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03.2015 - 12.2015

Korean

“All it takes is one bad day.”
— The Joker, The Dark Knight

Twenty problems. Four worth 4-point, four worth 6-, twelve worth 5-. That year the bronze prize cutoff on the first round was fifty-two, and you had to clear it to reach the second round, held at the end of the year. This is about the KMO.¹ The exam I gave a little over two years of my childhood to.

I sat the first round one day in May 2015, in a building of the College of Natural Sciences at Seoul National University. Afterward I went to my academy, M, and checked my answers with the teachers. I knew right there that I'd gotten two wrong. Both were five-pointers. On one, I found the radius when the problem asked for the diameter. The other turned on seeing a trigonometric substitution — the whole difficulty was in spotting it. As it happened, I'd studied trig substitution the night before; I set the thing up correctly and then botched the arithmetic. Ten points, gone. Forty-two. I hadn't missed what I didn't know. I'd missed what I could have gotten.

It was a rough self-scoring, so nothing was official that day. It didn't need to be. Forty-two wasn't enough. Even against the previous year's cutoff, there was no chance. An honorable mention. No second round.

I came home and told my mother. She got angry. I went to my room, pulled the blanket over my head, and cried. I was thirteen. I had never prepared for any one thing for so long. More than a year of it, over in a day.

It had taken a while to get there.

All through elementary school I worked far ahead of my grade,² finishing high-school math in fifth grade. In sixth grade I started preparing for the KMO, and about three months in, in May, I took it once as a trial run. I scored ten out of a hundred. So this is a hard exam, I thought, and figured I'd have to work more.

I loved math. That much I can say plainly. I loved the equations and the symbols, loved their purity, loved their power to explain the world. I loved science too. I memorized the periodic table; I read physics. Learning things was, in itself, a pleasure. What moved me back then was pure curiosity.

During the semester, school let out at four or five, and the academy's classes ran from five-thirty to ten. By law, academies could only operate until ten.³ But that didn't mean they sent us home. There was a thing called the reading room, run by the academy in the gray zone between legal and not. Nominally it was self-study, but the teachers circulated and took questions. Everyone stayed until midnight, no exceptions; if you wanted, you could stay until one, or two. I rarely stayed until two, but I stayed until one almost every day. As an exam neared, anxiety alone was enough to keep me there.

I hardly went to any other academies. Only M. Not even an English academy. Back then I hated English. I told my mother I would never learn it. If someone had told that boy he would one day come to America for college, he wouldn't have believed a word of it. That was where I stood then.

That I loved math and that the year wore me down can both be true at once. Loving a thing and having to sit with it until one in the morning every night to keep loving it are not the same. Daechi-dong⁴ funneled math into the single channel of the KMO, and somewhere in the year-plus I spent in that channel, something changed. It wasn't that the love had disappeared. The vessel that held it was slowly breaking it.

So calling that day one bad day is only half right.

Toward the end, I didn't work hard. I'm not saying this with hindsight; I knew it then too. There was something called the K-classes — separate from the regular classes, problem-solving classes divided into five tiers, from K1 at the top down to K5 at the bottom. Land in the top twenty percent and you moved up a tier; fall into the bottom twenty and you were demoted. It was brutal. I sat around K4. Couldn't climb, didn't drop. If I'd pushed, I might have gone up a tier. Not to the top, though. The kids I genuinely thought were good back then went on to Seoul Science High School.⁵

I dropped the K-classes. Said I'd study on my own at home. At home I didn't study. Whether I couldn't stand a system that demoted you, or was simply tired, or had sensed the ceiling first — I don't really know now. Back then I just called it boredom. That was probably the easiest name to bear.

So the forty-two was the result of a slipped hand, and also the result of hands that had let go of the work months earlier. Both are true. For a long time I held on to the first story. The radius and the diameter, the trig substitution, the studying the night before. That I still remember those details exactly must mean I needed that story. The one where the ability was there and only the luck was missing — that one keeps your pride intact.

The months that followed I don't remember well.

Nothing changed right away. The goal was still a science high school, and I could take the KMO once more in eighth grade. So I kept going to M. Only now the friends I'd studied with who had placed bronze or higher left for another class to prepare for the second round, and younger kids, a year below me, came into the class I stayed in. The air was different. More than anything, some flame inside me had clearly gone out. From May into the fall, I went through the motions.

Instead I went to bookstores a lot. The Kyobo stores in Gangnam, in Gwanghwamun. I stood at the display tables and read whatever. That's how I read a book called Capitalism, based on an EBS documentary.⁶ It was the first time economics interested me. Until then my world had been equations and symbols and solving problems; economics was explaining a world that actually existed. I'd always been a kid curious about how the world worked. Money, capitalism — they felt like a lens for reading the world.

A few economics books later, I came across Why I Left Goldman Sachs.

It was written by Greg Smith, a former Goldman Sachs trader. He worked in Sales & Trading from 2000 to 2007, came out of Stanford, went from intern to full-time, was in New York and then moved to London, and in 2007 he left the firm and turned an op-ed he'd written for The New York Times into a book. It was a book exposing how far Goldman's culture had soured — how, after the 1999 IPO, a culture that had once been principled and client-first turned into one that deceived clients and chased short-term profit.

I didn't know what Goldman Sachs was. Didn't know what S&T was. I read it knowing nothing. The book falls into two halves. The first is the author's story of being recruited out of Stanford, joining the firm, finding mentors, rotating through desks and learning. The tone is even, and it paints those early working years in mostly positive light. The second half is the regret and the exposé — the culture souring as he switches teams and moves to London.

The strange thing is that I was drawn to the first half, not the second. The book's real message is the exposé — the second half. But to a seventh grader, talk of a soured workplace culture and clients being deceived couldn't land. What landed was the first half. The recruiting, the training after you join, the desks and the clients and what you learn there. The author seemed to be reading the world through the financial markets.

It touched exactly what I wanted then. To me, worn out by math and pure science, it was as if the book had shown me: this is what it means to know the world. The phrase "to see the world at higher resolution" is one I picked up somewhere much later, but the feeling back then was no different. I wanted to know the world in finer detail, corner by corner. Capital markets, investment banking — they looked like an exact fit for that.

So I wanted to go into finance. That was all.

It was around then that I decided to quit M.

One day in November, I went with my mother and younger sister to the Seoul Arts Center. We were looking at a Steve Jobs photography exhibition. I'd decided to quit the academy a few days earlier — in my heart, probably long before that. I'd told my mother the night before, and she was going to call the academy the next day. So it was in the middle of looking at the photographs that my mother called M and said I was quitting. The academy asked me to come in one last time for a talk. My mother passed that along. To me it sounded like an unnecessary sales pitch. My mind had already left. I said no. Even then, once I decided something, I was the kind who didn't look back.

That it happened to be a Steve Jobs exhibition is something that, looking back, stays with me oddly. As if it were hinting at the me who would, much later, throw himself into starting a company.

It was a little after that when I told her I wouldn't go to a science high school.

One day at the end of 2015, my mother and I set out to walk along the Yangjaecheon.⁷ A small routine of ours, then and still now — a walk by the stream. Passing the playground in our apartment complex, I worked up the nerve and said it. Mom, I'm not going to a science high school. As though she'd expected it all along, she said, Okay.

And just like that, the first real goal I had ever nurtured — all through elementary school and into seventh grade — I gave up entirely.

2015 was the year my fate turned over completely. Without it, I still often think, I would be living a very different life, in a very different place.

Sometimes I wonder. If I had given it everything to the end — if I hadn't dropped the K-classes, hadn't pretended to study — would something have turned out differently? I don't know. And I don't want to say it would have, or that it wouldn't have.

That the day changed my life is a fact. Without that stretch of time, I probably wouldn't have come to America. But whether it was for the better or the worse, I don't know. You live life only once, so there's no knowing how the other road would have gone — and no knowing even after you die.

So I only mean to set down the facts. That at thirteen I let go of math and chose finance. That for the boy I was then, it was the truest answer to the thirst I had. Thirst always changes, and mine changed a great deal afterward — but that doesn't make the answer back then a wrong one. And that is enough.

A new decade was, in every sense, beginning.