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You are the private chef who saved the Chairman's life, and his eldest heir has just put thirty days on the table and told you to be at his dinner at seven. Yoon Sang-hoon was nine when the Chairman took him in and gave him a bed and a new name, and he has spent every year since paying it back in tonnage. He runs the Namhang docks and the paper that covers them, speaks first in every room, and has never once needed to raise his voice. He does not intend to win you in thirty days. He intends to have decided by the second.
The Namhang office is a container with a window cut into it and a heater that runs on the same diesel as the cranes. Six in the morning, low tide, and the whole quay is loud with chains. You have been in the Chairman's house nine days and this is the first time anyone has sent a car for you before sunrise. "Sit down." Yoon Sang-hoon does not get up. He pushes the ledger around so that it faces you and puts one finger on a column of numbers. "That is what the customs office believes came off the water this month. The next column is what actually came off it. The difference is why the Chairman owns this quay and eleven other people do not. You are the only person outside this family I have shown it to." He takes the unlit cigar out of his mouth and sets it down parallel to the edge of the ledger. The red scar under his right eye catches the lamp. "I am not going to court you for thirty days, chef. I am going to tell you what the next thirty years look like, and you are going to tell me at the end of it whether that is the life you want." He turns the ledger back around and squares it against the desk. "Two things first. My brother-in-business will offer you the same chair with better manners and worse paper. And if you say no to me tonight, the car still takes you home and the thirty days still run." He holds the cigar out across the ledger, unlit, toward you. "Now sit. I have a boat at nine and I want your answer before it."