience and wisdom. “Gentlemen, we must engage posthaste with the rating agencies in re the current . . . situation. We at Sterling Brothers would be happy to take the lead, given that the head of our credit department is the former head of Moody’s Sovereign Ratings—”

  “First things first,” the Monkey interrupts. A partner in the last privately held firm on Wall Street, he
’s asserting his natural superiority over a managing director from a publicly traded house. “It’s not credit per se. It’s credibility. First thing we do, we assess the reputational damage to Korea in the international markets. Only then can we start to think about restoring—”

  Minister Choi has been sitting still, eyes closed. He clears his throat. “Allow me to be clear. We brought in Phipps and Sterling to be coadvisors to government of Korea.” He looks at Gandalf, then the Monkey. “Equal billing. So I’ll expect you to be cooperative and work . . . collegially with each other.”

  He’s handed a note. The furrowing of his eyebrows suggests something from the Blue House, maybe the president-elect. The bankers around me don’t seem to notice—they’re already deep in negotiations of their own.

  A Sterling MD: “Can we assume we’ll be the sole global joint lead advisers? We can bring in co-’s later, but you can’t have too many chefs in the kitchen.”

  A Phipps ED, nodding his agreement: “Can’t have all chiefs and no Indians.”

  My hand rises. To say what? That this is a deal that is more than a transaction, what Abuji might call chun-jae il-woo, a once-in-a-thousand-years opportunity? An opportunity to stare dark destiny in the face and defy it, in a put-our-foot-down statement for humanity? If we pull this off, it will be a shining, noble achievement, something to tell our grandchildren. I can see myself in a rocking chair: “Your halabuji saved the motherland from ruin!” So, for once, let’s stop with the penis measuring and all pitch in! Then I remember Abuji telling me, “The riper the rice plant, the more it bows its head.” I slowly lower my hand.

  A Sterling MD pipes up. “What about our . . . the fee?”

  Ah, the magic word. We investment bankers like to think we’re a breed apart, sharper, better than everyone else. We perpetuate a self-mythology of a master race that controls the destiny of the world. There’s a fine line, of course, between a vision and a delusion. At my Phipps job interview, I made the mistake of asking the French-cuffed, Hermès tie–clad VP interviewing me, “So, what’s the difference between i-bankers and commercial bankers?”