“Let me know when you decide what stocks you want to buy with that money. We’ll have a long conversation about it.” Father said while putting a million won into my stock account.

I answered calmly, “I’ll study a lot.”

That was perhaps the answer my father wanted to hear.

“Are you…crying?” he asked.

***

Some might say the current interaction between my father and I was a trivial domestic event that wouldn’t overall impact Korea and the world. However, everything had started from here. A surprisingly similar incident had occurred years earlier. In the past, it had happened after the IMF crisis was over. 

I froze after seeing the one million won in the account and bought a beginner’s comic book for stock trading, called ‘Introduction.’ Then, I made an obvious decision as the dot-com boom from the U.S. came to Korea during that time and the Korean stock market also rose. Of course, my stock account grew rapidly, and, in March of 2000, I was busy bragging about it to Seong-Ho and pretending to be an adult. 

However, any firm could become the next hope for the future in that era if they were...