Second Life of the Trade King - Chapter 1

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: LilGuyBlastoise

◈ Second Life of the Trade King ◈

Chapter 1: 1988 Busan Yeongdo (1)

──────

The wall clock in the Changi Airport lounge pointed to five in the morning.

Without taking my eyes off my laptop screen, I lifted my cold coffee to my lips.

The Chicago Board of Trade had just opened. December corn had started at $4.80 a bushel and was moving five cents higher.

I kept turning over how to hedge the palm oil order that had come in from Jakarta yesterday.

“Vice President!”

Deputy General Manager Park came over from the next seat and sat down. In their late thirties, they were a junior colleague who always reported to me first whenever they landed a deal.

Today, they were accompanying me on a business trip to Indonesia.

“We’ve practically secured this palm oil deal. Chairman Kim of the Mujur Group replied yesterday. They said they’d accept our price.”

I gave a calm nod.

“That’s good.”

“I think your trip to Jakarta six months ago really helped. Chairman Kim brought up that dinner again.”

“I see.”

Deputy General Manager Park looked as if they wanted to boast a little more, but then the boarding announcement came on.

“Attention, passengers on SQ958 to Jakarta…”

I slowly closed my laptop.

As I took out my phone to switch it to airplane mode, a KakaoTalk notification appeared.

[You know your niece or nephew is getting married tomorrow, right? Make sure you come.]

It was my older brother. For a divorced man like me, he was practically my only family.

“Let’s go, Vice President.”

Deputy General Manager Park stood, pulling their suitcase behind them. I got up as well.

A laptop bag in my hand, a suitcase at my feet. That was everything I had carried through thirty years as a trader.

Beyond the glass windows along the passage to the gate, the rising dawn sun painted the runway red. But I did not look at it.

My mind had already moved, like a machine, to my first meeting after arriving in Jakarta.

I boarded the plane, took the window seat, fastened my seat belt, and closed my eyes.

About thirty minutes after takeoff, the plane shook for the first time.

At first, it was ordinary turbulence.

After thirty years of business travel, I was used to planes shaking. I did not even open my eyes.

But the second jolt was different.

The plane dropped hard once, then caught itself.

Deputy General Manager Park shouted urgently from beside me.

“Vice President!”

The seat belt sign flashed frantically, and the captain’s voice came over the intercom, a tone faster than usual.

English, then Indonesian. Something about an engine malfunction.

Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling, and I slowly grabbed mine.

My hand trembled.

It was the same hand that had never shaken even when the Chicago market fell ten percent in an hour. Yet now it trembled.

Then the plane began to tilt.

“W-What?!”

“We’re falling! We’re falling!”

Passengers began to scream, slipping into panic.

They had reason to. The Indonesian coastline was visible outside the window now, far too close.

And it kept getting closer.

Deputy General Manager Park was shouting something beside me, but I could not hear them clearly.

Time stretched strangely.

The last thirty seconds felt as long as thirty minutes.

My past flashed through my mind.

At twenty-six, I joined Glencore and ran forward with my eyes fixed only on success.

No Korean had ever become an executive at the company, but that was exactly what I liked about it.

An empty seat had to be claimed by someone first.

I wanted that person to be me.

At thirty-two, I married the niece of the family chairman. I did not love her, but that did not matter.

I needed a family that could pull me up, and she and her family needed a man who was smart enough and manageable enough.

When the president patted my shoulder at the wedding and said I was family now, I welcomed those words sincerely.

That day, I believed I had finally gained something.

One day, I learned that my wife had another man.

But I was not angry.

This marriage had been business from the beginning, and there was no place for love in business. So we did not have children.

It was easier for both of us that way, and neither of us believed the relationship would last forever.

After that, only the cities I lived in changed.

At forty, I became head of the London branch. At forty-five, I transferred to Chicago. At forty-nine, I became vice president in Singapore.

The first Korean to do so.

When a newspaper asked me for an interview, I said the secret to my success was focus in life.

‘Focus, my ass…’

My family, my friends, even my parents back in Korea, all of them had been outside my field of vision. So perhaps it had been the truth.

I was fifty-seven, the year headquarters chose its next president.

There were three candidates: the president’s biological son, the eldest niece or nephew, and my wife.

Everyone in the company knew that the biological son was the most incompetent member of the family.

Yet he became president anyway.

In the end, I accepted that blood decided everything.

The following week, an executive from headquarters flew to Singapore.

My successor was Deputy General Manager Park, the colleague beside me who had been bragging about their deal.

The deal they had won through the connections I made in Jakarta six months earlier was what pushed them into the vice president’s seat.

I had devoted my life to reaching that position, but now that I had outlived my usefulness, they were informing me that they would replace me with a new part.

Funny enough, I could not protest.

Every choice I had made had been strategic. I understood that their actions were entirely rational.

And in that meeting room, I realized for the first time that all of it was the result of my own choices.

Marriage had been business, and the company had belonged to someone else.

The connections I made, the deals I landed, the position I protected, all of it belonged to someone else, not me.

I married to enter the family, but in the end, a family was still a family.

‘There was never a place for me in it to begin with…’

And now I was on a plane bound for Jakarta.

Even in this final moment, I was going to die while trying to secure a deal for the company.

The plane dropped hard one last time.

As consciousness faded, one thought remained clear.

- I spent my whole life working for other people’s benefit.

- Where was my life?

- If I could live just once more…

A massive impact hit.

Then everything went black.

* * *

When I opened my eyes, an unfamiliar ceiling filled my view.

Yellowed wallpaper hung low above me.

The faint smell of fermenting salted anchovies drifted from somewhere, while the cries of seagulls continued outside the window as if they might stop at any moment.

A thick cotton blanket covered me up to the shoulders.

For a moment, I could not tell where I was.

As I slowly sat up, the first thing I noticed was how light my body felt.

The pain that had weighed down my shoulders was gone, and the shoulders stiffened by my forward head posture stretched easily.

My body felt so light that it did not seem like my own.

I raised a hand.

It was a young hand that had never done rough work.

The veins barely showed through the back of it, and the nails were neatly trimmed.

“Wait… This place…!”

It was intensely familiar.

A cramped second-floor room, furnished with nothing but a desk, a bookshelf, and a wardrobe. Thick stacks of paper rested on the desk.

As I approached, I saw the cover.

[The Structure of Korea’s Grain Imports and Challenges in International Trade / Kim Hyun-woo, Fourth-Year Student, Department of Trade, Pusan National University]

On the bookshelf stood books I had once read: International Trade Theory, Trade Practice, International Economics, International Trade Settlement, and more.

A poster reading “February 1988 Graduation Ceremony Schedule” was pinned to the wall beside it. The calendar next to the desk was open to January 1988.

“I’m… alive? I really came back?”

I slowly rose and opened the window.

A gust of salty wind blew in.

The dawn wind of Yeongdo, Busan, in January. The wind I had breathed every day in my youth.

Outside, Yeongdo Bridge emerged in the dim dawn light, and beyond it, the stacks of containers at Busan Port were faintly visible.

This was still the Busan Port where Korean shipping company flags flew.

My legs gave out, and I dropped into the desk chair. Then I heard my older brother’s voice from the next room.

“Hyun-woo, you up? Come eat breakfast.”

My brother’s blunt voice sounded slightly unfamiliar.

“Okay. Just a minute!”

Perhaps because I was flustered, my answer came out cracked.

Rather than going downstairs right away, I sat at the desk and sorted through the situation.

Then, slowly, I began taking out the things that remained in my mind one by one.

The Seoul Olympics would be held in September this year. The next year, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall would fall. I did not know the exact date, but November was probably right.

I remembered parts of the history that followed, though they were jumbled and would have to come back to me slowly.

But one thing was lodged in my mind in detail: grain price trends in the nineties.

The corn spike of 1995, the soybean crash of 1996, even wheat’s movements in 1998.

Price charts for decades of aluminum, copper, and crude oil also unfolded clearly in my mind.

The same went for how container freight rates moved in each year.

Naturally. That was all I had lived for.

After sitting there for a long time, one question finally occurred to me.

Why had I come back?

I did not know the answer.

And figuring it out did not seem particularly important.

What mattered was what I would do from now on.

“Ah… Right…”

I remembered the situation before I died.

Even the thoughts and emotions I had then.

I had spent my life working only for others, and only when I was about to die did I realize that there was no one around me, that this was wrong.

“Shall I start now?”

I looked at Busan Port outside the window again. The container stacks glimmered faintly in the dawn sunlight.

Thirty years from now, every one of those containers would bear the flags of foreign shipping companies.

Hanseong Shipping would disappear. Mirae Shipping would be handed over to its creditors. An era would come when Korean shipping would kneel before foreign capital.

Cargill, Glencore, and Maersk rose in my mind one after another.

I had worked inside those companies, traded with them, and analyzed them.

I knew how they were built, how they operated, and where to begin.

I opened the door and went down the narrow stairs.

When I opened the door leading to the first-floor shop, a familiar sight spread before me.

Shelves reached the ceiling, piled haphazardly with coils of rope, paint cans, boxes of gaskets, and nets.

A small kitchen in one corner was for cooking ramen, while my father sat behind the counter with a newspaper spread open before him.

It was my father.

A thin man in his early sixties, dressed in worn work clothes.

He glanced at me as I came in, then returned his attention to the newspaper without saying much.

He looked exactly as he had in the past.

On one side of the shop, my older brother was dealing with a customer. A middle-aged man who looked like the owner of a fishing boat shouted.

“What, we’re out of these gaskets again? Mr. Kim, give me two more boxes. We sail the day after tomorrow…”

“Yes, I understand.”

I watched my older brother handle the customer with ease, then walked to the counter.

“Dad.”

My father glanced up, then slowly folded the newspaper.

“You’re up.”

“Yes…”

A brief silence followed.

For the first time in decades, I slowly looked over my father’s face again.

He had once run a small shipping company, but it had gone bankrupt in the shipping recession of the eighties. Now, in his early sixties, he guarded the counter of a marine-parts shop. He looked utterly drained.

When the company went under, it must have consumed all his strength.

But that was all right.

Maybe I could help my father regain that strength.

“Why are you standing there like that?”

“Where did you put the trade registration certificate?”

My father gave me a sidelong look, reopened his newspaper, and asked shortly.

“Why?”

“I have a use for it.”

He looked up at me for a moment, as though wondering what his second son was thinking, then asked again.

“What for?”

“I’m thinking of trying foreign-vessel supply work.”

My father paused.