鐵鋼은 國力
In steel lies national strength
— Park Chunghee, Army Major General, Third President of the Republic of Korea
I
The cerulean outline around the unread email burned into his retinas as he hovered his cursor over the subject line. "Staffing - Kevin to join..." There went his afternoon plans to check out a new cafe that had just opened in Seongsu-dong. Before opening the email, he double-checked a couple of the hanja - the islands of Chinese characters denoting Sino-Korean words that sat within the sea of Hangul text. 製鐵 (jecheol): steel manufacturing. The senior associate that had led their final training module had warned the new starts that staffing might not give them their first choice industry or capability. Case demand, she had called it. Still, Kevin was disappointed. He had been hoping for an interesting software or tech case, and even joining the private equity ringfence seemed preferable to a future of looking at different types of metal.
He quickly scanned through the email, looking for the section on case travel. As needed, but likely LT traveling, with working team joining if needed. More disappointment. He had been looking forward to seeing more of Korea on company dime, but it seemed like that might be unlikely. Kevin leaned over to Jin, his baby-faced but sharp-eyed friend from training, to catch his attention. "You heard of Junseo Park?" he asked.
Jin looked up from his screen, blinking thoughtfully, and answered, "I heard he's kinda a hardo - you staffed to his case?"
"The girl on my team said that the case she had with him was a real burner," Jisung chimed in from across the desks. His penchant for gossip, paired with his quick wit and congenial disposition, had made him the de facto resource among the first-year associates for manager testimonials.
More bad news.
Kevin had been the last of his start class to get a case assignment. After their two weeks of training, the eleven fresh associate consultants had been allocated one by one to various projects. Four of them, right off the bat, were assigned to the ringfence, where they would help assess prospective acquisitions for the private equity funds that hired his firm, Cambridge Consulting Group (CCG). Six others, including Jin and Jisung, had been staffed across the next three weeks, ranging from organizational restructuring projects for some of Korea's hottest tech firms to AI and data strategy cases for chaebol subsidiaries. By Tuesday of the third week, Kevin was the only one still left on the 'beach', which meant he was obligated to be on stand-by until 1pm for a possible case assignment, after which he was free to do with the day as he wished.
He had spent the first couple days exploring the area around his new apartment in Euljiro, identifying a local HomePlus grocery store, boxing gym, a small but charming cafe, and a couple of takeout restaurants within a ten-minute walk of his apartment. Once he felt situated, Kevin began exploring the wider city, accompanying his teammates on the rugby team at Yale, who had come to visit Seoul as part of a multi-country Asia trip. Some of the consultants he had started with were already clocking 16-hour workdays, turning comments and building Excel models late into the night, so Kevin felt lucky to retain the freedom to join his teammates at the pochas in the evenings.
By the third week, his teammates had moved on to Taiwan, and Kevin began to grow restless. Surely there was some case that needed an associate consultant, so why wasn't he staffed? He reflected on the staffing chat he had had with program management and his behavior during training. Granted, he had been one of the less serious associates of his start class, cracking jokes with Jin and Jisung and playing online flash games, but he didn't think it had been bad enough to not be given a case. He had even wondered if this was CCG's way of quietly letting him go before he even got to do anything. As he began a deeper scan of the email, the disappointment from the suboptimal case conditions welling up inside him was also accompanied with a strong sense of relief.
The contents of the email reminded him of his limited grasp of Korean compared to his peers: every paragraph seemed to have at least one hanja that he didn't recognize. After a couple minutes of deep focus and cross-references with Naver's hanja dictionary, however, he had a solid understanding of the context of the case. His first client at CCG would be WOSCO, formerly known as Wonsan Iron and Steel Company, an originally state-run but now semi-privatized steel manufacturer that supplied the bulk of Korea's steel to industrial conglomerates. His team would be helping them with a "Net-Zero Manufacturing Diagnostic," which mainly seemed to be overseeing the transition to greener steel manufacturing processes.
A wave of nervousness swept through Kevin; he had just had to double-check the hanja for steel, and soon he'd have to help give a recommendation on how the foundational steelmaker in the country should make their steel? All the jokes his college friends had made about consulting echoed in his mind. Maybe I am a fraud, he thought, as he started to download the PPT and PDF attachments in the email. His swirling mind fell back to Earth as an Outlook notification warned him of the team kickoff that was starting in five minutes.
II
In the fifteen minutes of the meeting so far, Kevin had counted the woman across from him had blinked precisely twice. From the ramp-up materials, Kevin had learned that Mikyung Lee was a legend at WOSCO. She had graduated top of her class at Seoul National University and had worked her way up the ranks at Hanseong Heavy Industries, the jewel of one of Korea's five premier chaebols, before she was poached by WOSCO to lead their strategic accounts division. Her name had been on the contributor list of every major slide deck that had been included in the ramp-up materials, and the partners had warned Junseo, his manager, not to say anything that might rub Mikyung the wrong way. She had not yet spoken in the meeting, but Kevin could tell all eyes fell to her whenever a contentious point was raised. He suddenly met her eyes as they pierced through her rimless glasses, and he lowered his gaze back to his laptop.
Kevin reeled his mind in like a dog that had been pulling at its leash, focusing back on the contents of the meeting. Junseo had just started to introduce the team, and flashed up the headshot slide that Kevin had made. His blood ran cold as he noticed a typo on Junseo's name - he had carelessly used the wrong hanja. He sank deeper into his seat, as if reducing his presence might also reduce the risk that someone would notice the error. Thankfully, Junseo moved on to the next slide before anyone could notice, but a KakaoWork DM notification flashed on his screen from Hyunjae, the senior associate who was working on the other workstream. "Forgot to ZE that page, eh?" the message teased, referencing CCG's policy of Zero Error to ensure that all materials were perfect before presenting to the client. Kevin sank further in his seat, feeling even smaller than before.
Thankfully, as Junseo had briefed to him before the meeting, Kevin was not yet expected to participate in any of the discussion, but even as a bystander, he could feel his muscles were tensed. He dutifully transcribed each word that was spoken, noting the speaker with shorthand initials and frantically catching up during each batch of silence. The conversation broadly tracked with what Kevin had read in the ramp-up materials: the previous CCG team had worked with WOSCO to define targets for what net-zero manufacturing could look like in the next five years, and had identified two paths to get there. In one option, WOSCO would build a facility in Gwangyang from the ground up, close to Korea's southwest industrial corridor centered in Yeosu, leveraging the latest industry best-practices and attracting talent from the surrounding area. In the other, WOSCO would funnel the resources to renovate the steel manufacturing site in Cheongjin, at the northern end of the country, which had been WOSCO's flagship facility during Korea's rapid industrialization in the 70s and 80s, but had been overshadowed in recent years by Pohang Works, where most of WOSCO's advanced and specialty materials were made. Noting that Hanseong Heavy Industries was headquartered in Yeosu, Junseo had hinted at an existing bias from the partners and clients towards the former option, and the attitude Kevin noticed from the attendees all but confirmed that the correct answer already seemed to be settled.
"So where did you go to school, Minjae-ssi?" one of the WOSCO clients pulled him back from his rumination with an off-handed question. The meeting had concluded, opening the floor for pleasantries and small talk before lunch.
Quickly he replied, "I was abroad for university, at a small liberal arts school in Connecticut." Noticing the puzzled look on his face, Kevin added, "It's called Yale."
He felt his face begin to heat up as the client's face brightened with understanding, exclaiming "You must be a genius then! I'm glad you're working with our team."
Kevin clumsily gave a half-hearted acknowledgement, freezing up before asking him where he had traveled from. After an awkward pause, the client gave the name of a town that Kevin wasn't familiar with, then asked, "You grew up in the US then, I suppose? Your Korean is quite good."
Kevin was reminded of all the Americans that had praised his excellent English, despite the fact that he had been born and raised in New Jersey. He guided the rest of the conversation as they had learned during training, careful not to reveal his age or lack of professional experience. Despite the spirited handshake and accompanying hearty smile from the client as they parted, Kevin couldn't help but feel like there was something he had missed, like he had hurriedly checked out of a hotel room without doing a final sweep for his belongings.
III
The pure white background of the empty spreadsheet bored into Kevin's eyes. Junseo had requested that Kevin build out a skeleton for the discounted cash flow (DCF) model that compared the financials for WOSCO's two options. During the one-on-one, Kevin had eagerly nodded along as Junseo had described the structure of the model, not wanting to admit he had lost Junseo somewhere between the bottom-up demand forecast and the overall revenue build. Now, he realized he had no idea how to begin. His college economics classes had made more use of R than Excel, and though the two-week training had covered a basic DCF model, the example workbook they had used in the training had nothing in common with the bits and pieces he did remember from his conversation with Junseo.
He had been staring at the blank workbook and the training DCF for over an hour now, ALT-Tabbing between the two windows, with zero progress. He finally gave in and opened KakaoWork, clicking Hyunjae's profile. "Hey man, could I ask you for some advice on this model?" he typed quickly and hit enter. He had always hated asking for help; in college, he had always been the one his friends would come to with questions about assignments. He gazed at the three dots next to Hyunjae's icon, biting his fingernails. "Yeah dude, I'm on 4240, come by."
Kevin was met with laughter as he turned the corner to the north side of the 42nd floor. He spotted Hyunjae's dyed blonde hair over his monitor and walked over to his desk, which resembled the wake of a tornado. Papers with illegible scribbles in different colors were strewn across the desktop, covered by various trinkets and gadgets, and large tubs of protein powder and creatine sat next to a comically small Nalgene water bottle, a half-empty shaker bottle, and an insulated mug with a logo Kevin didn't recognize. He couldn't imagine working with such clutter around him - his own desk was meticulously sterile, with only the firm-provided keyboard and mouse accompanying his laptop. Hyunjae was deep in conversation with some of the other senior associates who sat in this bay, joking about how one of them had left their credit card at a bar the previous weekend. Judging by their reactions, it seemed like this was a frequent occurrence.
Hyunjae caught his eye as Kevin approached his desk. "What's up man, you said you needed some DCF help, right?" he asked. "You should ask Taejun here, he's supposed to be an expert on them," he continued, nodding to the thin man with square metal glasses, a neat middle part, and perfect posture sitting next to him, "he's recruiting for PE."
He said the last two letters in a whisper, covering his mouth, as if the mere phonemes were forbidden in the office. As Kevin began to pick up his belongings to ask Taejun, Hyunjae waved him back. "I'm just kidding man, Taejun's getting cooked right now. His client just uploaded a bunch of files to their dataroom that don't match any of their existing data."
Looking back, Kevin could see that Taejun was furiously typing, with his hands rarely leaving the keyboard for the mouse. He set his laptop back down on Hyunjae's desk, pulling up an unused chair next to him. "So I've never really done a DCF other than during training," he admitted, expecting surprise or admonishment.
Instead, Hyunjae laughed. "Don't sweat it dude, I was a biochem major in college. Didn't even know what discount rate or overhead was when I first got here," he chuckled, "we all start somewhere." He kept conversation going as he navigated the folders on his laptop. In stark contrast to his desk, his folders were neatly organized and labeled. "Gotcha," he muttered as he opened up a workbook, and Excel's opening animation came to life on his screen.
As Hyunjae navigated the workbook, Kevin tried to identify which shortcuts he was using. He quickly realized the futility of the exercise and instead focused on the screen itself. The workbook was zoomed out so far that he couldn't read the individual numbers; even still, the model stretched across the LG UltraWide monitors that were mounted at each desk in the office.
"You understand the basics of a DCF, right? Time value of money and all?" he asked.
Kevin nodded.
"I always find it helpful to plan out a model with pen and paper before I start building it in Excel," he advised, "and when you do start building it, I would throw in some dummy numbers to get the ball rolling and get a sense of the mechanics."
He switched windows to the kickoff deck that Kevin had read countless times and flipped to a slide that Kevin had always skimmed over. "Based on how the previous phase calculated things, you'll probably want to build some type of bottom-up demand forecast based on some of the data sources we usually use for heavy industry like CRU, S&P, or OECD."
Kevin rapidly jotted down notes as Hyunjae spoke.
"The thing with these types of models is, the assumptions make or break the answer. You probably want to go through all of the ramp-up materials and make sure we have some way of triangulating the assumptions before showing it to Junseo," he warned, his face darkening. "You really don't want to be in a situation where you can't justify an assumption you've made."
Hyunjae's reaction made it clear that he had been in such a situation before.
"First thing's first though, I would just look through this model and get familiar with what's going on in it," he finished, "and as you have more questions just ping me."
Hyunjae was always joking around during team meetings, livening up the mood with stories from his weekends and suggesting team lunches, paid for by the firm, multiple times a week. Given his behavior in the team room, Kevin had thought he would give him some generic advice and point him to some internal firm resources; he had not expected Hyunjae to understand his workstream better than himself. After ensuring he had received the example DCF model from Hyunjae, Kevin bowed in thanks and gathered his belongings. As he descended the stairs to his own bay, he heard more laughter roll in from 4240.
IV
Kevin rubbed his eyes, still drowsy from working on the model late into the night. He double-checked the platform noted on the electronic ticket on his phone, then looked around at the station. He had always seen the KTX logo next to the Seoul Station waypoint on the maps hanging from the subways, but he had never actually entered the inter-city rail section of the station; his parents preferred driving whenever they had to leave Seoul, whether to the nearby countryside to visit his extended family or for a vacation to the East Sea.
Platform 12. He identified the correct direction of the platform and began walking, taking in the destinations listed on the other platforms as he passed them.
Busan, Mokpo, Ulsan, Gaeseong, Hamheung, Pyeongyang.
The realization of his limited exposure to his ancestral nation stoked an ember of guilt within his chest, but he ignored the feeling as he stepped through the doors of the locomotive. He settled into his window seat, pleased with the legroom and plush upholstery. Even though he knew he had booked business class, Kevin couldn't help comparing the interior to the plasticky red and beige upholstery on the Metro North. As he opened his laptop to continue working on the model, he felt his phone buzz. A text from his father in the family group chat asking, "Have you left yet?" Kevin silenced his phone, planning to respond once he had incorporated a list of model changes that Junseo had sent him in the morning. He opened up Excel and began to type, oblivious to the train accelerating beneath him.
Kevin felt disoriented as he first looked out the window from the model, switching from cells, formulas, and context menus to the flurries of snow falling outside. He checked the map on his phone to see where the train was: they were approaching the Yanggak bridge to cross the Daedong river and enter Pyeongyang. He felt his stomach rumble and realized he hadn't eaten anything other than a roll of gimbap from the convenience store and a coffee. He confirmed the length of the stopover in Pyeongyang and opened KakaoMap to examine the options for food in Pyeongyang Station.
Even though it was chilly, Kevin decided to try the food that he associated most with Pyeongyang: naengmyeon, buckwheat noodles in a clear meat broth served cold with sliced beef, vinegar, and mustard. He found what seemed like a regional chain within the station with good reviews and mentally pictured the meal. Since he was traveling, he had a per diem of 100,000 won for food, which could comfortably get him anything on the menu multiple times over. As the train pulled into the station, Kevin beelined for the restaurant, images of noodles and icy broth housed within stainless steel bowls floating in his mind.
大同麵屋 (Daedong Myeonok). He snapped a photo of the sign for his Instagram story and walked through the automatic doors. A cheery attendant greeted him as he sat at one of the 2-person tables. Like most of the chain restaurants in Seoul, the menu and ordering system were through small tablets situated at the end of each table. Kevin picked Set B, which came with a large bowl of noodles and a side order of mung bean pancakes, and also selected the option for extra sliced beef. As he waited for his food, he looked around at the other customers in the shop. Nothing about the way they were dressed gave away that he was in a different province, but every once in a while Kevin would inadvertently notice a word pronounced slightly differently than he was used to, like a square with one side that was ever so slightly too long.
"Here's your raengmyeon," the attendant exclaimed as he placed a tray in front of Kevin, startling him both in his volume and his pronunciation. He bowed in thanks, then looked at the spread in front of him. For what it was worth, it didn't look dissimilar from what he might get at Yea Jip, his favorite Korean restaurant back home in Fort Lee, but he knew looks could be deceiving and gave the broth a taste. It was clearer and lighter than what he was used to, with less acidity or sweetness. At first taste, he felt underwhelmed, but he resisted the urge to add too much vinegar and mustard. Though the taste began to grow on him, especially paired with bites of the sliced beef and mung bean pancakes, he still preferred the stronger broth that the ajumma that ran the shop back home would make. Still, he cleared the plate, and checking his watch, hurried to pay for the meal with his corporate card and made his way back to the train.
The sun had begun to set as the train pulled out of Pyeongyang Station. Kevin gazed through the window at the city as the streetlights began to shine. He saw flashing neon signs for familiar establishments: internet cafes, convenience stores, pochas, coin laundromats. At the same time, there was a distinct sheen to the city that was different than Seoul; it felt older, not in a dilapidated or obsolete way, but in the way that a well-maintained vintage Mercedes might feel old, more established, grounded, and sure of itself. If Seoul was capitalism as speed, Pyeongyang was capitalism as stature. Kevin smirked, half-ironically, at his own lyricism, and jotted down the line in his running list of creative ideas, which had made little progress since the case had kicked off. He returned his gaze out the window; his father had often told him stories of Pyeongyang from his university days. Kevin could almost see the wistful glint that would wash over his father's eyes whenever he would describe the streets he now saw through the windows.
Kevin suddenly remembered the message from his father he had pushed off. Luckily, he had taken a photo of the naengmyeon from earlier. Quickly, he sent the photo along with a cheerful message: "Finally tried the real deal here in Pyeongyang! Back on the train heading up to Cheongjin now." With the time difference, he knew he wouldn't get a response for a couple of hours. Staring back out the window, he promised himself he would explore the city more if the case ever brought him to Pyeongyang again.
V
Kevin made sure to set multiple alarms to give himself ample time to get ready before the site visit. He had a history of sleeping through alarms, even sleeping through an exam at Yale, and was determined not to start his career in the same way. After a quick shower and pep talk in the bathroom mirror, he met with Junseo in the hotel lobby and ordered a taxi to the client site, double checking all the characters before confirming the ride: 元山製鐵 淸津製鐵所 (Wonsan Jecheol Cheongjin Jecheolso - WOSCO Cheongjin Steelworks). The taxi, a sleek black Ryugyong R9, pulled up beneath the porte-cochere, the exhaust floating up like a storm cloud in the crisp morning air.
"An R9," Junseo noticed, with an ever-so-slight hint of scolding, "we usually don't want to show up to the client site in cars that are too nice." Kevin cursed his luck, then got into the back seat with Junseo.
The smokestack from the facility loomed overhead as the taxi pulled in to the visitor center of the plant. Hyunjae, sitting idly on his phone in the waiting room, quickly stood up and bowed as he and Junseo walked through the revolving doors. The three of them approached the front desk, offering their names and ID cards, which the attendant received with both hands. The light blue background of his F-4 visa clashed against the faint gold of the two national IDs. After a brief moment, the attendant gave back the ID cards along with pre-printed name tags. Luckily, Kevin's name tag displayed the hanja for Minjae - he had been careful not to include his English name in the information they had sent to WOSCO for the visit.
"Please wait here for a moment," the attendant said softly, his voice tinged with an accent subtly unfamiliar to Kevin. "Director Im will be here shortly."
Kevin almost didn't recognize the name, then remembered how northerners typically pronounced Im. From the context that the director's name had appeared in his ramp-up documents, Kevin expected a gruff, lean, stern executive to walk through the tan oak doors. Instead, a chubby, avuncular figure crashed through the doorway, preceding his entrance with a deep, hearty laugh, flanked by a scruffy, rail-thin man who looked no older than Kevin, and a tall woman with a jet-black bob wearing a factory uniform perfectly tailored to her frame.
"I apologize for keeping you waiting," he started, in a voice that was somehow even louder and deeper than his laugh. "There were a couple of diagnostic tests we wanted to validate before meeting with you all."
"Absolutely no worries, we just arrived here ourselves," Junseo responded without skipping a beat. "It's a pleasure to meet you. My name is Park Junseo, and I'm the senior manager overseeing the work that CCG is doing with WOSCO. These are my team members, Kim Hyunjae and Kang Minjae."
Though Kevin was relieved Junseo had used his Korean name, part of him was still not fully comfortable with it, like a leather jacket that was his size but fresh from the factory.
"Pleasure to meet you," Hyunjae bowed, and Kevin followed his lead.
"I'm very excited to be working with all of you," the director replied. Kevin had assumed the volume of the director's voice had been a carryover from his laugh - he now realized this was his standard volume. "My daughter worked at PwC before moving to the States - I'm sure you folks at CCG do just as good work."
"We will try our best," Junseo replied.
"Our facility is roughly divided into four regions," Director Im explained, gesturing to a larger-scale version of the schematic Kevin had seen in the ramp-up materials. They were seated in a minimally-decorated briefing room with articles of PPE neatly arranged on the walls. "Given the limited time we have, we'll skip over the raw material intake and the blast furnace sections and start with the basic oxygen furnace area, stop by one of our plate mills, then see some of our inspection rooms."
Kevin matched the director's words as he spoke to the unfamiliar hanja that littered the map, mixed with transliterations of English words (he was particularly fond of the use of 슬래브 - seulrebeu - for 'slab'). The map indicated the distance to the basic oxygen furnace from the briefing room where they currently sat as a little under a kilometer, which Kevin mentally converted as ~0.6 miles. To his surprise, there was no vehicle waiting for them through the doors that opened to Cheongjin's blistering winter air.
"If you folks don't mind, we can walk to the basic oxygen furnace sector from here - you'll be able to see some of the intake equipment and blast furnaces on the way."
As a sharp breeze chilled him to his core, Kevin regretted choosing his more fashionable wool coat instead of his puffer, which sat in his hotel room closet.
The basic oxygen furnaces had been impressive, with the glowing orange slabs passing through the continuous slab caster from the furnace looming overhead, but Director Im had repeatedly downplayed their complexity in favor of the plate mills, setting Kevin's expectations high. He looked up at the building now in front of them. 第三厚板工場 (Jesam Hupangongjang - Plate Mill No. 3) was etched in large antiquated serif characters, the grooves filled with dirt and grime over the years. Yellowed paint was flaking off the facade, revealing the bare concrete underneath, and chips in the window recesses gave further credence to the age of the facility.
"This is where the magic happens: Plate 3!" The director announced the shorthand nickname with a paternal tone, gesturing the group inside. Given the exterior, Kevin was dubious on how advanced such a facility could be, as the group followed Director Im through a labyrinth of halogen-lit hallways. They arrived at the elongated control room, which he called the pulpit, where workers wearing the same outfit as the tall woman, albeit in less flattering proportions, manned the continuous control panel that Kevin felt was more suited to a nuclear power plant than a steel facility. Dozens of screens flashed in shades of green and blue, contrasting against the deep red slabs and bright yellow sparks from the mill floor, and fed vital diagnostics through vectorized graphics and a mix of hangul, hanja, English, numerals, and data charts to the workers. Kevin was reminded of a scene from The Matrix, where one of the characters could parse real-world events in the Matrix from the gibberish code flashing on screen.
"This pulpit is staffed with even more operators than the others in Plate 3 because it oversees the production of our highest-grade plate. Even the smallest deviations in temperature, additive concentration, or flow rate can ruin an entire batch," the director narrated.
As if on cue, one of the workers, a weathered man in his 50s, barked a command to another, who swiftly adjusted a slider and began rapidly typing on a terminal resembling an IBM Model F. Kevin mentally labeled the glowing sheets exiting the casters as the 'advanced plate' he had built into his two-category model, waving aside a shadow of doubt at the incongruence between the two rows of data he had in his model and the complexity of the alien spaceship command center that lay in front of him. Kevin's eyes scanned the rest of the room, trying to identify any details that might help inform his model, and briefly caught the woman's gaze before he looked away. He focused his attention back to the director, but he could still feel her eyes trained on him, examining him as if he himself might be a plate batch ruined by the wrong temperature during rolling.
"I hope the tour was helpful!" Director Im exclaimed at his usual volume.
"It was very helpful - I'm glad we were able to put a picture to all of the analytics," Junseo said diplomatically.
Personally, Kevin thought the biggest benefit of the tour was that it had single-handedly helped him hit his 10,000 step goal for the day.
"Director Im, if you have the time, Hyunjae and I would love to speak with you and Mr. Choi about some questions we had regarding some of our analyses," Junseo continued.
Kevin froze - he hadn't been briefed about this split.
"Of course," the director replied, gesturing towards a door that led to a plain-looking conference room. "Minjeong-ssi, if you don't mind, please accompany Associate Kang and help answer any questions he might have."
With that, the four men entered the conference room, closing the door behind them. Kevin didn't know what to say. Minjeong broke the silence.
"Shall we go find another conference room?" Her voice, dry and brusque, tinged with the same accent as the attendant and Director Im, caught Kevin by surprise.
"Yes," he stumbled, shifting his backpack to his other shoulder. "I'll follow your lead."
She began to walk down the corridor to another door with an identical layout to the room his manager had gone to.
"This should work," she announced, then took a seat in one of the plastic conference chairs, slouching in a way Kevin didn't expect from her military posture and gesturing Kevin to do the same. He sat down and took out his laptop, opening the lid to reveal the DCF he had been working on.
"Do you have any questions for me?" Minjeong asked curtly.
Clearly, she found the situation to be a waste of time. Kevin nearly declined before realizing that none of the assumptions in his model had been validated with anyone but Junseo.
"Actually, could I get your thoughts on some of the assumptions I'm using for this model?" he asked hesitantly.
Minjeong's face brightened with curiosity as she leaned over. "Sure, what type of model is it?"
Cycling through the tabs, Kevin gave a brief overview of the model, careful to undersell the ramifications given Minjeong's affiliation with the Cheongjin plant. "It would be really helpful if I could get your thoughts on how we're thinking about ramping up the yield curves for the two plants. Right now, we have steel products split out into commercial, high-volume steel and specialty steel, and I've combined a couple benchmarks to estimate how much product a plant could produce over time."
Minjeong stared at the screen for a few moments, narrowing her eyes in focus. "Is there a reason you only have two types of steel?" she asked. "Even if customers order it by the kilometer, something like sour-service pipe has a completely different process and associated ramp-up than other commodity steel, and it's just as different from something like HSLA or naval steel."
Kevin was too embarrassed to ask what HSLA stood for, instead justifying with, "The industry benchmarks I've been reading usually use those two categories."
"If I were you, I'd have at least 4, just from my experience working in the plant," she replied, not swayed by his appeal to authority.
"How do the actual curves look?" Kevin knew that her answer could add hours of work to his plate.
"Honestly, I don't think I could even give you an answer with the categories you have now."
Kevin felt his face heat up - a small part of him had hoped she would be impressed by his complicated model. Instead, she had dismissed it, as an art teacher might wave aside an underworked sketch. He switched tabs, wanting to shift away from ramp curve assumptions. "We're also doing some demand forecasting - what do you think of these global demand assumptions?"
She hesitated, aware of his distraction tactic, but bit, shifting her attention to the new set of figures.
Kevin checked his phone, realizing he had missed KakaoWork DMs from both Junseo and Hyunjae. They had finished their discussion with Director Im almost 30 minutes ago and had gone to get lunch. Kevin sent a formal apology to Junseo then asked Hyunjae where they were. "Pull up to the employee cafeteria man, the food is fire," Hyunjae replied, with an emoticon that reminded Kevin of the difference in their ages.
"Excuse me, Manager Chae, do you know where the cafeteria is?" he asked.
Minjeong turned, rubbing her belly, "Yep, I'm hungry too. I can take you down there. I have to say, we have some really good food."
Kevin took one last look at the spreadsheet on his screen, now populated with various notes accompanying the assumptions, then closed the lid and followed her through the doorway.
VI
Kevin stepped out of the back of Director Im's car, staring up at the weathered nameplate for the restaurant. 송평대게회식당 (Songpyeong Daege Hoeshikdang - Songpyeong King Crab and Sashimi). Unlike most of the storefront signs he had seen, this one was in hangul, the native Korean script, even though most of the words had a corresponding hanja. Combined with the aging exterior and the lack of ornamentation, Kevin wondered if Director Im had some sort of financial incentive to bring the group here instead of a more upscale establishment.
The roar of voices that escaped as Hyunjae pulled the door open overrode his suspicions. Even on a Tuesday night, there wasn't an empty table in sight. Kevin recognized the steel-blue accents of the WOSCO uniform throughout the restaurant, mixed with pressed white dress shirts covered by vests emblazoned with the WOSCO logo. The waitress, a plump middle-aged woman with a bun and a wide smile, greeted Director Im with a bow.
"Good evening, Mrs. Park! How's business today?" he asked cheerfully.
He had greeted the man at the front by his name as well - Kevin wondered how often the director visited. Mrs. Park began leading the group through the restaurant. As the director passed by, a few of the men in uniform stood up to bow. He quickly bowed back and gestured for them to take their seats again.
"Sit, sit, you've had a long day," the director said, then turned to Junseo, explaining, "I worked with their fathers before they retired. I still remember when they would come up to me to ask for chocolate after my shifts."
The group turned to a side corridor lined with traditional sliding doors.
"Here is your room, Director Im," Mrs. Park gestured, leading to a cozy, wood-lined dining room, the harbor's lighthouse and neon lights of the docks visible through the windows.
"Thank you, Mrs. Park," he responded with a bow and a smile.
"I'm sure it doesn't compare to what you folks have in Seoul, but this is one of our favorite spots," he explained to the CCG team. "I've been coming here for work dinners since I was an associate myself!"
"I could think of no better place for seafood than Cheongjin," Junseo replied in his usual diplomatic tone, "the seafood in Seoul is overpriced for the quality you get."
Kevin glanced around as the rest of the room began to gravitate towards a seat. He was sure there was a socially correct answer for where he should sit, but as he thought through the possible permutations and their ramifications, everyone had already begun taking their seats. The only available seat was across from the director, next to Minjeong.
Kevin was careful to ensure that the rim of his glass was below the director's every time they clinked, and that his body was facing away from the director every time he took a sip from his glass of soju. He had seen both faux pas in workplace dinner scenes in Korean dramas and had validated their veracity with some of the Korean international students at Yale. The director had insisted they order Eorangcheon, the local brand of soju, instead of the usual Chamisul, Chumchurum, or Amnok. Kevin studied the bottle as the director placed it down after pouring another round. It was more rounded than the bottles he was used to, and was a dark shade of mottled brown, more similar to a beer bottle than the forest-green typical of other soju brands. The label, already peeling from the condensation, was a dark blue, with the characters 漁郎川 boldly printed in red calligraphic script down the center. His eyes followed a droplet of water to the bottom of the label, where 22.5%, printed in small script, foreshadowed the next day's hangover.
They had already finished the first course of the meal, an assortment of raw fish, served with the usual chojang and soy sauce, as well as a sauce that Kevin did not recognize. He had instinctively reached to dip a slice of mackerel in the chojang when Director Im stopped him, exclaiming, "You can't let the chojang mask the quality of the fish!"
Minjeong discreetly gestured to the mystery sauce, whispering, "It's mustard and soy sauce."
As the restaurant staff streamed through the sliding doors with an assortment of dishes for the second course, Kevin excused himself to the bathroom to do some on-the-fly research on other culinary quirks of the region, determined not to make another mistake.
After returning from his ad-hoc restroom culinary ramp-up, Kevin scanned the second course, but he didn't recognize a single dish from the Naver blog that he had found. He cursed the article, patiently waiting for others to begin eating so he could follow their cues.
"So, Minjae-ssi, Manager Park here says that you grew up in the United States. How does Korea compare?" Director Im had ordered another bottle of Eorangcheon, and his cheeks were already the color of molten steel.
"It's very nice here," Kevin replied, "things are cleaner, I feel safer, and everything is much more convenient than the States."
"Have you been up here to Hamgyeong province before?" the rail-thin man Kevin remembered as Mr. Choi questioned. Clearly, the Eorangcheon had loosened his stiff tongue.
"This is actually my first time north of the Imjin," Kevin admitted, "all of my extended family live in the south."
"Oh, is your family not from Sincheon? I assumed from your surname's hanja that you had roots up here."
Kevin could feel his face heating up. "I'm not sure, unfortunately. My parents both moved to the US before I was born."
"I see..." Director Im replied.
Kevin desperately tried to rack his brain for any nuggets of ancestral information his father might have mentioned, but his mind drew a blank.
"How about you, Director?" Junseo quickly took up the slack in the conversation, "were you born here in Cheongjin?"
Kevin found his mind wandering as the director began a story about what the city looked like in his youth. Did all Koreans know where their families had originated from? He didn't even know where Sincheon was, or how Mr. Choi had come up with it. He knew that if he asked his father, he'd be met with a multi-hour history lecture, but sitting through that would be preferable to what he had just experienced. He focused on the grilled mackerel, avoiding Mr. Choi's eyes as if doing so would reverse the embarrassment he had felt.
The rest of the group had gone outside for a smoke break, leaving Kevin and Minjeong to finish up the remaining pieces of grilled fish and leftover segments of king crab.
"So why did you come to Korea?" Minjeong asked suddenly as she expertly cracked a joint, pulling out the crabmeat effortlessly, "If you went to Yale, you must have had opportunities to stay in the US."
Kevin had a well-rehearsed, corporate answer for this question that he had used with relatives, interviewers, and his fellow associates, but the warmth from the Eorangcheon steered his mouth in a different direction.
"Honestly, I felt like a foreigner back in America. People would always ask where I was from from, then compliment my English, even though it was my first language and I could speak it better than them." He wasn't sure if these were the type of client conversations the trainers had envisioned, but it felt good to vocalize his thoughts. "I thought that maybe I'd fit in more here, but clearly I was wrong." He let out a soft laugh, gesturing to the mustard soy concoction.
Minjeong poured out the last of the Eorangcheon and tilted the glass to her lips, downing the shot. "You're selling yourself short - I bet you the average Seoulite would've gone for the chojang first too," she said as she reached for another piece of grilled fish. "And Mr. Choi is a history nut. He's one of those people who can trace his genealogy back to the Unified Silla period. Don't let his obsession get to you"
She surgically separated a perilla leaf from the stack and wrapped the fish in it, adding a dab of ssamjang. Kevin mirrored her actions, and after taking a bite, responded, "Even still, look at you. I'm sure you know exactly where your family is from."
She set down her chopsticks and looked him in the eyes, "That's because Cheongjin and WOSCO are all that I've known. For what it's worth, I respect your courage to make the jump to come here. Part of me knows that I'm still here because I'm too scared to try going somewhere else. Besides," she added, reaching for her water, "I'm sure you could teach me a thing or two about how to eat American food."
Kevin cracked a smirk as the rest of the group lumbered back through the sliding doors, the faint smell of menthol cigarettes wafting from their coats.
"I still can't believe you don't smoke," Hyunjae teased, patting Kevin on the back. "Are all Americans that soft?" Kevin laughed off the joke, resisting the urge to counter, "We smoke harder things".
Junseo checked his wristwatch, a tasteful Oyster Perpetual, and announced, "It's getting quite late - thank you for your hospitality, but we'll have to get back to our hotel." Kevin knew this meant the CCG team would have more work once they returned to the hotel, and Hyunjae's badly-disguised grimace confirmed his suspicions.
As the group walked back down the hallway towards the entrance, Kevin noticed a series of black-and-white photographs he had overlooked on the way in. One in particular caught his eye; though he recognized the prominent smokestack and bolded characters on the placard despite the effects of decades gone by, the Plate 3 pictured had a different aura, standing tall with a fresh coat of paint, the borders of the placard's lettering crisp and sharp, a beacon of Korea's progress and industrialization effort. Kevin was reminded of when he would come across old photos of his father in his youth, the same piercing eyes and thin smile preserved across the years, but with a veneer of exhaustion and wear not present in the print. Even without the color clue, Kevin could make out the WOSCO jumpsuits worn by the men standing in front of the building, and he felt his eyes drawn to a little girl near the front left of the crowd, her slight frame contrasting against the burly men and scale of the building.
"That's from the opening ceremony for Plate 3," Minjeong spoke suddenly, startling Kevin. "Guess who this is?"
She pointed to the girl Kevin had been staring at, her face playful.
"Let me guess, you?" he played along, though her expression already told him all he needed to know.
"Bingo! That's my dad behind me. We had a copy of this same photo in our apartment too, before..." The smile faded from her face as unpleasant memories appeared to surface.
Kevin quickly changed the subject. "Is Director Im here too?"
"Of course! I'm the handsome fellow here," his booming voice was accompanied by his outstretched finger, as large as a bratwurst.
The group, noticing Kevin and Minjeong's absence, had backtracked, and Kevin could see Hyunjae's disapproval. He remained silent as they continued to the door, then bowed to all of the WOSCO team members, making sure not to bow any differently to Minjeong. He piled into the taxi, a more pedestrian Hyundai Sonata, with Junseo and Hyunjae, apologizing for the delay. As he settled into the back seat, he opened his phone and began typing a message to his father, "Is our family from Sincheon?" before deleting it, shuddering at the thought of the wall of text he would receive.
VII
"Big K!" Jin greeted him warmly with a light slap on his back. "How was the trip up north?"
"Any baddies at the client site?" Jisung teased.
A brief image of Minjeong flashed in Kevin's eyes before he blinked it away as he muttered, "I wish." He was in no mood to joke around; his train had arrived late from Cheongjin and he had gotten up early to turn some comments from Junseo. He had chugged two Americanos from the office coffee machine and had some aspirin, but there was still a faint throbbing in his head from lack of sleep.
He was back in CCG's Seoul office, sitting at a row of desks that he had claimed with Jin and Jisung after training. Most of the teams had wrapped up their afternoon syncs to set the direction for the rest of the day's work, and the soft gold of the winter afternoon sun streamed through the wall-length windows of the office.
"You OK man?" Jisung turned and asked, noticing the lack of energy with which Kevin responded to his teasing.
Kevin didn't feel like getting into specifics. "Yep, just not looking forward to working late tonight," he replied, half-heartedly.
Jin crept up behind both of them, abruptly cutting in. "So what are we feeling for dinner tonight lads? Pizza Hut has a crazy deal going on right now if y'all could be convinced."
Jisung turned back to look at him. "Didn't you say you were locking in for the summer bod this year?"
Jin backed away, his face darkening from the jab. "Geez, I didn't realize all you Goryeo U kids are so mean," he retorted, "Kev, you think it's because they don't get much sunlight up in Pyeongyang?"
The sound of his name pulled him back from his thoughts on how he would update his model with the latest data they had received from the Cheongjin plant. "They're just not used to how chatty all you Seoul National kids are," Kevin quipped absentmindedly.
Kevin volunteered to grab the food from the lobby once it had arrived to get some fresh air. After identifying the delivery driver and providing the delivery passcode, he gazed for a moment at the lights of the Seoul skyline and the stream of cars flowing down Highway 1 that cut through the center of the city. The contrast with the austerity of Pyeongyang and the harshness of Cheongjin quickly reminded him of the model that sat waiting for him, pulling him back through the automatic doors, electronic gates, and sleek glass elevators of the building.
"Have you guys been to Cheongjin before?" Kevin asked Jin and Jisung through a mouthful of sweet potato pizza.
"One of my ex's grew up there, but we didn't date long enough for me to actually go and meet her family up there," Jin responded, his eyes loosening their focus in recollection.
Jisung chuckled, "You have an ex from every major city in this country." Turning to Kevin, he continued, "I had a couple friends at Goryeo who grew up there, but never been myself. It's supposed to be a bit quaint, right?"
Kevin saw through the word for what Jisung meant by it: underdeveloped and backwards.
"What'd you think of the place?" Jin asked, noticing Kevin's silence.
Kevin paused for a second as the image of Minjeong flashed through his mind again. "Kinda reminded me of Detroit honestly," he offered, making the connection on the spot. The rugby team had gone to a tournament at the University of Michigan his junior year, and he recalled the stark industrial plants pouring smoke into the steel-grey winter sky as the bus had driven through on its way to Ann Arbor.
"I heard they have good pizza," Jisung teased, looking over at Jin.
"Yeah, but New York's is better," he responded, not registering the jab. Kevin and Jin had also bonded over both growing up in near New York City - Kevin in New Jersey and Jin in Queens.
"What's with the red check cell?" Jisung peered over Kevin's shoulder at his model.
Kevin cursed, tracing the dependent cell with CTRL + [ and expanding its formula with F2.
"Dude, you don't have a 0 in your INDEX MATCH." Jin had leaned over from his desk to help troubleshoot.
"That's why I keep telling you guys to get on the XLOOKUP wave," Jisung exclaimed, continuing, "Why do you have an INDEX MATCH here anyways?"
Kevin quickly typed in the 0 and pressed Enter, launching a cascade of recalculations. "They have a bunch of different types of steel and we're using different yield ramp curves for each of them - it's a total pain in the ass," Kevin explained, confirming that the check cell had switched from a garish red to a pleasant grey. "Thanks for the help boys."
He cycled through the tabs again, ensuring there weren't any more red check cells, then versioned up the file - he was already at v12.
"You didn't seem sure when Jisung asked you about the baddies up there earlier," Jin fished back the topic like a lobster trap in deep water.
"There was one girl that was kinda cute, but she's like way older than us," Kevin admitted. "Besides, I'm pretty sure I'd get fired if I tried anything anyways."
"Only if they find out," Jisung said with a glint in his eyes.
"I'm with Jisung, you gotta get her Kakao the next time you're up there dude," Jin added.
"Fine, fine, I'll scheme something next time," Kevin played along, wanting to leave the subject as quickly as possible.
"By the way, why do you need so many different categories for steel?" Jin asked, not looking up from his screen. He had returned to his desk, and Kevin could already hear the slow and methodical clacking of his hunt-and-peck typing style - he had been the only one in the starting class who didn't know how to touch type. "It's all just metal, isn't it? How different could it be?"
"I had two broad buckets before, but one of the clients said it didn't make sense and recommended that I split it out more," Kevin responded, recalling the look of condescension from Minjeong as she had first asked him about the categories in his model.
"Was it the cute girl?" Jisung asked, not missing a beat.
Kevin knew if he told the truth, he would never live it down with them.
"Nah, it was some random associate," he lied, picturing Mr. Choi's lanky frame instead.
"You should lowkey get rid of them, it honestly seems like false precision to me," Jin replied, half-jokingly, "it would also make your life a lot easier."
"I'm with Jin on this one," Jisung chimed in, "they're all the same thing, just shaped in different ways with tiny differences in the ingredients. Now software," he paused for dramatic effect, "there's something that needs a detailed taxonomy. ERPs, CRMs, HRISs..."
Jisung had been staffed to the ringfence team specializing in enterprise software due diligences, and he had taken them to be his new personality trait.
"Dude, we get it, you get a hard-on for B2B SaaS," Jin retorted.
Their usual banter faded into the background as Kevin stared at the categories on screen. It's all just metal. Jin's offhanded comment echoed in his brain as he switched tabs to his browser, where a ChatGPT window with a verbose answer to What is HSLA steel? sat waiting for him. Before his Cheongjin visit, he would have wholeheartedly agreed with his friends. Now, he wasn't so sure.
VIII
Kevin strolled past the naengmyeon chain from his previous visit as the latest hit from HUNTR/X streamed through his AirPods. He was tempted to stop in for a bowl of noodles, but he restrained himself, wanting to get to the CCG Pyeongyang office quickly for some final preparation before the update tomorrow. He recalled the error in his formula that Jin and Jisung had helped him fix, shuddering at the prospect of another error hidden deep within the sprawling tabs of the spreadsheet. He wasn't sure why the meeting, with the bulk of attendees being based in Seoul, had to happen in Pyeongyang, but he appreciated the opportunity to explore Korea's second capital with CCG footing the bill.
As he exited through the main entrance of Pyeongyang Station, he found himself jostling between the stream of commuters finishing their workdays. The sun had just set, and the soft glow of dusk mixed with the LED streetlights to give an eerie sheen to the figures streaming by. Kevin was initially surprised by the density of the crowd, but a quick look at the subway system schematic on KakaoMap clarified the reason for the congestion. Unlike Seoul's metro system, which had multiple nodes across the city, Pyeongyang's subway centered at Pyeongyang Station, from which the rainbow of metro lines, named for different hangul consonants, emanated radially. The transit directions indicated the CCG office was one stop away on the red ㄱ (ga) Line, but Kevin decided to walk it instead, reasoning that the couple extra minutes would be worth taking in more of the city.
The Supreme Court loomed into view as Kevin strolled further and further from the station, towering over the assortment of buildings that Kevin assumed housed various government ministries around it; the tree-lined roads of Goryeo University's central campus across the river seemed like a children's playset against the judicial monolith. The soft yellow glow of floodlights illuminated the sleek grey granite body and sloping roof tiled with jet-black volcanic rock. Kevin had seen the building on television and accompanying news headlines throughout the years, but the physical presence and weight of the structure hit him differently, even from blocks away. It struck him that though all the downstream economic activities of high finance might happen down south in Seoul, the decisions that shaped those events were all made in the complex now before him.
The KakaoMap directions indicated he had arrived at the CCG Pyeongyang office, but Kevin felt a glimmer of doubt. The building in front of him was unassuming, 5 stories tall, with a simple, polished-stone exterior - a far cry from the grand metal and glass lobby of the eighty-story Samsung Tower that housed the Seoul office. He stepped through the sliding doors and examined the building's directory. Sure enough, CCG occupied the 4th and 5th floor of the building. He gave his name and ID to the attendant at the front desk and draped the visitor badge over his neck, scanning it before stepping through the automated gates to the elevators.
As he stepped out of the elevator bay, he was greeted with the familiar forest green that CCG used across their brand and materials. The client space had a similar layout to the Seoul office, but with a view of the Supreme Court in place of the expansive panorama of the Han River. He scanned his badge to enter the working space and found an empty cluster of desks, setting down his bag and plugging in his laptop to the familiar LG UltraWides. He navigated the various tabs of his model, using the CTRL + PageUp/PageDown shortcut Hyunjae had shown him, making sure that all the check-cells were in order and there were no #REF errors. Junseo had hinted that he might defer to Kevin for any model-specific questions during the interim update, so he wanted to be ready for whatever the partners might throw at him.
He hadn't expected the meeting to be so well-attended. The meeting invite had included email addresses from both CCG and WOSCO that he hadn't recognized, but in his experience those attendees had usually been no-shows. Not today. The conference room stretched to accommodate all of the participants, with lower-rank associates like himself and Hyunjae relegated to the seats against the wall, away from the long glass table. Additional faces that Kevin didn't recognize populated the large TV at the end of the room, their avatars indicating they were muted with a small red microphone with a dash through it. At the head of the table, he saw Mikyung Lee from WOSCO, and he also recognized a shorter woman with grey hair as Seoyeon Baek, a partner from CCG Pyeongyang who split her time between his case and a few others.
Junseo reined in the participants from their small talk to begin the meeting. He had reviewed how he planned to lead the meeting the night before, with the first half dedicated to Hyunjae's workstream and the second half to Kevin's model. Kevin found it hard to concentrate as the partners began to discuss Hyunjae's market research; his hands started to sweat, and the model he had open on his laptop, which he had reviewed hundreds of times, took on a new sheen of unfamiliarity.
Finally, he recognized the model-on-a-page slide that he had built, gesturing in his portion of the agenda. The first few slides went by without issue; the partners and clients nodding along as Junseo described the approach and data that drove the DCF model for the two scenarios. Junseo clicked his keyboard to reveal the 'money slide', a two-panel with a waterfall chart detailing the build of expected revenue and costs for each option across the agreed-upon 10 year range for each scenario. As Hyunjae had instructed, Kevin had been careful to put a large "PRELIMINARY" tag in the upper-right corner of the slide, preemptively justifying any future iterations of the model.
"From our preliminary analysis, we expect a greenfield Gwangyang plant to reach profitability by Year 6, with 4.2 trillion won in revenue at a ~16% EBITDA margin by Year 10. We expect the Cheongjin brownfield expansion to reach profitability sooner, between Year 3 and 4, but with lower total revenue and margin by Year 10," Junseo narrated.
At the mention of "lower", Kevin's eyes gravitated to the dotted green box around the Gwangyang option, indicating its relative attractiveness over Cheongjin. He was suddenly reminded of his off-hand comparison of Cheongjin with Detroit. He had drawn a superficial connection in the weather and smokestacks, but he now recalled the decay he had seen on that trip. The dilapidated houses, with rotting porches and boarded-up windows, the shuttered abandoned factories, with metal and glass strewn out front, and the weeds poking through the cracked pavement of the neglected streets. All had served as a somber reminder of the reality that the automotive industry's departure had meant for the residents. As he imagined the same fate befalling Director Im, Minjeong, Mrs. Park, and all the others he had met in Cheongjin, the ramifications of CCG's recommendation to build Gwangyang now elicited a visceral reaction he had not yet felt before.
Junseo continued in his usual slow but steady tone. "Of course, we will continue to pressure test the assumptions and refine the model to more accurately capture the fan of outcomes before our final conversation."
Most of the attendees seemed satisfied with the outcome - it matched the initial biases that both the partners and clients had. He glanced over at Mikyung, who was flipping through the physical printout of the slide deck that Kevin had prepared for all the attendees. She spoke for the first time in the meeting, asking, "Could we talk through the assumptions underlying the cost and revenue drivers for both cases? I see you have double-clicks for each of the scenarios in the following pages."
Kevin sat up in his seat as Junseo flipped to the next slide, a more detailed view of the waterfall for the Gwangyang case. "We combined global industry benchmarks, market participant conversations, and interviews with WOSCO personnel to triangulate each of the assumptions. Are there any particular assumptions you wanted to cover in more depth?" Junseo asked.
"How is the ramp-curve for yield on the different steel segments currently being modeled?" Mikyung pushed, prompting Kevin to quickly flip to the relevant tab in the model and mentally review it.
"Excellent question. One of our associates, Minjae, has been closest to the model and can give you a better answer than I could. Minjae?" Junseo looked over at him with an encouraging smile, opening the floor.
Kevin could feel his heart pounding in his throat; taking a deep breath, he began, "As Manager Park mentioned, we've taken multiple sources to estimate the yield ramp curve across the key segments of WOSCO's products. If we look at page 103, we've laid out our estimates of the curve for each of the segments for both scenarios. Taking plate products as an example, our understanding is that the higher-volume, lower complexity segments, such as base plate and commercial marine plate, will ramp more quickly."
As the countless late nights with the model filled Kevin's mind, his voice grew calmer and more poised - the flow state reminded him of speaking during college discussion sections when he had actually done the readings. He continued, "To reflect increased operational complexity for advanced plate and critical-service plate, we've applied a 10% and 25% haircut, respectively, to the yield curves, which were informed by industry benchmarks from the World Steel Association as well as conversations with some of the operators at WOSCO's Cheongjin and Pohang plants. We've approached WOSCO's other segments in a similar manner," he concluded, surprised at his own lung capacity.
Mikyung nodded slowly, but Kevin could tell she wasn't convinced. "Thank you, that all makes sense. Nippon Steel recently finished a similar greenfield project to what Gwangyang might look like. If you haven't already, the ramp curves for their product segments may also be helpful triangulation points."
Kevin nodded, and Junseo stepped back in, responding, "We'll confirm whether the benchmarks we used include that project, and if not, we'll be sure to add those in as well. Any other questions?"
The silence felt like an eternity, but finally Junseo flipped to the final page of the deck, a schedule for the remaining working sessions and meetings. "Thank you all very much for your time. If anything comes up, you can always reach me through email or phone, and we'll see you all next month." Kevin sighed with relief, not realizing he had been holding his breath the entire time. Most of the attendees began to pack their belongings, but he noticed the CCG team wasn't moving. He glanced over at Hyunjae, who mouthed 'debrief'.
"That went well - Mikyung was quieter than usual," Junseo started, "Although she had a good point on refining those yield curves."
One of the partners from Seoul, a heavyset man with balding grey hair and thick round glasses, agreed with Junseo, adding, "Let's try to get our hands on those curves from Nippon and integrate those in."
Seoyeon, the partner from Pyeongyang, shook her head. "From my experience with Mikyung, she won't be satisfied with us just following her suggestion. Those yield curves are the key to the model - we need to feel rock solid about them." She turned to Junseo, her face contemplative, "Have we gotten actual historical ramp figures from WOSCO? I know they can be touchy about that data."
Junseo shook his head, "We've gotten some high-level figures from the management at Cheongjin and Pohang, but nothing site or segment level."
Kevin thought back to his conversation in the conference room with Minjeong and how he had shifted her attention away from the ramp assumptions after she had shown doubt.
Junseo continued, "I was planning to visit the Wonsan HQ next week. Kevin, if you want to join me, we can try to dig up some of the historical ramp curves from one of their data people."
There had been a pop-up from one of his favorite fashion labels he had wanted to check out next week, but he knew he couldn't refuse. "Sounds good, I'll book travel ASAP," he replied.
Seoyeon began to pack her laptop and papers into a sleek brown purse, "I know it's extra work, but Mikyung and WOSCO will appreciate the real answer more than what seems right on paper. I really appreciate all of your hard work."
Kevin had told himself he wouldn't be affected by compliments he knew the partners were obligated to say, but he still felt a swell of pride. He bowed as Seoyeon left the room, opened up CCG's internal travel portal, and began typing in the hanja 元山 (Wonsan), already familiar to him from their use in WOSCO's full name.
IX
Kevin had already lost count of how many times he had recognized the WOSCO logo, and his taxi had yet to even enter the sprawling corporate campus. There had been a WOSCO priority line for oversize luggage pickup at Wonsan Station; corporate shuttle buses, painted in steel blue to disambiguate from the green metropolitan buses, had the company's logo stamped on both sides; even the bike share system, though the models were identical to the ones in Seoul, were white-labeled with the familiar lettering. He was reminded of how Yale's deep blue signage and the sterile Yale New Haven Health system's logos permeated portions of New Haven, as the taxi pulled up to the guard station flanking the entry gate.
"Name?" the guard asked briskly.
Before Kevin could answer, the driver casually responded, "should be for Kevin."
Kevin rolled down his window and corrected him, "Sorry, my name should be on the visitor list as Minjae." He had forgotten that KakaoTaxi had synced his name from his KakaoTalk profile.
"ID please." The guard didn't seem bothered by the confusion, and Kevin quickly handed over his visa. "Please proceed to building 2, on your left," he pointed to a sleek glass rectangle at the end of a pine-lined boulevard, then returned to his desk. Kevin could see the reflection from the felt-green background of an online Go-Stop video game in his glasses.
If someone had told Kevin that he was at the wrong address, he would have believed them. The bright morning sunlight streamed through the single sheet of glass serving as the front wall of the cavernous lobby that seemed more fit for a chaebol's headquarters than a steel company's, illuminating the WOSCO logo that hung from the vaulted ceilings stood at least 30 feet above him. The logo, made of polished steel and enamel, looked taller than he was, and he knew his perspective only made it look smaller than reality. Kevin had expected that the headquarters would be grander than the Cheongjin factory, but this scale seemed almost wasteful.
He wandered to the waiting area to peruse a series of WOSCO memorabilia preserved on one side of the wall. After examining a chunk of steel labeled as the first output of WOSCO's forges and an occupation-era railway map of Korea (then called Chosen), with Wonsan circled in red ink, he found himself facing a panel of brushed black characters, plainly framed with no accompanying placard, as if the piece spoke for itself. 鐵鋼은 國力 (Cheolgangeun gukryeok - In steel lies national strength). The work was signed by Park Joong-su, the authoritarian prime minister who had steered Korea through its economic miracle, though at the price of some democratic and civil liberties. He sat down on the plush leather couch, cracking a smile at the irony of a gyopo like himself, whose American passport had spared him from the nation's six-month mandatory military service and who still paid taxes to the IRS, shaping the future of Park's steelmaking industrial love child. The 國 character for nation began to take on a strange weight in his eyes as he linked it to the 美國 (Miguk - USA) stamped on his own ID.
The image of Junseo's gait and perfectly-combed hair brought him back to reality and onto his feet. "How was the flight?" Kevin asked as they headed towards the front desk.
"Super chill as always," he replied as Kevin struggled to keep up with his pace. "I still don't understand why you insist on taking the train."
Kevin shrugged, "it's cheaper - besides, I find it easier to work on trains than planes." I can also actually nap properly, he continued to himself, but didn't dare say this to his manager.
Once they were seated in a conference room, Junseo forwarded him an Outlook meeting invitation. "I set up some time with one of WOSCO's data analytics people, but I have to go and talk with someone else about Hyunjae's workstream. Do you think you can lead the meeting?" Kevin nodded, excited to finally get some one-on-one client exposure. Other than that time with Minjeong, a voice said in his head. He waved it away; he knew performance reviews were due in a week, and he was determined to impress Junseo.
He made his way to the conference room noted in the meeting invite, peering through the square viewport at the top of the door. Wonhee Chang, a stout, balding middle-aged man with squinted eyes and what looked like a perpetual scowl, was already inside. Kevin checked his wrist to confirm the time, then knocked and entered the room, starting to speak with a bow. "Hello Mr. Chang, how are you today? My name is Kevin, and I'm one of the team members from..."
"I know who you are. Where's Manager Park? Wasn't he supposed to be in this meeting too?" Wonhee interrupted him, immediately putting a bad taste in Kevin's mouth.
"Unfortunately, he had another meeting come up, so he asked me to speak with you about..."
"So he left me here with a kid who just graduated and doesn't know black beans from red beans?"
Kevin felt an ember of anger start to burn in his stomach, but he quashed it, knowing this man held the keys to the data that he needed for his model.
Clearing his throat, Kevin justified his presence. "Actually, I'm the one directly working on the data analysis, so Manager Park also felt that I would be better equipped to get in the weeds with you." He knew that without establishing his credibility now, Wonhee would never respect his model and give him the data he needed. "Using a couple different machine learning models and multiple different data sources, I've projected the yield curves of WOSCO's key steel segments, which I'd be happy to show you. Unfortunately, we haven't had a single source of truth for WOSCO's internal yield curve ramps across the different sites, which has complicated our analysis."
He noticed Wonhee's ears perk up at the mention of machine learning and realized that rigorous statistics might be the way to his heart. "A big issue is that a lot of these benchmark data sets describe the same underlying runs, so our posterior predictive intervals are larger than we'd like. I've also considered modeling with a Gaussian stochastic process instead of fitting to logistical curves, but I don't feel great about it with the lack of clean independent data."
The scowl had softened on Wonhee's face, but he remained hesitant. "Even if the higher-ups were fine with me giving out that data to outsiders, it would take me the better part of a week to build all the queries to pull it from our data lake. Besides, there's a lot of on-the-ground nuance in that data that I doubt you white-collar Seoulites would be able to understand."
The gears clicked in Kevin's mind. Not only was Wonhee dubious of the analysis and the project at large, he also seemed to harbor a deep grudge against everything the southern capital stood for. Kevin switched tactics.
"Honestly, I felt the same way, which is why I was secretly a little relieved when Manager Park couldn't join this meeting. I think my upbringing and education in the United States has made it tricky to work with the people in the Seoul office, who I've noticed only seem to care about how things look on a slide and the final number." He felt a shadow of shame at throwing his colleagues under the bus, but desperate times called for desperate measures. "My academic advisor at Yale always used to tell me that just like the old proverb goes, the journey matters more than the destination, especially for data analysis."
He had struck gold. Wonhee's eyes brightened as he perked up in the conference chair. "Oh, I didn't realize you went to school in America. I did my Master's at Princeton - is that near where you grew up?"
Kevin thanked the heavens for the connection. "I was actually born and raised in New Jersey, in a town called Fort Lee, if you've heard of it."
"Fort Lee!" Wonhee exclaimed, "my buddies and I would always drive up after a big exam to get Korean food out there. Have you been to Yea Jip on Main Street?"
Kevin thought back to the naengmyeon from Pyeongyang Station and his automatic comparison to his hometown spot. "Of course! My mother is good friends with the owner - we go to the same church."
After some banter over the particulars of traffic on the George Washington Bridge, the cyclists that constantly zoomed by on their way to 9-W (Kevin didn't dare mention his affinity for the route after Wonhee announced his distaste at the way they would share lanes with cars), and the Korean spa in nearby Palisades Park, Kevin focused attention back to the data he needed.
"Sorry to switch back to business, but getting back to the data..."
"Oh, don't worry about it! I'm always happy to help a fellow Ivy League graduate. Give me your email address - I'll make sure you get the relevant ramp curves for all of our major sites by the end of this week."
Kevin always felt uncomfortable referencing the intercollegiate sports division turned status symbol, but his relief at obtaining the data he needed trumped any awkwardness he felt.
"Thank you so much. I'll be sure to update you on any interesting insights we find." Noticing the time, he began packing his belongings into his bag. "Oh, and if you're ever back in the United States, please let me know. If I'm around, I'd love to show you around Fort Lee." Kevin added extra congeniality as he shook Wonhee's hand, doing everything in his power to ensure the data would arrive in his inbox.
"Will do! It was a pleasure to meet you, Kevin." Wonhee trotted out the door, letting the door slam behind him.
Junseo raised an eyebrow inquisitively. "You managed to convince the data guy? The manager from the previous phase told me he was a huge pain in the ass to work with."
Kevin nodded as he took a triumphant bite of the bibimbap from the employee cafeteria. Like the lobby, the dining room was worlds apart from the one in Cheongjin. The sleek bronze cutlery matched the hardware holding up the flowing curtains that partially obscured the panoramic view of the East Sea. Even with the added seasoning of his data victory, the bibimbap didn't hold up to the perfectly-browned jeyuk bokkeum from Cheongjin. Kevin made a mental note to bring this up with Minjeong when he saw her next, then realized in his introspection he had missed a question from Junseo.
"Sorry, I didn't catch what you said," he confessed sheepishly.
"All good, I just asked when you think you could get me a view of the updated model," Junseo repeated.
Straight to business - a part of Kevin had been hoping for some validation. He paused, another piece of advice from Hyunjae echoing in his mind. Take however long you think it'll take, and multiply it by at least 2, 3 if you think you can get away with it.
"Mr. Chang said he could get me the data by sometime next week, so I can have the updated model ready for your review by next Friday."
"Sounds good," Junseo replied, "we're also going back up to Cheongjin next week, so you can validate the updated model with some of the clients there as well."
Kevin nodded, grateful for the breathing room.
"By the way, great job with Mr. Chang. I was honestly prepared to meet with him again separately given what the previous team said about him. You've got a knack for client," Junseo said, not looking up from his grilled mackerel. "Keep it up."
Kevin thanked him drily, trying to match his nonchalance, but couldn't help but crack a smile.
X
"u meet up w miss chae yet?"
The message preview from his KakaoWork group chat with Jin and Jisung flashed in the lower right corner of his screen as he was showing the updated model to Minjeong. He quickly closed the window, hoping she hadn't noticed. He glanced over - her eyes were narrowed in focus on the updated yield ramp assumptions. It seemed like she had a habit of picking at her fingers, as if the digital movements would offset and calm her racing mind.
"It still doesn't seem quite right," she confessed, leaning back in her chair.
As promised, Kevin had received the historic ramp data from Wonhee the previous week, in an email that also contained a link to an article about Fort Lee's ecosystem of imported Korean fried chicken restaurants (Kevin personally preferred BBQ, but Kyochon was a close second) and more emojis than he thought Wonhee's generation knew existed. The data had been massive, but thanks to a mix of Python and Alteryx, Kevin had distilled the relevant information into an updated set of assumptions. The final output hadn't actually shifted that much, and Kevin wasn't sure whether to be annoyed at the hours of extra work he had done for nothing or thankful that he wouldn't have to create a whole new set of upfront slides to justify a larger change.
"Can you show me what new data you used to build out these assumptions?" Minjeong asked.
Kevin hesitated - the analysis pipeline was split across dozens of Jupyter notebooks and Alteryx flows. "The workbooks are kinda all over the place right now, and I stupidly decided to use both Python and Alteryx to analyze it instead of just picking one."
Kevin had hoped name-dropping the analytical tools would discourage Minjeong, but she responded without flinching, "Just show me where they are. I know my way around both of those."
Opening the directory, Kevin felt a hint of hesitation. In his caffeine-fueled 3AM work sessions, he had neglected to give coherent names to the notebooks, and some of them still retained their Untitled Notebook monikers. Still, he knew that without Minjeong's seal of approval, Junseo wouldn't feel comfortable with the model for the final update, so he rotated his laptop to face her, apologizing in advance for the chaos.
She gestured to his travel-sized Logitech MX Anywhere mouse, and once he handed it to her, she straightened up, cracking her fingers, and beginning to type. As she pored through his labyrinth of analyses, he tried to keep up with her method of inquiry, but quickly lost track and instead took a closer look at her face. She had the same understated style of makeup from his first visit, with a shadow of pink under her eyes and a glimmer of red on her lips the only color on her otherwise pale face. Her bangs fell uniformly onto her eyebrows, with two longer strands on each side flanking her face. Her eyes were narrowed in focus, her nose wrinkling intermittently as she struggled to decipher a particularly unorthodox piece of syntax Kevin had used. She rocked her head side to side in thought, then nodded determinedly, as if to convince herself that she had found a source of error.
Rotating the laptop back to Kevin, she pointed at a line of Python code. "This is probably what's causing the funky yield curves. It's really annoying, but the Pohang plant uses different names than us for plate products. You lumped this time series into the critical-service plate, but it should be advanced plate - Pohang just threw in the word critical to make it seem more advanced and justify their price for it."
Kevin followed her finger to a dictionary he had defined at the start of a Jupyter cell. He felt justified in his mistake given the confusing nomenclature, but he also remembered a document from the ramp-up materials that had called out some of the inflationary naming practices of the Pohang plant.
"If we take a peek at the new ramp curves with that fixed," Minjeong continued, tapping the Enter key with a flourish, "these look a lot more reasonable to me now."
Kevin stared at the assumption table and the associated line chart. The yield curves for critical-service had flattened considerably, while advanced plate had been moderately lifted. Switching to the overall outputs, he felt a drop in his stomach as the NPV, break-even, and revenue estimates, which had all favored Gwangyang previously, now gave a slight edge to Cheongjin. His mind immediately began to think of other assumptions he could adjust to bring the Gwangyang numbers back up - otherwise, he would have to justify a new answer to Junseo, the partners, and Mikyung.
"Thank you," he said softly to Minjeong, his eyes still glued to his screen, "you're a lifesaver." He exhaled slowly, shutting the lid of his laptop and bringing his eyes to meet Minjeong's. "When did you get so good at Python?"
She let out a soft laugh, putting on her uniform's overshirt and standing up to stretch. "You never asked me my major: I double-majored in Korean Language Arts and Stats."
Kevin was taken aback. "What brought you to WOSCO then?"
"I told you," she said, as if he already knew the answer, "I was born and raised in Cheongjin."
She gathered her belongings and headed to the door, pausing before passing through the frame. "By the way," she said, turning back to face Kevin with a wry smile, "your friends Jin and Jisung are very funny," and left, gently closing the door behind her.
XI
"Ne, I understand." As he had expected, the simple question on the origins of his father's side of the family had led to a spirited lecture that had spanned Admiral Yi Sunshin and his turtle ships, why Imperial Japanese occupation was the root cause of every major issue Korea had today, and the importance of his eating and exercise habits. He glanced at his phone, which continued to chronologically log the length of the call, already past the three-hour mark, but his father showed no sign of losing steam.
Prior to getting distracted by a piece of news from the morning, Kevin's father had shed light on how Mr. Choi had brought up Sincheon. 康, the hanja for his and his father's surname, was part of the Sincheon Kang clan, different from the usual 姜 used by the Jinju Kang clan that laid claim to most Koreans with the last name. Incidentally, his membership of the clan also helped explain part of his given name; 在 (jae) had been predetermined 31 generations ago and cataloged in a massive tome for future generations. His father explained that his own name, Taehwan, followed this nomenclatural directive, and should Kevin choose, his sons would bear the character 欽 (heum) in their given names.
Kevin quickly reeled the conversation back to his ancestry before his father could continue his speculations on the impacts of artificial intelligence on the workplace. "If we're originally from Sincheon, why does all our extended family live near Seoul?"
Visibly disappointed Kevin didn't want to hear his theory on the rise of agentic AI, his father was nevertheless happy to speak more to the family's history. "Your grandfather had the foresight to anticipate Park Joong-su's industrialization push and pivoted to get into heavy industry. You know about his 5-year plans and all, right?" Kevin nodded, anxious to hear the rest of the story. "He ended up choosing shipping, and we relocated to Incheon a couple years after I was born. Your aunts and uncles all went to university in Seoul, so our side of the family's been there ever since."
"But you went to Goryeo, in Pyeongyang?" Kevin inquired, wearing his confusion on his face.
"I was like you - I wanted to get away from my family for a bit. See the world, try something new. At least I didn't go halfway around the world like you did." His father chuckled, not grasping the irony that Kevin was back in his ancestral country, just as his father had returned to his ancestral region.
"When I was growing up, your grandfather used to tell me all these stories about the different ships that would come in and out of the ports, stacked to the brim with corrugated shipping containers. He would joke how when you're close to one, your neck starts to hurt from look up so high. Imagine all the steel that went into building those things." His eyes took on the familiar wistful look. "One thing's for sure, those ships were the lifeblood of our country's growth. Now, with all this datacenter and semiconductor craze, you can't even..."
As his father began another rant, Kevin visualized the nautical behemoths, the wrinkles in the steel sheet of the containers palpable in his mind. HSLA plate for the hull and weathering sheet for the containers, he thought to himself subconsciously, then caught himself and scoffed. The case was beginning to consume him.
After he wished his father a good day, he hung up and returned his gaze to the model. The new results from Minjeong's corrections stared back at him, reminding him of his dilemma. After adjusting some of the other assumptions, he had found a permutation that would bring Gwangyang to parity with Cheongjin, but he knew using those assumptions would just be statistical sleight of hand. The set of assumptions that he had found favoring Gwangyang would imply that the impact of the institutional knowledge of Cheongjin's workers was negligible, and Kevin's mind flashed back to the operators in the pulpit that had reminded him of Tank from The Matrix, as fluent in the mill's data streams as Tank in the streams of mirrored katakana symbols in the movie.
Both data and reality supported Cheongjin, but he knew the partners preferred Gwangyang, which CCG had also given their preliminary recommendation for. He would have to not only answer for the updated ramp curves and argue against the assumption set that supports Gwangyang, but also convince Junseo and the partners that this was the right answer for WOSCO. Part of him, both worried about possible reprimanding from Junseo for not catching the answer change sooner and also dreading the extra hours of analysis and slide-making that would be needed, switched back to the alternate model he had with the assumptions favoring Gwangyang. Suddenly, the black-and-white photograph in front of Plate 3 flashed in his mind. Feeling the little girl's gaze through time, he deleted the Gwangyang version of the model and created a new tab in the original, setting up a multi-dimensional sensitivity analysis table to convince Junseo.
XII
"So you're telling me we're going to walk into the SteerCo with WOSCO next week and tell them the opposite of what we've been telling them for the last couple of weeks?" Minseok Yoo, the primary billing partner from the Seoul office and Junseo's direct supervisor, exclaimed. Flecks of saliva flew from his mouth as he spoke, and Kevin saw Junseo's ever-diplomatic face twist into a grimace as he thought through how he would respond to him.
Kevin had revealed the new data and corresponding answer change during their end-of-day sync on Thursday, after he had built a sufficiently thorough sensitivity analysis and triple-checked all of the assumptions and model mechanics. Junseo had initially been dismissive of Kevin's confession as he had led with the (not incorrect) statement that he had altered one segment's categorization in his model, but the color drained from his already pale face as he flashed up the model outputs on the flat-screen in Junseo's office. "Have you tried playing around with the assumptions? There must be some way to get Gwangyang's numbers back up." Kevin felt a hint of pride from the parallel between Junseo's initial reaction and his own.
"I was able to find a combination that gets us directionally back to the original answer, but..." As Kevin began to explain the invalidity of the Gwangyang assumptions, Junseo cut him off, curtly stating, "So use those."
"I actually think the data points to Cheongjin as the right answer," Kevin stated firmly as he switched tabs to his sensitivity analysis.
Junseo's glare burned into his face hotter than Cheongjin's blast furnaces, and Hyunjae paused his typing and looked up from his laptop, as if Kevin had just suggested that the sky were red or that Korea was divided into two separate countries that had been at war for the better part of a century. Before Junseo could interrupt, Kevin quickly walked through the sensitivity analysis, which he had built with the help of Jin and Jisung, and Junseo's face began to soften. Even Hyunjae, whose face was usually in a playful smirk or frustrated scowl, seemed impressed by the depth of his analysis.
"Your conclusion makes sense from the data, and the analysis is solid." Junseo started, breaking what felt like an eternity of silence after Kevin had finished describing his work, and brought his hands back to his laptop. "I just don't know how we're going to justify this to the partners and WOSCO."
"What if we suggest a hybrid approach?" Kevin took a shot in the dark with an idea that had been building in the back of his mind, like an itch that he couldn't scratch away. "WOSCO could funnel some of their investment into Cheongjin and the rest into Gwangyang."
Junseo had started shaking his head before Kevin had even finished his thought. "CCG partners hate compromises - it'll never fly with Seoyeon," Junseo said, pinching the bridge of his nose. Kevin could already picture the slender Pyeongyang partner shaking her head in disapproval from Junseo's determined tone, who sat in silence for a moment, then sat up in his seat.
"Alright." He stretched, cracking his fingers and neck. "If we're 100% sure about the data, we need more justification behind their conclusions. Hyunjae, do you remember anything from some of the expert calls you ran that might help us here?"
Hyunjae shifted in his chair, seated in his usual slouched position, an inch away from falling out of the chair entirely. "Hmm, I have a couple good quotes about capability transfer and the role of equipment vs. management." He scrolled through his compilation of notes, the scroll bar barely visible from the length of the document.
"How good are they?" Junseo replied, "And how many do you have?"
Hyunjae looked up, "I got a bunch, and some of them are straight bangers."
Junseo narrowed his eyes; Kevin knew Junseo didn't like using slang during meetings, but he seemed to decide that the direness of the situation outweighed his distaste for Hyunjae's vernacular. "If I blank out a loop, do you think you could build it out by tonight? I know it's early night, but we have our check-in with the partners tomorrow, and if we don't have a good set of materials to convince them, we're all gonna be working the weekend."
Hyunjae smirked, "It's all good, I was just gonna go work out and hit the steam room tonight anyways. If you want to lean in on Kevin's materials I can send you a first pass at a blank loop before I grab dinner."
Kevin hung his head. Though he knew the answer change wasn't his fault, he still felt responsible for derailing the team's early night. "Perfect, if you want to get started on that, don't feel like you need to stay. Kevin," Junseo turned to him, his eyes now lit with resolve, "let's get these model pages ready for the partners tomorrow."
Junseo began to respond to Minseok, speaking carefully, as if navigating a minefield, each word vocalized with resolve. "I understand this materially changes our answer, but the team believes that this is the correct one. As you can see, the experts we've spoken with don't find it unreasonable that an existing plant with experienced management could outperform a greenfield facility, even despite equipment advantages with the latter, and I assure you we've quadruple-checked all of our data inputs and modeling."
True to his word, Hyunjae had crafted a new section of the deck that wholeheartedly backed the new conclusion, with a new suite of quotes that supported the new answer almost all too well.
Minseok trained his eyes on Kevin. "And you're sure of the assumptions, Minjae?"
Even a week ago, Kevin's mouth would have been dry and he would have been unable to meet Minseok's eyes. Now, he found the countless late nights perusing WOSCO's catalog, querying different steel plate specifications through ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and Minjeong's exasperated email replies after he asked her about the same product line for the fifth time, all fueling his response, the force of his words shocking even himself. "I assure you that the model is an accurate view of WOSCO's current and historical capabilities." He didn't take his eyes off of Minseok's, noticing for the first time a small birthmark next to his right eye and a vein pulsing next to his left. "It reflects decades of data directly from WOSCO, and we've pressure-tested the analysis with multiple members of management from their Cheongjin, Pohang, and Wonsan plants."
He paused for dramatic effect, then resumed, adopting Junseo's resolute tone, "I will personally vouch for the validity of the outputs." He wanted to add, "and just because you want the Gwangyang option so you can sell more cases to Hanseong doesn't mean that the data will support you," but he liked his job too much.
Before Minseok could interrupt, Seoyeon, the partner from the Pyeongyang office, chimed in. "This could actually be an opportunity for us to suggest a hybrid approach to WOSCO. On paper, Cheongjin has better raw NPV and revenue, but we all know that it'll be helpful for them to have a production facility near Hanseong, one of their biggest clients."
Kevin snuck a glance at Junseo, who avoided his gaze like the plague, as Seoyeon echoed his own offhand suggestion from the team room.
"We can suggest a two-pronged approach: divert some of the resources set aside for this project to renovate the Cheongjin facility, then build a smaller greenfield facility in Gwangyang to focus on the highest-value segments that align with Hanseong's needs." She paused, then continued, "Who knows, we could even sell them an extension to identify which specific product lines should stay in Cheongjin and which ones should be moved to the Gwangyang facility," a mischievous twinkle in her eyes as she looked over at Minseok. Kevin hadn't thought of the possibility of selling additional work with his suggestion, but Seoyeon's proposal still boosted his confidence, a proof point that corporate higher-ups were not always infallible.
Minseok leaned back in his seat, contemplating the proposition. Another partner, a lanky, well-dressed man in his fifties, chimed in, "I like Seoyeon's suggestion. I always felt that the two options were a bit too extreme, and this way we can also appeal to Mikyung's history with Hanseong."
Two of the other partners nodded, and Minseok rubbed his chin with his fingers, finally sitting forward and nodding. "I'm aligned. Team, could we refresh our materials to incorporate this new frame? If you're able to get us a draft of the materials by tonight, we can have LT give thoughts and do another rev early next week before our SteerCo with WOSCO."
Kevin glanced at the time in the lower right corner of his screen: 4時25分. The edits Minseok proposed would take a couple hours at least, but he was glad that the partners seemed satisfied with the new model output. He began to draft a message for the KakaoWork group chat with Jin and Jisung that he would miss dinner with them but would join them for drinks after, as a DM from Hyunjae, containing a stream of the Korean character ㅠ to denote tears, popped up on his screen.
XIII
Kevin rubbed his eyes as the harsh summer morning sun streamed through the windows of his hotel room. He had forgotten to close the blackout curtains before going to bed, his mind focused instead on the client workshop that lay ahead of him. He pulled back the sheer curtains to reveal the whitewater waves crashing on the ink-black basalt and expanse of the sparkling blue waters of the Korea Strait. Fishing barges, the glint of the sun reflected off their windshields, dotted the horizon, and the fuchsia lighthouse jutted out from the concrete jetty, flanked on all sides by a sloping mass of concrete tetrapods. Even though he rationally knew it was the same sea, Kevin couldn't imagine that a mackerel that he might have seen in the turbulent dark blue waters off of Cheongjin could now be navigating the placid sapphire waters that lay before him here in Jeju City.
Leaving the lobby of the hotel, he gazed up at the silhouette of Mount Halla in the distance. Illuminated by the morning sun, he could barely make out the snow-capped peak, a visual reminder of the height of the mountain as the humid summer air enveloped his body. He recalled the austere presence of Gwanmo Peak, the highest point of the Hamgyeong Range, which had loomed over Cheongjin, plunging the city in shadow long before sunset. Gwanmo had been completely covered in snow, while Halla's figure was primarily the green and grey of conifers and rock, with only a sliver of white remaining at the tip. Even though it had been months since he had been in Cheongjin, or the north of the country in general, he still found himself incessantly comparing north and south, from platters of raw fish and their accompanying sauces and plants that looked similar on first glance but revealed subtle differences, to the smallest differences in word choice and accents.
True to Seoyeon's prediction, WOSCO had agreed to a two-month extension for a deeper product-level portfolio analysis for the greenfield Gwangyang plant, but to his shock and disappointment, Kevin had not been chosen to continue with the team for the extension. He had suspected a poor performance review as the cause, but Junseo's evaluation of him had been glowing, particularly in the client section of the report. Hyunjae, who he still grabbed coffee with once a month (he always made a point to flash his company card when paying), chalked it up to 'case demand,' and Kevin began to understand his role and place as a small, replaceable cog of the much larger corporate machine. After WOSCO, he had been surged onto a large technology merger, and he now found himself in Jeju advising Hanseong's entertainment and hospitality subsidiary.
He stepped into the backseat of a Ryugyong R9, the same car that Junseo had admonished him for back in Cheongjin, but he knew his new manager, who always made a point to choose the most luxurious option on KakaoTaxi, wouldn't care. As the taxi navigated the palm-lined boulevards towards Hanseong's Jeju City office, his phone buzzed, a notification card from The Joseon Daily popping up on his screen. Kevin typically flicked away news notifications, most of which generally crowded his already-scattered mind with far-away calamities and events he couldn't control, but he had already finished reviewing the materials for the upcoming client workshop, so he decided to skim the article as a small break.
Once he clicked the notification, opening the newspaper's app to the article, the familiar hanja 製鐵 (jecheol) for steel manufacturing in the title caught his eye. A warm feeling of pride filled his chest as he read the article, which covered WOSCO's now-public decision to build the Gwangyang facility alongside a substantial capital investment into the aging Cheongjin plant. While the total Won amount of the investment into both facilities was slightly different than what he knew was contained in the bolded, double-bordered cells of the Excel file that lay within his laptop, Kevin knew that his work had helped steer the decision. A computer-generated rendering of a renovated Plate 3, the high dynamic range and slightest pixelation of trees flanking the entrance the only giveaways to its digital origin, offered a different pathos from the aged black-and-white photograph from the restaurant or the weathered exterior he had seen firsthand. It promised a Korea not of soot, hematite dust, and rusted tankers, but of semiconductors, solid-state batteries, and electric vehicles.
As he scrolled past a photograph of Director Im, Kevin could hear his boisterous laugh, smell the char from the grilled mackerel, and feel the warmth of the Eorangcheon in his throat. The embarrassment he had felt from overlooking the soy and mustard dipping sauce was now tinged with a sense of nostalgia, and he even thought back to the piercing cold winter breeze of the northern city fondly. His thoughts shifted to Minjeong: her cold and forensic gaze from the factory tour, her playful tone and jabs in the restaurant, the ease and finesse with which she had identified his taxonomic error. He had her as a friend on KakaoTalk, but their final conversation thread had only been another clarification of a specific line of specialty plate.
He rolled down the window, gazing out at the palm trees and letting the cool morning breeze ruffle his hair and fill the taxi with the scent of brine as he reminisced. Suddenly, his phone buzzed again, the double staccato identifying itself as a KakaoTalk notification. He lazily looked back down, allowing the phone to recognize his face and switch from the redacted lock-screen preview to the sender's name: 蔡敏貞. It took him a brief moment to recognize the hanja: Chae Minjeong. As the characters clicked and his stomach leaped, a KakaoWork notification from his manager materialized, shifting Minjeong's name down the screen. Kevin hesitated, staring at the screen for another second, before dutifully opening his laptop again, ready to respond to the latest set of client asks.