perm, called an ajumma in Korean, asked me in English. She identified
herself as a professor at a local university.
“It’s a global company,” I explained. “There’s more interest these days.”
“It’s Korean at its heart,” she insisted, “not global.” With her droopy
eyes, she pointed me toward a street. “It’s that one,” she said, ushering me
to a discreet traditional home with a curved wooden roof, set amid a thicket
of low-slung, dilapidated apartments. “My mom knew him.”
The gate was locked. No one was home.
“You must understand that when we think of Samsung in Korea, we
think of the future,” she said. “We don’t think about history. The past is
shameful. This is why you will find history is buried here in Daegu.”
She hailed me a taxi. “I’ll tell him to take you to the founding site of the
first Samsung company. Samsung Sanghoe [pronounced ‘Sang-hwaey’] we
called it. They sold vegetables. Now they make smartphones.”
After a short drive through a gray and forlorn clash of high-rises, I
arrived at sunset at a Samsung holy site: a sized-down wooden replica of the
first Samsung trading shop, subtly and artfully lit near a drab street corner.
Samsung’s original shack-like building was deemed a safety hazard and
razed in 1997.
I read the museum plaques in this miniature shrine to the corporation.
“I think people are most happy when they know what gives their life
purpose,” read a quote from Chairman Lee Byung-chul (B.C. Lee) on a
plaque. Lee had died in 1987. “I am unshakable in my faith that
strengthening the nation through business is the path I must walk.”
—
IN 1936 B.C. LEE had an epiphany.
“I had returned home late after gambling with dominoes. The bright
moon was seeping into the room through the window. I was 26, by then a
father of three. When I saw my children, drenched in moonlight and
peacefully sleeping, I felt as though I had awoken from a nightmare,” he
wrote in his memoir. “I’ve idled away my time. It’s time to set an aim in
life.”
B.C. Lee lived in a rugged, dusty Japanese colony. The Japanese
military, in its bid to unify Asia under its “co-prosperity sphere,” was
throwing its weight across the continent. The world was on the cusp of an