Korea Read Online Free Page B

into the hot late-summer sunshine, and we clambered down the steps onto the dockside, and he looked admiringly up at the great wall of rust-red steel with the fireflies of welding torches glittering here and there along its immense length. He turned to me and said, with a note of very real sadness in his voice: ‘You know, I think that Europe is quite finished.’
    I prompted him to explain. He warmed to his miserable theme as only a Scandinavian could: ‘There was a time, you know,when we were past masters at building things like this. Ships so grand, so beautiful…But now, looking at this…Oh, sure, from my owner’s point of view I’m pleased. We’ve saved some money, we’ve got a ship delivered on time, everything’s fine in the balance books. But seeing how they do it, these Koreans—I just can’t see how we back in Europe can continue to make ships, how we can continue to have any real industry at all. I suppose what I mean to say is, I don’t see how Europe can survive in the face of competition from miracle workers like the people here. For that’s what this is—it’s a sheer, bloody miracle.’
    And that, I suppose, is when my fascination with Korea began.
     
    I knew, as my Swedish companion had, that Korea had quite literally risen from the ashes of recent ruin. Just thirty-two years before this particular autumn day, a war that had lasted for three years, claimed 1.5 million casualties, and raged quite pointlessly up and down the playing-card-shaped Korean Peninsula, had been concluded: a cease-fire had been announced, a truce that divided a nation in two and separated it by barbed wire and minefields and ever-vigilant guards was put into effect. And South Korea, utterly devastated and demoralized, an emasculated shambles of a country, started shakily to get up onto its two feet again.
    And get up it most certainly did. With an effort that, more than any other post-war recovery effort in the world’s history, appears now to have been superhuman, truly miraculous, Korea stood, then took a first step, then began to walk with confidence, then to trot, and finally to run until—as now—it has started seriously to challenge the world’s industrial leaders, with a seemingly unbeatable combination of energy and efficiency, national pride and Confucian determination.
    There was no shipyard at Ulsan thirty years ago. There was not even a company called Hyundai. But now the Hyundai plant at Ulsan is one of the best and most productive in the world; and the men who had the idea to make it thus, and whose pride and vision have kept Korea’s shipyards and Korea’s car plantsand, indeed, the Republic of Korea as a whole forging ahead and pulling away from all others, were, it seemed to me, true miracle workers.
    I was not, I must confess, either terribly interested in studying nor competent to explore the mechanics of Korea’s industry, nor the unfathomable mysteries of Korea’s economics. The price of steel plate and the costs of fuel oil, the insurance rates for the Strait of Hormuz and the cumbersome tables of freight rates for the North Atlantic Conference remain among the arcana that I could never hope to master. But I was, I soon discovered, fascinated by the Koreans themselves, by the Korean people. How, I wondered, had they managed it? What was it that had allowed them, or had perhaps impelled them, to become so hugely successful when all the Cassandras would have marked them down for Third World ignominy, for poverty, for oblivion. In short, what sort of people were they? So I made up my mind there and then, while talking to that dour Swede on that Ulsan jetty, to go back one day and try to find out. And indeed, in the early spring two years later, and armed with enough time to make a stab at understanding, I flew out to Hong Kong and boarded a non-stop jet bound for the Korean capital, Seoul.
     
    It was a late afternoon in the middle of March when I arrived, during a bout of what the immigration