Peregrine’s last days, by Andre Lee
First start in investment banking
Pioneering the Asian bond business
Building the business at Peregrine
The approach of the Asian financial crisis
You have moved several times in your life between America and Asia. What was your up-bringing like? I was born in New York city and I moved when I was five years old to Korea and at that time – in 1968 – Korea was only barely beginning some sort of industrial development. Electricity failures were common. If you could find Coca-Cola you were quite lucky. Finding any imported goods at all was almost impossible unless you went to the army base. In those first years in Korea I was, I think, very integrated within Korean society. Then we moved to an area where foreigners lived. I started going to the department of defence school on the army base and friends began to change and speak English, so life was kind of sheltered for a while. Then in high school I transferred to an international school, because my father had left the civil service and was starting business on his own as a lawyer, so that exposed me much more to many Korean Americans.
So did you feel Korean or American?
When I returned to the US for college at 18, I began to understand that there were parts of me that were actually very Korean. I think that growing up in Korea was very helpful in the sense that at some intuitive level I could understand other Asian countries from the point of view of a development time-line. It was the sights, the sounds the smells, as much as remembering what happened with Park Chung-hee and the effects on my family or people that I knew and of the bloody transfer of power from a dictatorship to another new leader, all the way to democracy. I remember taking that sort of experience with me on my first trip to China in 1987 and it literally smelled like Korea did in the 1970s.
When you left college in America, how did you live?
I worked as a salesman in New York city for a Japanese company which manufactured industrial sewing machines. So I would travel around to Brooklyn, the South Bronx, China Town, essentially into sweat shops, selling to garment factory owners. That was a big revelation to me, because my upbringing was definitely middle class. There were some very harsh lessons that I learned quickly from many immigrant groups: the Koreans, the Hispanic, the Jewish. It was a tough bunch. These people were very worldly, much more worldly than I was at 22 and very street-smart which I was not, and I had to learn new lessons to survive.
