Episode 4: The Adopted Son of the Ford Family (1)
By the time the dream-like journey around the world ended and we arrived in America, it was already June. I had left Korea in February, so it had taken nearly four months.
Even before arriving in America, I had started calling the Fords "Dad" and "Mom," and as soon as we set foot in America, Dad officially adopted me.
My new name was Henry K. K. Ford. K. K. stood for Kim Gyeong-hui, my given name. The reason I included my real name in my new name was so that my lineage would not be questioned later on.
If this were the 21st century, adopting a child would begin with background checks and investigations into whether the child had been kidnapped or forced through other unjust means, but in 1896, in an era not even at the end of the 19th century, there were no such issues with adopting an Asian child.
There would be no shortage of people asking what the problem was; after all, a great white nobleman of America was adopting a poor Asian orphan, so what if his parents were still alive?
Seeing the couple traveling together in Korea, I had thought Dad was quite wealthy, and someone traveling around the world in first class on a passenger ship couldn't possibly be poor. But after arriving in America and seeing my parents' house and learning about Dad's job, I realized Dad was far richer than I had imagined.
Dad was a financier working on Wall Street, and he owned a house on 53rd Street in Manhattan, New York, where the wealthy resided.
The house on 53rd Street in Manhattan was a European-style marble mansion of antiquated elegance; "antiquated" referred to the architectural style, not that the house was old. My parents' home had a fairly spacious yard and garden, more than twenty rooms, and as many as seven employees, including a chef, butlers, and maids.
It had been the same while traveling in Europe: when my parents introduced me as their son, people would frown with expressions asking why a wealthy white person would adopt a lowly Asian child. But once they heard my status, their treatment changed completely, accompanied by surprised expressions as if they had never done such a thing.
To protect me, my adoptive parents introduced me as the son of a duke who had been executed by the king due to political strife in a certain Eastern country, which they could not name. Joseon did not have a title of duke, but when considering my father's position, introducing him as a duke was not far from the truth.
Perhaps that was why Korea was unexpectedly quite well-known among European intellectuals. It wasn't as famous as China or Japan, but far more people knew of it than the Korea before the Korean War, especially among the intellectual class.
My father had been the Prime Minister who had organized cabinets four times in Joseon, the greatest figure in its political circles, so as his only son, I might be a more important person than some petty royal or noble.
This was no different after returning to America. When my adoptive parents introduced me as their adopted son, the household servants who had been treating me with disdain, as if asking where they had picked up a yellow monkey, suddenly looked at me with completely different eyes once they heard I was the son of a duke.
On top of that, when they learned of my fluent English and the fact that I spoke several foreign languages, including French and Russian, they looked at me even more differently. Also, my handsome appearance—having a high nose bridge and large eyes with distinct double eyelids like Mom—was a great help to me in this country of severe racial discrimination.
The greatest cause of racial discrimination was an appearance that looked excessively foreign to their eyes; since I scored points in the looks department first, it was only natural that the sense of racial discrimination weakened.
Dad pointed to a large room and said,
"This will be your room from now on."
I felt joy at having my own room, but also worry. No matter how much future knowledge I possessed, my body was basically only eight by Korean age, or merely six years old. Moreover, in Korea, I had always slept with Mom, and even after boarding the ship, Mom and Dorothy had always slept with me because they knew I was afraid of sleeping alone and suffered from severe nightmares, so it had been fine. But now that we had arrived at the main house in America, if they told me to sleep alone, I would obviously suffer from terrible fear every night.
Seeing my frightened appearance, Mom comforted me.
"Don't be afraid. Mom or Dorothy will always sleep with you until you're no longer scared."
Phew!
Don't scold me for not being able to sleep alone even though I have future knowledge. American kids are accustomed to sleeping alone, so they have no problem with it, but I wasn't used to it, so I still couldn't sleep by myself. No matter what memories and knowledge I held, because my body was that of a six-year-old, the emotional aspects—love, joy, sorrow, anger, fear, wonder, admiration—manifested exactly as those of a six-year-old.
*
A few days later, it was Saturday, and we decided to visit a nearby aunt's house together. Mom was the eldest of three sisters, and her sisters lived nearby, so they had promised to meet together.
My aunt's house was a massive mansion with a garden far larger than ours. Our building wasn't even half that size, yet it had more than twenty rooms; at that scale, it seemed like there would be over forty rooms.
"Henry, it's nice to meet you. I'm Jane, your aunt. Everyone calls me Jessie, so you can call me Aunt Jessie. And this is my husband, Jack, who is your uncle."
Aunt Jessie was ten years younger than Mom, and she had a son who was now four and a daughter who was two.
My uncle said,
"I'm Jack Morgan. You can call me Uncle Jack."
Jack Morgan. Where had I heard that name before? Surely he wasn't *that* J.P. Morgan's son... No, maybe I should ask just in case.
"If Jack is a nickname, what's your real name?"
"It's John Pierpont Morgan Jr. I have the same name as my father, so everyone calls me Jack."
"John Pierpont Morgan? Are you the son of J.P. Morgan?"
"It seems even a little tyke like you knows my father's name."
"I saw Grandfather's name several times in the newspapers I read while coming here."
"Oh my, you read that too? John, this child is truly remarkable."
Jack Morgan turned to Dad and said, and Dad answered with a subtly proud tone.
"Didn't I tell you beforehand? He's an incredibly smart kid. He reads more books than I do, so Laura and Dorothy scolded me fiercely about it."
So my father's brother-in-law, my mother's sister's husband, my aunt's husband—was he really the son of *that* J.P. Morgan?
John Pierpont Morgan, still famous in the 21st century through the investment firm J.P. Morgan, was the financial emperor of this era.
You could call him the modern-day Rothschild, but even the Rothschilds at their peak couldn't really compare to Morgan. Europe had many families famous in finance—especially the Medici, the Fuggers, and the Rothschilds—but the financial power they enjoyed at their zenith couldn't match the financial power currently enjoyed by John Pierpont Morgan.
He was truly the king of the financial world who had wielded the greatest financial power in human history. And yet, the father of my uncle-by-marriage was none other than that John Pierpont Morgan. This was an absolute jackpot...
At Aunt Jessie's—or rather, more precisely, Uncle Jack's house—many other family members had gathered besides Aunt Jessie. From what I heard, they were the Morgan family, Uncle Jack Morgan's family, and most of them were interested in me.
They introduced themselves to me one by one, then sent me and the kids off to play separately in the garden and began talking among themselves.
"So you're saying that boy's mother tried to strangle him to death?"
"Perhaps, rather than remain and die from shame and humiliation, she chose death."
"So the child's biological father was the greatest figure in the political world, having organized cabinets four times."
"There were many complicated circumstances, so it's hard to say definitively who was in the right, but he was undoubtedly the greatest figure in the political world."
While the adults were talking, I took the children out to the garden and began playing with them. There were quite a few children among the Morgan family members, and all of them were at least two years younger than me.
The oldest was Aunt's son, Junius Spencer Morgan, who was four, and there were also three-year-olds and two-year-olds, so it was a bit difficult to look after them, but I did my best to play with them.
These kids were, so to speak, cousins or similar relatives to me, and children this age naturally obey their older peers far more than adults. To them, a cousin older by two years, like me, was an absolute figure to follow, a great being who knew the truths of this world full of wonders.
I began to think that if I trained these kids well starting now, they might become useful talents I could employ in the future.
Right now they were just snot-nosed brats, but they were children of New York's—no, America's—greatest financial aristocracy. My sly desire was that if I tamed them to listen to me well without any sense of racial discrimination starting now, I might at least be able to secure funding from them in the future.
"Anyway, once they grow up, whatever education you gave them as children is useless," you say?
Hey, do you think I wouldn't even consider something that basic? Just think about it—when I make a car and bring it out for the first time, if these kids fall head over heels for it and pester their parents to buy one too, wouldn't initial sales go pretty well?
Huh, a car? Why would I make a car? Just because my name is Henry Ford doesn't mean I'm the real Henry Ford who left his mark on original history. Why would I make a car?
No. Now that my name is Henry Ford, there's no law saying I *can't* make cars. Excluding Asia entirely, I hadn't seen a single car even once from Europe to New York here. It was 1896, a time when there should have been a few around, but I really hadn't seen even one.
Whether in Europe or America, the streets had only horse-drawn carriages and streetcars; there wasn't a single automobile to be found. That meant cars were that rare, that the automobile industry hadn't yet been born. So where is the law saying *I* can't make cars? I may not possess tremendous knowledge, but at the very least, I can avoid the trial and error that people of this era would have to go through.
In my head, I began reviewing one by one what was needed to make a car.
In a car, the engine is the most important thing above all, so that means making cylinders, pistons, the engine head, spark plugs, the carburetor, connecting rods, the crankshaft—wow, that's a lot. But these were all things I had touched with my own hands while repairing cars, so none of them seemed particularly impossible.
However, the problem was that in this era, there were no alloy steels suitable for automobiles, but I could make those too. From what I knew, the original Henry Ford had also used vanadium steel when building his famous Model T, overwhelming other cars in durability and performance, and combined with its cheap price, it had become a popular car.
If it was just vanadium steel, I could definitely make it too. Wait, to make alloy steel, special steel, do I need to make it in an electric furnace? Did electric furnaces exist in this era?
Countless things I would have to make in the future passed through my mind.
When I died at my mother's hands and awakened, besides gaining future knowledge, I had also acquired several other peculiar abilities. I had suspected these might be special perks given to protagonists in novels that the owner of my future knowledge had read, so while on the ship, I had shouted "status window" several times where no one could see me.
In the end, no matter what I did, the status window never appeared, but the special perks were definitely real.
The first special perk was memory. The owner of my future knowledge had graduated from Seoul National University and even studied abroad; he had been a naturally smart person with excellent memory, but the memory given as a special perk was on a completely different level.
Things seen just once in books, newspapers, or on the internet, and memories even the owner of my future knowledge had completely forgotten, were all remembered as clearly as photographs. Therefore, I remembered all sorts of chemical formulas and alloy ratios from books the owner of my future knowledge had read.
The second special perk was calculation ability. And it wasn't merely on the level of having excellent calculation skills—it was as if a spreadsheet program like Excel was installed in my head, allowing calculation abilities nearly on par with a computer. Dad had tried to teach me math while we were on the ship, but after seeing my calculation ability, he simply gave up on teaching me.
The third special perk was brute strength. Not stamina, but brute strength. In other words, my stamina was still that of a six-year-old little kid, but my strength had grown to nearly adult levels. I suspected this strength would grow even stronger once I became an adult. However, because this power was such a foreign ability, unlike my memory or calculation ability, I had been hiding it from my parents and Dorothy as well.
As for the last special perk, I simply hoped the day would never come when I had to use it.