She was a princess who dreamed only of becoming a classical harpist. Instead, her ruthless tycoon of a father packed her off to America to study hotel administration, before forcing her to join the dull, if vastly lucrative, family business.
If that sounds like a hackneyed Disney plot, it’s perfectly possible that this poor-little-rich-girl version of the Cho Hyun-ah story currently doing the rounds is nothing more than PR fiction, manufactured to generate public sympathy for a spoiled-brat South Korean princess who fell from grace. If so, it isn’t working.
To be fair to Cho Hyun-ah, when you’ve grown up having everything handed to you on a plate, being offered your free nuts in a bag in the first-class section of an aircraft owned by your daddy’s airline must come as something of a traumatic shock.
That, however, hardly excused the scene that followed on board Korean Air Flight KE086 on December 5 as the crew prepared to take off from the John F Kennedy airport in New York, bound for Seoul.
Cho, the eldest daughter of Korean Air Lines chair Cho Yang-ho and a KAL executive in her own right, took one look at the unplated macadamias and – under the circumstances, there’s only one word for it – went nuts.
According to multiple reports in the South Korean media, repeated this week in court, she publicly humiliated both the female flight attendant who had so brazenly breached the company’s first-class snack-serving protocol, and the chief steward responsible for her.
Worse, she became so incensed when Park Chang-jin was unable to immediately produce the service manual that she ordered him off the aircraft.
There was only one problem. The aircraft had already been pushed back from the gate and was lining up for take off.
Actually, for Cho, that was not a problem – she ordered the pilots to return the aircraft to the gate, which they did, leaving the 250 fare-paying passengers on board to wonder if KAL really was, as its 2014 TV commercials suggested, “All about you”.
Cho’s behaviour appeared to confirm all the South Korean stereotypes about the arrogance and nepotism of the country’s dynastic business clans, or “chaebols”, and set in course a chain of unlikely events, which this week has seen her modelling green prison overalls and facing prosecution demands that she spend three years in prison.
This week in Seoul Western District Court, Cho, who has been in custody since December 30, faced charges of forcing a flight to change its route, using violence against the crew, forcing the chief steward off the flight and then ordering employees to lie to cover up what she had done.
Giving evidence against her, a teary-eyed Park said Cho had acted “like a beast that found its prey, gritting its teeth as she became abusive, not listening to what I had to say at all”.
Cho, he added, had shown not “an ounce of conscience, treating powerless people like myself like feudal slaves, forcing us to sacrifice”.
Feudal is a good work to describe Cho’s background. Known as Heather Cho to her western and westernised friends, she was born with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth. As the eldest daughter of a Korean tycoon, under the unwritten rules of the South Korean commercial dynasty system, Cho was always going to be destined to play a major part in Yang-ho’s family business.
Almost certainly, harps have played little part in the family’s succession planning.
Her father is the chairman and chief executive of the Hanjin Group, whose subsidiaries include the giant container line Hanjin Shipping and national airline Korean Air, which it bought in 1969.
Celebrating its 70th anniversary this year, the group was founded in 1945 by Cho’s great-grandfather, Choong Hoon Cho, but really hit the big time in 1956, when it won a lucrative contract to freight ammunition for United States forces in Korea. The Vietnam War would bring even more business Hanjin’s way.
Heather Cho joined the family outfit in 1999, via a near-obligatory spell of Stateside higher education. A graduate of Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, in 2009 she went on to earn an MBA from the University of Southern California, which can also claim her father and brother and sister as alumni.
That same year she was made senior vice president of Korean Air and in 2011 added chief executive of the KAL Hotel Network to her responsibilities.
This is a relatively modest operation, with just five hotels: two in the US, in Los Angeles and Hawaii, two on South Korea’s Jeju Island and one at Incheon International Airport.
It was, presumably, regular business trips to Hawaii that gave her and her husband, a celebrity plastic surgeon, the bright idea of making sure their twin boys were born there in 2013.
Securing US passports for the twins, as South Korean commentators pointed out at the time, was a great way for them to avoid having to do national service – clever, but unlikely to further endear their mother to a nation already seething over the them-and-us behaviour of the privileged chaebols.
"The family is no stranger to controversy," reported The Straits Times this week, "and has been cited in the media as a prime example of how wealthy, family-run conglomerates in South Korea are rife with nepotism."
Now Cho has thrown aviation fuel on that fire.
In 2005, she took on her first major task for daddy’s airline, overseeing the revamp of KAL’s corporate identity alongside the Italian fashion designer Gianfranco Ferré.
Under her supervision, Ferré created the uniform that KAL cabin crew wear to this day which, according to the airline, “attains harmony between modern global fashion appeal while integrating the foundation of Korea’s traditional and inherent beauty”.
What’s more, it features “ergonomic design and use of practical and supple fabrics” – ideal for kneeling in, as Cho would later oblige two crew members to demonstrate on the tarmac at JFK.
It's possible that the whole nut-rage episode will unfairly overshadow all the good work that Cho has done behind the scenes at KAL. The Moodie Report, a travel industry magazine, had credited her with driving up in-flight retail sales to the point where last year the airline sold US$190 million (almost Dh700m) worth of duty-free products, making it the world's number-one shop in the sky.
None of which, of course, will count for much now in what many commentators report is the three-way race to succeed daddy as chairman, being run between Cho and her brother Won Tae, in charge of business strategy, and sister Hyun Min, head of marketing.
As the public appearances over the past week of Cho and her father – both bowing, apologising and begging for “generous forgiveness” – have demonstrated, this is a country where public face is everything.
Shortly after news of Nutgate broke, Cho senior was quick to stage a televised press conference, at which he apologised for his daughter’s “foolish act”.
“I failed to raise the child properly,” he said. “It’s my fault.”
And Cho senior knows all about losing face – in 2000 he was convicted of tax evasion and is now facing questions in the media over whether he is really the best person to be heading up the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in 2018.
But it hasn’t all been bad news. As she awaits the judges’ verdict, Cho can console herself with the thought that her shame is nut-farming’s gain. After her outburst in December, the South Korean branch of eBay reported that sales of macadamias – never a popular nut in the country – had boomed twelvefold.
theweekend@thenational.ae
