On Memorial Day, Cambodians call for swift Khmer Rouge trials

A few weeks ago I told a story about a book — an autographed first edition of Carlos Bulosan’s epic novel America Is in the Heart, which I had been hunting down for ages and finally found a week before my daughter’s wedding in San Diego. I gave that book as a wedding present to Demi and Jerry, effectively returning it to California, where Bulosan himself had inscribed it to future Chief Justice Fred Ruiz Castro 61 years ago.

And I thought that was that for the Bulosan book. Well, guess what?

Last week, arriving late at night from a visit to Korea (about which more, below), I was greeted by a book on the table — it had been covered by a sheet torn out of an old magazine, so I couldn’t tell what it was. When I opened it I couldn’t believe my eyes: it was another copy of the very same book, a later printing of the same first edition, not signed by Bulosan but by another writer I hold in even higher esteem — “G. C. Brillantes 1949.” This time it was inscribed “To the father of the bride” by Greg, who had acquired it very likely as the 17-year-old Ateneo freshman he would have been in 1949.

I haven’t properly thanked Señor Brillantes yet — he’d be the first to acknowledge a little hearing problem and I don’t want to end up screaming “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” at him over the phone — so here’s a very public muchisimas gracias. Greg’s gesture reminds me of the generosity of quite a few of our senior writers toward their juniors and friends. Greg Brillantes, I suspect, has been quietly distributing his personal library to some fortunate recipients. Over the years, I’ve been privileged to receive presents of books, pens, and ephemera from Franz Arcellana, NVM Gonzalez, Jimmy Abad, and other writers I admire. In good time, I hope to be able to return the favor with another generation of recipients.

I know some readers and critics will be put off by this seeming fetish of old men (and some women) for yellowed paper and scratchy signatures. These are people to whom books are just products (or should we say “cultural commodities”) and words just text. Happily I feel otherwise. I’m not saying we should revere the book, or even the author, but I do appreciate the book as the physical proof of a writer’s long labor — indeed, as the author’s extended signature.

For me, a personal inscription on a title page, no matter how casual, turns the book into something almost like a letter, which I will read with more attentiveness than I would accord other works on a long shelf, depending on its sender.

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I’m convinced that there’s an extra gene or at least an extra nerve in every male that produces a pleasant twitch in response to things that move — cars, trucks, trains, planes, and boats. It’s a lifelong fascination that begins with Tonka toys (or, in my time, sardine-can racecars with bottlecaps for wheels) and, with luck and learning, culminates in factories, assembly lines, and shipyards, those “marvels of engineering” that make grown men sigh with boyish longing.

And so it was that when my editor rang me up last month to ask if I was willing to go on assignment to Korea to peek into the achievements of one of that North Asian neighbor’s chaebols or industrial giants — with the almost apologetic coda that the mission would “involve some plant visits” — I leapt with the same kind of glee another lifestyle writer might reserve for a Prada launch or a cruise in the Bahamas. I love plant visits — this is the frustrated industrial engineer in me talking, having entered university as an IE freshman — and have enjoyed gawking at how things are made, from the Coke bottles of grade-school field trips to a day-long tour of Volkswagen’s famed Wolfsburg factory a couple of years ago.

Our sponsor in this present case was Hyundai — a company that started out 60 years ago as a construction company, then moved on to carmaking 20 years later powered by one man’s dream (helped along by engines initially borrowed from Mitsubishi) and which has since grown phenomenally to become, among other things, the world’s largest builder of ships. Founder Chung Ju Yung died in 2001, but Hyundai has more than handsomely survived. Pedestrians like you and me know Hyundai as the maker of such popular vehicles as the Sonata, the Starex, and the Getz; few realize that it and its subsidiaries make high-speed trains and submarines as well, and operate hotels and resorts, among other enterprises.

In the Philippines, Hyundai has been represented by Hyundai Asia Resources Inc. (HARI), a young but rapidly growing company led by the dynamic team of Richard Lee and Fe Agudo, who carried over their marketing skills from real estate to the highly competitive automotive industry. Starting from 11th position five years ago, HARI has moved Hyundai up to fifth among local car brands, against the dire predictions of industry hands who believed that Hyundai would sell no more than 2,000 units a year (they’re now doing twice that volume).

Like all things Japanese and Taiwanese many decades ago, Hyundai and other Korean manufactures entered the Philippine market disadvantaged by the longstanding preferences of consumers for American, European, and Japanese brands; “Korean” suggested cheap Japanese copycats, shoddily made and poorly serviced.

But that’s no longer true. Aside from Hyundai, brands like Samsung and LG have opened the world’s eyes to the superior quality of Korean goods — not to forget all those telenovelas that have become another major Korean export — products that roll 24/7 out of highly automated assembly lines like Hyundai’s car plant in Ulsan.

Again, for most Filipinos, the word “Hyundai “ is still synonymous with cars, and this was what I (in a group composed mainly of motoring journalists) came to Korea to see. Ulsan is a city in itself close to the southern port city of Busan, and this is where Hyundai has chosen to locate its largest and most important manufacturing facilities in a global operation that produces more than 1.4 million cars and 80 big ships a year in Ulsan alone.

Getting to Busan from Seoul, more than 400 kilometers away, was already part of the Hyundai story. We boarded a sleek KTX high-speed train in Seoul; just exactly how fast “high-speed” was soon became clear when the TV monitor overhead began to display the train’s current speed — just a shade under 300 kilometers per hour. (Imagine it this way: if there was a railroad running straight and flat to Baguio, this train would get you there in 50 minutes.) The train — as our unfailingly pleasant and patient Korean guide Flora informed us — had been built by Rotem, a Hyundai subsidiary.

Our Busan/Ulsan sojourn began with a temple visit, and you almost wonder what ancient Buddhist shrines, with all their picture-book serenity, have to do with the hustle and bustle of modern manufacturing. But you look and think longer and it’s all of a piece, this steely resolve of a people to rise up from the ashes of the wars that have periodically ravaged the peninsula to claim their own space — literally and figuratively — between the political and economic behemoths China and Japan. We learned that Busan became South Korea’s temporary capital during the Korean War in the ’50s, lying farthest from the North’s rampaging forces; but many centuries earlier, the same temple we visited had been sacked by the Japanese warlord Hideyoshi — Busan being the closest city to Japan.

Modern Korea’s newfound confidence asserts itself most strongly in places like Ulsan, where thousands of gleaming new cars fill sprawling lots in neat rows awaiting shipment. This is no used car lot: this is 21st-century car manufacturing at its most efficient and — to this overgrown boy — most dazzling and mindboggling.

Life for a car begins as a sheet of metal that goes through a regimen of cutting, stamping, welding, and sealing, until the familiar box with holes takes shape, color, and substance. Here in Ulsan, much of that work was done by hundreds of industrial robots — eyeless and headless but many-handed machines doing the welding, etc., hovering above and around each metal hulk like solicitous nurses around a newborn.

I watched as robots took hold of two front seats, the left and the right, stuck them into either side of an assembled frame, and bolted them down before the frame inched forward to receive windshields front and back.

If the automotive assembly line was impressive, the shipyard on nearby Mipo Bay was breathtaking. I’d seen this facility on the Discovery Channel, but nothing quite prepares you for the scale of “heavy” as it applies to the name “Hyundai Heavy Industries, Inc.”, which operates the shipyard.

The 2,000-acre yard resembles a giant set of building blocks, strewn with massive parts of ships waiting to be conjoined. Smaller parts are moved around by Goliath cranes — nine of them — which can lift up to 1,500 tons. Flatbed trucks each with 148 wheels and a driver’s cockpit on either end skitter around the place like yellow bugs.

The shipyard consumes some 1.8 million tons of steel plates a year, and the joke is that Hyundai produces its cars out of the leftovers. One out of every four ships afloat on the world’s oceans is made by Hyundai, the first company to develop the technology to build ships on dry land; 28 of these ships are under construction at any one time, and it takes from eight to 10 months to finish one, which requires 30,000 liters of paint to look spiffy.

The shipyard employs 40,000 people — just feeding whom involves 51 restaurants and the daily sacrifice of no less than 50 cows, 240 pigs, and 20,000 chickens.

Witnessing all this was exhilarating (unfortunately we couldn’t take pictures of the industrial facilities from within), and I’m sure that everyone there with me who was seeing it for the first time was awestruck by the spectacle of industrial muscle being flexed in ways we Filipinos could only dream of. Part of me wanted to weep, thinking of the educational infrastructure required to make this possible — all the scientists and engineers we would have to produce before rolling our own cars and ships off the assembly line.

Was there anything comparably impressive and world-class we Pinoys had to show the rest of the globe, or even just the Koreans? “Shopping malls!” someone said, and we all laughed in easy agreement.

Next week: Seoul food and the lighter side of our Korean sojourn.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.net.