WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: LilGuyBlastoise

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◈ Second Life of the Trade King ◈

Chapter 2: 1988 Busan Yeongdo (2)

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Once I knew what I had to do, there was no reason to delay.

But a problem arose right from the start.

"Haah... clothes..."

When I opened the closet, there was nothing but student clothes.

At best, one clean shirt and a pair of jeans.

There was no way a twenty-six-year-old student's closet would have a suit in it. Going dressed like a student was not necessarily a bad idea.

I was not going out to drum up business today. I was going out to scout.

Besides, jeans might look more natural than a suit if I was sitting in a corner of a teahouse.

I slipped my trade registration certificate into my inner pocket and went down to the first floor. My older brother glanced over from the counter, where he was sorting the customer ledger.

"Where're you going?"

"Going to take a look at the docks."

"What for?"

"Just because."

I needed to see the port myself, to find out where the foreign shipping agencies were concentrated and how supply deals worked.

My memories of my previous life remained vivid, but the precise layout of Busan Port in 1988 was hazy after thirty years.

The broad movements of the global market were clear, but I could not recall every alley along the dockside streets beyond Yeongdo Bridge. I had to see it with my own eyes.

My brother did not ask any more questions. He had always been like that.

Even thirty years ago, my brother had never pried deeply into his younger brother's affairs. It was not so much trust as my brother's usual lack of interest in other people.

I quickly ate the breakfast that had been set out and headed out of the shop. Behind the counter, my father looked up from the newspaper and casually asked,

"Did you eat?"

"Yes. I had a bowl of ramen."

"......"

Fortunately, my father did not ask anything more.

He probably thought I was trying to make something of myself with my foreign-language skills.

More than that, though, my father had lost all passion for worldly matters after his business failed and he began running this tiny ship-parts company.

That was probably why he paid less attention to me.

In any case, my father's indifference was undoubtedly the easiest possible starting point for me right now.

Once I crossed Yeongdo Bridge, the dockside streets of Busan Port unfolded before me.

It was the port in January 1988.

Stacks of containers glimmered dimly in the early morning sunlight, while cargo trucks roared along the narrow roads.

Dockworkers hurried back and forth between the piers and warehouses with loads on their backs.

The salty wind and smell of oil stung my nose.

For a moment, the thought crossed my mind that, thirty years later, half this view would be covered in the flags of foreign shipping lines.

Maersk and MSC would take the place of Hanseong Shipping, and foreign lettering, rather than Korean shipping-company logos, would be stamped on every container...

I headed for the street where foreign shipping agencies gathered.

It was a maze of alleys running from Yeongju-dong to Jungang-dong. Small offices stood side by side, their signs mixing Korean and English.

"Dong-yang Shipping Agency," "Busan International Shipping," "East Sea Marine Service," "Korea Shipping Agency"...

Some occupied a single small first-floor office, while others used an entire two-story building.

I slowly circled the street, familiarizing myself with the office layouts, but did not go inside.

If I walked in wearing student clothes without even a business card, people would immediately look at me like, Who the hell is this?

"Oh? A teahouse..."

I spotted the perfect place.

Having lived one life already, I knew that information gathered faster at cafés near offices or smoking areas in front of companies than inside the offices themselves.

That made a teahouse exactly the sort of place I needed in Busan Port during the 1980s.

The place I found had an old-fashioned sign overhead: Haeyang Teahouse.

When I stepped inside, six or seven men were seated around the cramped teahouse, drinking tea.

They looked to be in their fifties to early sixties, all dressed in work clothes or jumpers.

Not one wore a suit.

One look told me they were dockworkers. I took a seat in the corner, ordered a cup of tea, and quietly began listening to their conversation.

"Hey, I heard that Japanese ship's coming in again this week."

"Again? Who's handling supplies for that ship?"

"Daeseong Fisheries & Produce. Who else?"

"Those people aren't cheap."

"So what are we supposed to do? There isn't anyone else."

As the conversation continued, one of the men let out a deep sigh.

"Good grief. A grain ship's coming in from Australia next week, and we've put the supply contract out for bids again, but the estimates just aren't adding up."

"What isn't adding up?"

"All the bids coming in are about the same. And they're all expensive. I don't know if it's collusion or what, but we'd need proof before we could accuse them of anything."

An Australian grain ship.

The hand holding my tea stopped cold.

The words grain ship were familiar enough to make my ears ache.

Grain ships required different supplies from ordinary container ships, needed large-volume provisioning because of their long voyages, and once a business relationship was established, regular repeat transactions followed.

Most of all, after thinking it over on the way here, I had decided that grain would be the main business of the company I would build in this life.

So for my first target to be a grain ship was too perfect to be a coincidence.

The man sighed again. Then another man at the next table glanced toward me and furrowed his brow.

Suddenly, he raised a hand.

"Hey, you. Aren't you President Kim's son?"

I looked up at him.

He was a thin man in his early sixties, wearing a gray jumper. His hair was flecked with white, and deep wrinkles lined his face.

I had not seen that face in thirty years, but I vaguely remembered it.

I could not recall the name, but the man had been my father's business partner when my father ran the small shipping company Yeongdo Shipping. He was the uncle who came to our house to drink during every holiday.

"Uh...?"

"Hey! Don't you remember me, Park Man-ho?"

"I remember! Uncle Park!"

Now I remembered the name.

"Well, you're the younger one, right? Hyun-tae's little brother. You've grown so much. The last time I saw you was around when you started high school, wasn't it? Wow, you've really grown."

Uncle Park gestured for me to come over.

As I moved to the man's table, Park ordered me another cup of tea and launched into a long string of greetings.

"How's your father doing these days? Is your brother running the shop well? When do you graduate?"

The rapid-fire questions, before I could even answer, showed just how impatient the man was.

Still, I knew how grateful I should be for that concern, and my heart warmed for no reason.

After briefly answering with what I remembered, I naturally changed the subject.

"But Uncle, do you work for a foreign shipping agency?"

"Yeah. Dong-yang Shipping Agency. Been there about five years. After Yeongdo Shipping went under, I drifted around for a while before settling back down at the docks."

"I see. Actually, I'm interested in foreign-vessel supply work too."

Park looked mildly surprised.

"Hey, aren't you supposed to join a company after you graduate? You go to Pusan National University. Why work at the docks?"

"I've considered that, but I thought I might help with the shop too. Our family runs a parts business, right? Supplying foreign ships is a similar field, isn't it? You handle everything from parts to foodstuffs."

"Foreign ships are on another level, though."

"Come on, I'm confident in my English, and I want to seriously study the foreign-ship supply business."

With an approving smile, Park gave a hearty laugh.

"Wow, you really are President Kim's son. He did all that kind of thing once, too. He even tried his hand at supplying ships. If things had worked out for him, you wouldn't need to be doing foreign-ship supplies now."

For a moment, the uncle seemed lost in old memories.

The days when my father had been successful with Yeongdo Shipping.

"But I heard you mention an Australian grain ship earlier. Is something wrong?"

Uncle Park let out a deep sigh.

"Good grief, it's this. Our agency took on a grain ship from an Australian shipping company, and it's been about a week since we put the supply contract out for bids. Daeseong Fisheries & Produce has been our regular supplier for five years, but they raised their prices again this time. They raised them last year too, and now they've gone and raised them again. So we looked for a new supplier and invited bids again, but every estimate that came in is about the same. All expensive. I don't know if it's collusion or what. Either way, we're the ones losing out."

"Oh... So this is the kind of work you do, Uncle..."

"Yeah. I'm in charge of bids."

Uncle Park pulled a stack of papers from his bag.

They were clearly bid estimates. A table listed quotes from three companies by item.

"Hey, didn't you say you studied trade at school? Can you make sense of this?"

"Of course I can. My graduation thesis was about grain import structures."

"Really? Then could you take a look? I don't know how to compare these."

Without hesitation, I accepted the estimates.

The moment I unfolded them, I remembered the roughly five years I had spent handling Northeast Asian routes at Glencore's Tokyo branch in my early thirties.

Trading had been my main work, but I had also overseen supply-line management in those days.

That had been thirty years ago, when I toured the ports of Kobe, Yokohama, Shanghai, and Hong Kong once a month, meeting supply-company owners and negotiating prices.

I could no longer remember the exact price per bushel after thirty years.

But I clearly remembered the general range.

Supply prices at Busan Port had been, on average, thirty to forty percent higher than Kobe and Yokohama. For goods Australia produced in abundance, including beef and flour, as well as fresh water for drinking and everyday use aboard ships, they could be less than half.

I had seen those ratios every day at the negotiating table. Even after thirty years, the feeling remained the same.

I went through the estimates item by item and slowly began to speak.

"Uncle, I think all of these are expensive."

"...What? Really?"

"Rice looks thirty to forty percent more expensive than the Kobe average... Isn't lubricant nearly double? And the fresh-water price looks about one and a half to twice the Yokohama average."

"...... Are you sure?"

"Yes. But rather than collusion, I think everyone may simply be using the same inflated prices accepted in the existing market."

"......"

"Look at the beef price here. Considering that wholesale prices for Australian or American beef in the Korean market are about the same as in Japan, a Busan Port supply price double the Kobe average is clearly inflated. It means the suppliers are adding a 100 percent markup to Korean wholesale prices."

Uncle Park's mouth fell open. He looked back and forth between the estimates and me. He had been about to take a sip of tea, but set the cup back down instead.

"Hey... how do you know this?"

"I looked through some trade materials at the school library. I had to look at Australian grain import and export data while writing my graduation thesis. There was supply-price data in there too."

It was a suitably vague excuse, but Park did not look suspicious.

After studying the estimates again for a long while, he slowly nodded.

"Damn it... these bastards have been quoting us inflated prices for five years. So that's why our agency's prices are almost double those at other Australian ports."

Park put the estimates back into his bag. Then he suddenly looked at me with a determined expression.

"Hyun-woo, want to give this a try?"

"Me?"

"The bid. Want to submit a bid?"

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