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But Miracles don't last forever. One summer day in 1998, Hyundai Motor employee Choi Byung Joon received a yellow envelope. Inside, a note informed the 43-year-old that he was being "retired." Choi was shocked. "I thought the sky was falling," he says. "I went home to tell my wife. For many hours, we were drinking and smoking and wondering how we were going to survive."
Choi wasn't alone. Asia was in the throes of a financial crisis, and workers were getting sacked all over the region. The Crisis began far away in Thailand in 1997, with a loss in confidence in the Thai baht, and spread like an epidemic across Asia. Nearly all the tigers faced national bankruptcy. In Indonesia, the Crisis forced the resignation of strongman Suharto amid wild rioting in the streets of Jakarta. In South Korea, the Crisis exposed the faults of Park's Korea Inc. The cozy chaebol-government connections may have made the country rich, but by the 1990s, the system was rotten and corrupt, the chaebols were debt-ridden and bloated, and Korea Inc. came tumbling down. In 2000 the massive Hyundai conglomerate began to break apart, and in 2001 Chung died, his empire in shambles.
Choi's life collapsed with it. After four months without work, he found a job at one of Hyundai's suppliers, but at one-third his previous salary. His savings dwindled; and he had to fight off thoughts of suicide. Though he has since found a better paying job, the large debt he has built up has made it impossible for his life to get back to normal. Fed up, his wife abandoned him and their two children. "I'm in a very desperate situation," Choi says. "There is no hope." What keeps him going is a belief that one day he will work at Hyundai again. Management had promised that when the economy improved, laid-off workers like him would be rehired, and it's a promise he clings to frantically. About half a dozen times a month, he and a handful of others stand outside the front gates of the Hyundai car factory in Ulsan and chant: "Keep your promise!" (A Hyundai Motor spokesman says 95% of laid-off workers have been rehired, and the company hopes to re-employ the rest.)
The promise that Ulsan once held out for South Korea, however, is fading. Ulsan's best days may be behind it. These days, companies like Hyundai Motor, chasing global markets, are investing in China, India, even the U.S., instead of in Ulsan. The new industries now driving the South Korean economy are popping up elsewhere in the country, like in Park's hometown of Kumi. A short drive from Park's clay-and-wood hut sprawls a massive industrial park where companies like Samsung and LG make the mobile phones, flat TVs and other hip digital gadgetry for which South Korea is becoming renowned. At LG.Philips LCD's newest factory, glass for the LCD panels is escorted to the assembly line on automated carts that use puffs of air to hold the sheets in stacks. The sheets are so thin that if touched by the human hand, the glass would crumble. Employees walk about the clean rooms clad in white suits worthy of a space-shuttle launch.
Whatever the changes, the generation that created and experienced the Miracle is still grateful. In Ulsan, Hyundai Motor's Kim Tae Yong still has the same job he started doing 26 years ago, and now commands a $65,000 salary. His living room is cluttered by a piano, a large TV set, and rows of old photographs—in one, he poses in front of the Capitol building in Washington. He flips through the pages of a brochure for the brand-new, four-bedroom apartment he recently bought in an Ulsan high-rise. It's still under construction, and Kim can't wait to move in. The complex includes a parking lot, where he can put his luxury sedan, and a basketball court and a soccer field next door. "When I was young, I never thought I'd live this way," he says. In Ulsan, and all across Asia, millions are voicing the same sentiment, and trusting in an even better tomorrow.