故 金錫元 President's 1st Anniversary Eulogy

Chairman Kim was a man of the highest caliber, a businessman, sportsman, internationalist, educator, journalist, volunteer, and a Marine who served in the Vietnam War, and the enormous and diverse legacy and memories he left behind live on in our lives and are part of the building of Korean civilization.

*I delivered a eulogy at the first anniversary memorial service (Yongpyong, Gangwon-do) for the late Mr. Kim, who as chairman of Ssangyong Group had a great impact on the lives of Koreans and passed away last year. As a fellow freedman, we had a deep conversation.

When I was asked to give a eulogy at the memorial service for the first anniversary of Chairman 金錫元's death, I was surprised and thought, “It's been a year already?” and also thought that I should summarize my relationship with the late man. We were both born in 1945 and had a long conversation that spanned a generation, starting with the August 1985 issue of The Chosun, where he was interviewed in his 40s. When I first met him in 1975, when he became chairman of Ssangyong Group at the age of 30 following the sudden passing of his father, Dr. Sung-dani Kim, he was a “jovial young man” and confident that “all of Korea's elite were gathered at the conglomerate.” Nine years later, in 1994, when I interviewed him for more than ten hours, I wrote in the magazine.

<"As a freeborn Korean, Kim, who is already 50 years old and has been chairman of the chaebol for 20 years, was very easy to talk to. He spoke about internationalization, education, automobiles, and business philosophy in a modest and quiet way. ‘The three major conditions for an international person are to abide by international rules, to have a broad education, and to not bother others,’ he said. He emphasized that “making laws that can be followed and keeping them is the starting point of internationalization.”>

Three years earlier, when the World Scout Jamboree was successfully held in Goseong, Gangwon-do, Kim's words about globalization, which was the topic of conversation at the time, were a wonderful lecture to read again. A year later, in the fall of 1995, just before Chuseok, I sat down with the politician-turned-president for another all-night interview at his Itaewon home, and the last sentence of the article reads.

<During our six-hour conversation, he had already opened his third pack of cigarettes. The reason he went beyond his usual two packs is because he is nervous. The full moon was shining in the yard as I stepped outside to be escorted by Mr. Kim, who had started his second life as a freedman at the age of 50, and who had started his second life as a businessman.

In the fall of 1997, two months after I returned home from the Nieman Fellows Program, a world-class journalist training program at Harvard University, with the help of the Sungok Press Foundation, the waves of the foreign exchange crisis were crashing over the country, and there was a dinner for journalists here in Yongpyong, and I have never forgotten the look on Chairman Kim's face when he greeted me with his characteristic charming smile, reminiscent of Hahoe Tal, but with a hint of vulnerability, saying, “Every day is difficult these days.” It was around this time, or maybe it was later, that Chairman Kim said to an executive who was thinking of quitting, “Who am I going to resign to?”

The role of the older generation, such as President Park Chung-hee, who was shot in the chest and said, “I'm fine,” or Dr. Sungok, who accomplished so much and said, “Nothing in this world is mine,” was to build a “Bridge over troubled water,” or a bridge to this troubled world. We, the liberated children, who crossed that bridge into a new world, became the last generation to know hunger and the first generation to enjoy abundance, and we ran the fastest and the farthest, so we also fell the hardest. When Chairman Kim Seok-won, the leader of this generation, fell, we are here today, the people who were the bridge over troubled water for him when many of his friends disappeared.

For the first time in history since Korea's founding as a capitalist country, entrepreneurs have become the protagonists in the creation of a new history, and thanks to their 奮鬪, we are able to write “The greatest story ever told,” and Chairman Kim Seok-won is one of the authors of that story. As times changed and the so-called “new yangs” of the 士子 class of farmers and merchants, journalists prosecutors judges academics politicians and bureaucrats rode the wave of democratization to power, I found myself in the position of writing a petition for leniency for Chairman Kim on trial, and the name Kim Seok-won was being forgotten.

In July 2011, shortly after South Korea won the right to host the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, Chosun Ilbo reporter Choi Bo-sik interviewed Kim and wrote that he was the “unsung hero” who paved the way for the Olympics by pioneering Yongpyong when the ski population was 4,000, and the successful Goseong Jamboree was recalled when the Saemangeum Jamboree fell apart shortly before his passing last year. But ignorance doesn't make it go away. Kim was a man of the highest order, and his vast and varied legacy and memories as a businessman, sportsman, internationalist, educator, journalist, volunteer, and Vietnam War Marine live on in our lives and are part of the fabric of Korean civilization.

Today, we commemorate Chairman Kim, but as the years pass, the emotions of fond memories will fade, fade into memories, fade into records, and eventually fade into anniversaries. In the words of Mr. Lee, when tinted by moonlight, they become myths, and when faded by sunlight, they become history. What the 20th, 50th, and 100th anniversaries of Chairman Kim's passing will look like will be determined by the interest and efforts of those gathered here. The real battle of great figures begins from the moment the coffin lid is closed, and it will be a battle of records and memorialization, and it will depend on how and what is inherited by descendants and juniors.

From the perspective of Global Standard, I believe that the absolute loneliness of Chairman Kim, who was always critical of Korean society and expressed his frustration when he said, “Who do I resign to?” is not the lament of an individual, but a question to those who will live today and tomorrow. Perhaps the fault of our generation of liberators is that we have buried the great stories of our predecessors under the excuse that we were too busy living, so today's memorial service is not a memory of sadness, but a new beginning of hope and determination to remember him proudly, with all his successes and failures.

Seok-won Kim, you met a good world and lived hard, and you made it even better, and now that you're gone, you'll live on in our hearts forever. Rest in peace in a world where you don't have to worry about, “Who am I going to resign to?” We are here. We will see free reunification. Thank you very much for listening to my inadequate eulogy.

August 26, 2024, by 趙甲濟.