Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (10 page)

Many Westerners, like me, find public nudity uncomfortable. It’s one thing to briefly drop your towel while stepping in and out of an enclosed shower at a gym where no one knows you, as you may at a gym in the West. Here at Hyundai, I was naked around men I would be working with thirty minutes later as if nothing extraordinary had just happened. As uncomfortable as
this made me feel, I came to realize it was all part of the teamwork that Hyundai—and Korea—engendered. Without this sense of bonding, this soldiers-in-a-common-cause environment, Hyundai could not have come so far so quickly, and could not take its next great leap forward.

4

AT HOME: ALTERNATE UNIVERSE

If my work life was 100 percent Korean, the home life that Rebekah and I shared in Korea was, quite bizarrely, about as American as it could be.

That’s because we lived on a U.S. military base. Smack in the middle of Seoul.

The U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan is a 620-acre, 17,000-service-member American military base situated on what must be some of the most valuable real estate in all of East Asia. It is located in the southern tip of Gangbuk, north of the Han River. If you look at a Google map of Seoul, you’ll see a large, unlabeled, empty gray patch. That’s the base. It was built by the Japanese, who occupied the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945, and was taken over by the Yanks after World War II. It is the base of the Combined Forces Command, the joint military forces of the U.S. and the Republic of Korea, the principal deterrent against the sixty-year threat of North Korean invasion.

Unlike almost every other State Department posting overseas, Foreign Service officers assigned to the U.S. embassy in Seoul live on the military base, chiefly because that’s where the housing is. In other countries, Foreign Service officers live “on the economy,” as they call it, in everything ranging from high-rise luxury apartments in the safest countries to well-fortified compounds in more dangerous places where they lock the high gates at night and post armed guards.

This military base was where Rebekah and I would begin our marriage.

Embassy housing on the Yongsan base consisted of identical one-story homes that came in pairs; two long houses side by side, joined by a common wall to create the effect of one very long house. They have spacious yards—a thing rarely seen in Seoul—and are neatly arranged along the kind of quiet, pleasant, tree-lined streets that once populated the suburban American imagination. They are not fancy but they are big. We had a three-bedroom, two-bath house with a large living room, kitchen, dining room, and den. The house’s size elicited gasps from our Korean guests as they entered. It looked every bit like the post–World War II suburbia that visionary developer William Levitt intended when he broke ground for his first suburban tracts on Long Island.

Our general store on-base was the PX. When non-military people hear the term “PX,” images from old war movies or
Beetle Bailey
cartoons probably come to mind: long wooden shelves stocked with tins of food, boots, and supplies, all colored Army olive drab, overseen by a gruff quartermaster.

Today’s PX, the kind found on Yongsan, is indistinguishable from a small Walmart or Target. Embassy and military personnel are issued ration cards with a fixed dollar amount per month to prevent mass purchases intended for resale on the black market
off-base. No one gets inside without a ration card. There, we bought everything from our toiletries to Christmas presents to household supplies to a plasma flat-screen TV to a bowling shirt I still wear today.

On Saturdays, I exercised at the base gym along with American and Korean military personnel. The contrast could not have been more jarring. Over here were the American soldiers, sailors, and marines—black, white, Latino, male, and female—wearing all manner of workout gear, most of it designed to flatter. Thick and ropey muscles were covered in tattoos that depicted mayhem in images and promised worse in blunt language. The great weights they lifted clanged like church bells when they hit the ground. These were the guys I saw carrying bucket-sized packages of nutritional supplements out of the PX. On the other side of the gym were the Korean soldiers: slender, all male, all Korean, all with similar jet-black haircuts. They wore matching workout outfits, gray T-shirts that read
ARMY
neatly tucked into black shorts. They exercised quietly.

The base also has a commissary, which is military-speak for “giant supermarket.” Everything but the most exotic cooking goods is for sale. To further create the home-away-from-home feel for military personnel, the base has a food court with Subway, Burger King, Starbucks, Taco Bell, and so on. TVs hang from the walls of the food court, showing the American Forces Network, which carries major U.S. sports programming. On base there is also a driving range; a movie theater; a dog park; a large hotel called the Dragon Hill Lodge (“Yongsan” means “Dragon Hill”); a football field; a swimming pool; an elementary, middle, and high school; a chapel; and of course housing for officers and soldiers. The military housing ranges from small single-family homes to duplexes to garden apartments. The base feels like a leafy, quiet small town with a couple of stoplight crossroads and
traffic moving along at 25 mph. A small town that is surrounded by a twelve-foot concrete wall topped with razor wire. If your head isn’t yet fully wrapped around the oddity that is Yongsan, try this: Think of New York’s Central Park as a Korean military base full of Koreans.

Leaving the base and entering Korea each morning, then exiting Korea and reentering America each night, felt like moving between alternate mirror-image universes. As I grew into my work life, I became more Korean at the office; as the sole American, it was impossible not to experience some degree of assimilation. My home life, on the other hand, became even more American than it had been back in America. From Fox News and
American Idol
on the TVs at the food court to Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus on American Forces Network radio in my car, I was reintroduced to mainstream, Top 40 culture after decades spent loitering on the alty fringe of entertainment. More to the point, living among U.S. military personnel and the constant reminders of duty, sacrifice, and military threat can’t help but boost your patriotism. The Fourth of July on a U.S. military base bears greater significance than it does on the Mall in Washington, D.C. My daily switch from home life in America to work in the heart of Korea reminded me of the
Star Trek
episode where the crew passes into an alternate universe with an identical starship
Enterprise
, an identical Captain Kirk, and so on. Identical, that is, until you realize—wait a minute—Spock has a goatee. At first both worlds look pretty much the same, but the longer you live in each, the more jarring their differences.

To ease each day’s shock to my system, I established a comfortable morning routine, as I’m wont to do. I awoke in the dark at 6:00 a.m., kissed my sleeping wife good-bye, and left the house with my bagel, banana, and granola bar. I hit the Burger King drive-through on base when it opened at 6:30 a.m. to get my
morning large Diet Coke. Then I drove off base and south toward Hyundai, crossing the Han River on the Jamsu Bridge, the lower level of a two-tier span, which scenically sits about ten feet above the fast-flowing water. Halfway across the bridge, I’d pull over and stop to eat my breakfast, watching the sun rise to my left and the hikers and bikers pass by on my right, and listen to the previous day’s podcast of ESPN’s
Mike & Mike
show. One thing I quickly found out about myself, and it surely surprised me, is that I can handle massive upheaval in my life—new wife, new job, new country, new whatever—if I can just maintain a couple of small, familiar tethers to my old life.

Being able to start the day with an American-sized beverage—not findable off base in Seoul, a city of 10 million—and some radio sports banter did the trick. At 7:00 a.m., Seoul’s English-language radio news came on my car radio. This was my cue to finish breakfast, start the car, and drive the rest of the way to work. I would arrive at my desk, usually by 7:20 a.m. or so, aware that more than half of my colleagues were already at work. My bosses certainly were. The chairman legendarily arrived at 6:30 each morning, which meant his top executives had to be there no later than 6:20 a.m. A senior executive once showed me the morning alarm he had set on his iPhone. It awoke him at 4:20 a.m. each workday to ensure he got to the office before the chairman. So, in this way, I was a slacker.

This routine is not unusual in the business world, East or West, but it was a bucket of cold water in the face of a former journalist. For my entire newspaper career, my day—and the days of practically every journalist who worked at a morning newspaper—started when I’d amble into work at around 10:00 a.m. I’d done a college internship at an evening paper, which meant I had to be at work by 6:00 a.m. I vowed never to endure that again. I even turned down a job at an evening newspaper simply because of the
hours. Now, at Hyundai, I was working evening newspaper hours again long after most U.S. evening newspapers had disappeared.

Given that our home life was sealed off from Korea because we lived on a U.S. military base, Rebekah and I wanted to acculturate ourselves as much as possible to our new country. We both loved dogs, so we figured we could learn a little about Korea by getting a Korean dog.

We had done some research and discovered a native Korean dog called a Jindo, which is largely unheard-of outside of Korea. It’s almost impossible to export them because they are a protected national treasure. They are raised on Jindo Island, off the southwest coast of the Korean Peninsula. The Jindo—or, in Korean,
jindo gae
(
gae
means “dog”)—is a medium-size dog, about thirty pounds, usually white or tan. It has medium-length fur, a curled, furry tail, and a face like a Husky’s. It is universally described by Koreans as loyal, like the Japanese Akita, although its personality is closer to that of the grumpy Shiba Inu. Originally bred to be a hunting dog, it is highly athletic and intelligent.

Online, we found a no-kill shelter in a city called Asan, south of Seoul. It was run by Koreans and ex-pat volunteers. On the website was a striking white Jindo called Lily.

Rebekah and I made the ninety-minute drive to Asan in three hours, thanks to typical Korean traffic. The shelter was a ramshackle but well-intentioned collection of cages and fenced-off areas with more than a hundred dogs yapping excitedly.

We found Lily, leashed her, and took her out for a test drive. She interacted nicely with us and seemed so happy to have a walk, pulling—we thought—enthusiastically at her leash. She was bright-eyed and springy, with a pink tongue wagging happily as she trotted about. She had a little scratch on a hindquarter, but it seemed minor. Her backstory was more troubling.

Lily, who was probably less than two years old, had been
found wandering in the countryside and brought to the shelter. We had been told she had escaped from a dog farm, where she was being bred to be sold to a dog restaurant, which are a lot less common in Korea than they used to be but can still be found off the main strips in Seoul. The type of dog typically raised for meat in Korea is a midsize yellowish Spitz-like dog called a
nureongi
. The dog has no formal name:
neurongi
means only “yellow one.” But other dogs, including the Jindo, are bred for meat, too. Some believe that Jindo meat has a superior taste. Eating dog meat has been a sore point in the country since the outside world got its first good look into Korea during the 1988 Olympics, the same year Korea became a democracy. Aware that the practice would draw international criticism, the Korean government banned dog restaurants, although the move was widely flouted. Dog meat is typically served in stew and is most popular during the summer, when it is thought to give an extra boost in the wilt of August. It is a practice that survives largely because of a subset of older Koreans who guard it as a cultural practice and resent being told what to do by outsiders. But young Koreans have little interest in dog stew and are forming more family-member relationships to their pet dogs as in the West.

After spending about an hour with Lily at the shelter, we told them we’d take her and paid the $50 adoption fee. “What a great deal,” we told ourselves.

On the way back to the base, Lily, in a strange environment, slept curled up in the dark in Rebekah’s lap in the backseat of the black Hyundai Grandeur company car I drove. She peed once. Lily, not Rebekah.

When we got home, Lily bolted around the house, sniffing out her new surroundings, adapting pretty quickly. We tucked her into a dog bed in the kitchen, closed the doors, and made a note to check the scratch on her hindquarter when we woke up.

By the next morning, the scratch, thanks to Lily’s overnight worrying, had gotten bigger: a bright red wound that looked infected. We took her to the vet on base.

While we were waiting for the vet to arrive, another person showed up with a German shepherd. We had never seen Lily interact with another dog, so we cautiously let her approach the shepherd while both dogs were leashed. I left some slack in Lily’s leash.

Lily sensed the slack and struck. She was a white fur lightning bolt that shot straight at the neck of the shepherd, which was a good thirty pounds heavier. The spookiest thing was Lily didn’t growl, didn’t bark. She just silently attacked.

We were all startled, and a vet tech on the scene reacted quickest, grabbing two handfuls of the back of Lily’s neck, pulling her off the shepherd, and subduing her. The other dog was unhurt, and Rebekah and I chalked it up to Lily’s unfamiliarity with a new situation and discomfort caused by her wound.

Lily was not violent with us, but she was a chewer. My wife’s first Kindle, a pair of prescription sunglasses, and several pairs of shoes, in addition to furniture hems, a wooden door frame, chair legs, and practically anything nonliving fell victim to Lily. Her diligence when it came to destruction was without equal. Were she loosed on the North Koreans today, the peninsula would be united under Seoul’s rule tomorrow. I began to think of Lily as a weaponized house pet. But I also soon could not think of our household without her.