A Small Key Turns Big Doors
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By Neil Armstrong
Kim Hyang-soo’s autobiography, “A Small Key Turns Big Doors,” is only being privately published in a limited edition. This is a shame because Kim is one of those 20th-century South Korean industrialists whose life’s fortunes, if defined by a line tracing highs and lows across a chart, would follow the ups and downs of his country. He started out on his bike.
For Kim, bicycles had been a child’s metonym for the colonial struggle against the Japanese. As a kid he had pleaded for one, desiring youthful mobility in a country under foreign lockdown.
As an adult, he realized, as had already proven to be the case in the colonizer nation, that the bicycle industry was the small key for industry as a whole; that the operating machinery and parts involved in bicycle manufacturing turn growth in other machine industries, so forming a modern industrial base.
Kim was a small key himself, active in petitioning the government and his colleagues to expedite the development of the bicycle industry in order to kick-start Korean national renewal. His activism took him as far as becoming National Assemblyman for his hometown, standing and succeeding as an independent candidate amidst the bristling “thugs" of the Liberty Party.
Kim describes an incident in which he furiously disputed the use of a piece of land with a colleague ― then president of the Horse Racing Association and a close friend of President Syngman Rhee ― to illustrate the stymieing self-interest of the era’s political scene. Politicians could be, Kim realized before judiciously quitting the game after nationwide protests following the 1960 election, glass flecked speed bumps on the road to development and prosperity.
Or they could be Park Chung-hee. The growth and export urgency with which Park imbued his industrial captains suited Kim’s missionary drive to expand. Park, as much as advanced economic status, is the “big door" to which Kim claims access in his autobiography. The small key is the semi conductor. Kim's Anam Corp. diversified into the chip industry, and any reader remotely familiar with the details of South Korea’s industrial development will be unsurprised to learn that Anam took an overwhelming global market share of the semiconductor industry in one generation.
How did it happen? Kim was a studied dreamer, in so much as he took literal note of his nocturnal visions’ admonitory content. At the threshold of his second great industrial venture, he dreams of countless small objects stamped with the word “reliability.” Still not fluent in English, he takes his dream as having the force of something precognitive, related to his chip venture, and the founding philosophy upon which to proceed. Seeing them as “a bridge between latent consciousness and the real world,” Kim, you get the feeling, identifies his dreams as more practically facilitative than the politicians supposed to bridge projects of the will to the real world.
More telling than dreams, however, is an incident in which Kim’s fledgling semiconductor company is completing a small order for two hundred “headers," the production of which requires a component called a collet. Unfortunately, Kim’s collet breaks. It is impossible to complete the order by deadline date if they wait the ten days a replacement part will take to be delivered.
Instead Kim and Anam improvise, making collets out of nails, so meeting the order deadline, garnering excellent reviews, and having defeated a little American skepticism at the time about Korean industrial product specifications. In the medium term, the workforce explodes into the thousands. In the long term the semiconductor is a lightning conductor for South Korean entry into the first world.
The writer is the author of “Korean Straight Lines.” He can be contacted at nbarmstrongbook@yahoo.co.uk.