Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (14 page)

On the plane ride back to Korea, I bumped into Vice Chairman Chung waiting for the bathroom and he told me that he was very comfortable saying the speech as I’d edited it. I went back to my seat happy to have weathered my first big test. And happy to be heading, as odd as it still sounded in my head, home to Korea.

6

THE KOREAN CODES

A few months before I left Hyundai and Korea, I was dining with my team. One of my junior female team members, whose English was quite good and who had lived for a short while in the States, was sitting to my left, next to the napkins. I asked her to pass me one.

She did and then asked me, “Did you ask me to hand you the napkins because in your culture it’s considered rude to reach in front of someone while they’re eating?”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s right.”

“In our culture, it’s considered rude to interrupt someone while they’re eating to ask them to hand you something,” she replied.
That
was why Koreans had been jabbing their hands in front of me at meals for the previous three years, I realized.

But there it was, finally explained to me so clearly that even I could understand: each culture—Korean and American, Eastern and Western—had been behaving in a way it believed to be
polite, only to actually be behaving in the rudest way possible to the other culture. It was a small example of what I came to realize was the larger truth: Korean and American, East and West, have entirely different ways of looking at and understanding the meaning of the same thing. And although each side probably believes its intent is clear to the other side, oftentimes it could not be more opaque.

I came to explain it this way: if you set a glass on a table in between an American and a Korean, they will both see a glass. But it will mean very different things to each of them. To the American, the glass will mean “thing that will soon provide me with a refreshing beverage.” To the Korean, the glass will mean “thing that I must fill and serve to my seniors to show my respect for them.”

This concept, thought of in another way, is not unfamiliar to us in our highly politicized America. Republicans and Democrats will look at, say, the same social problem yet have two totally different interpretations of how it came to be and how to solve it.

If the Napkin Episode, as I came to call it, had happened a few months after I’d arrived in Korea, my three-plus years there might have gone more smoothly for me and for everyone around me.

It’s not just that Americans and Koreans speak different languages. The language is only the mechanical representation of the divide and is in fact the easiest chasm to bridge. I had always considered myself a superior communicator. I had made my living at a high level doing just that for two decades, making complicated stories clear and easy to understand for a general readership.

But in the East, my record was mixed. To the English-speaking foreign journalists who visited Korea, I was still a good communicator. They often found me a welcome relief from my colleagues, whose Korean-accented English the foreign journalists—who
were not native English speakers, either—sometimes found difficult to understand.

But to my Korean colleagues I was a poor communicator, at least for a large part of my stay there. Part of the problem was my quirks. I sometimes use double negatives. I’m sorry, but I can’t not do it. For a native English speaker, this was not a problem. For others, it was a source of pure confusion. The bigger problem was that I didn’t think through how to respond when I didn’t understand something I was being told. “So, wait,” I’d respond in exasperation. “Are you telling me it can’t be done?”

“No, sir.”

“No, it can’t be done, or no, it can be done?”

“Yes, sir.”

I was putting my poor colleagues through an Abbott and Costello routine, and no one was laughing.

I still remember how puzzled I was the first time one of my team members referred to my “American accent.” “What accent?” I said. “We don’t have accents. Brits have accents. Australians have accents. Even Canadians. We don’t.” To me, the British accent is a deviation from the norm—accent-free American English. But to a Korean, and to most of the world’s population, American English is just another kind of English accent.

This realization shocked me more than it would have had my ignorance been only linguistic. But embedded in my response, although I didn’t realize it at the time, was my belief that America is the industry standard for the world. Not just for English but in everything: politics, power, sports, entertainment, finance, you name it. It’s America’s world and everyone else is just playing in it. It didn’t take long living on the far side of the world to disabuse me of this notion. Yes, America was still by far the world’s richest and most militarily powerful country, and American movies got big audiences in Seoul. But over here, Beijing and Tokyo had
much more impact on Koreans’ daily lives than Washington. No one followed the NFL. Whole epochs of American and Western history were unknown. In the wake of the Great Recession, there was a general feeling that the West was in decline and that the twenty-first century would belong to Asia, not America.

I was feeling more than befuddlement over the way I sounded. This was a symptom of a much deeper dislocation I was feeling and confusion over the way I thought about America’s place in the world.

It turned out that the biggest reason for my poor communication wasn’t my American accent or lack of Korean fluency. It was my inability to understand the basic codes of Korea: Confucianism and Koreanness.

If you’re going to live in Korea, it is important and simply good manners to at least try to learn these codes, or understand that they exist, even if you don’t learn to speak Korean. If you’re going to do business in Korea or with Koreans, it is vital.

Confucianism, named for sixth century
B.C.
Chinese philosopher Confucius, is a quasi-religion but mostly it is a way of ordering society via a hierarchy based on age, wealth, social status, birth, gender, and other factors. An example of this is filial piety, the devotion to parents and elders, usually meaning obedience well into a child’s young adult years. Today’s Confucianism is known as neo-Confucianism, a form that has purged the mystical elements of Taoism and Buddhism that crept into the original doctrine during the Chinese Han dynasty in the first two centuries of the first millennium
A.D.

I knew a Korean woman who went to graduate school in the U.S. who was required by her parents back in Seoul to have a video conversation with them every night at the same time—and she obeyed. Even modern Korean women will rarely go against their parents’ wishes, especially their fathers’ wishes, when it comes to spouse selection.

Confucianism does not limit filial piety to strictly family relations. Expanded to a concept of “respect for the elder/senior,” it suffuses Korean society everywhere: from the workplace, where junior employees often see their bosses as fathers and vice versa, to business contracts, which are rarely equal. This is the
gap-eul
relationship of Confucianism, or “higher to lower.” In every relationship, one person is superior and the other is inferior, either in age, rank, income, status, whatever. In geopolitical terms, this goes back to ancient times when China was the
gap
, or the superior, to which Korea, the
eul
, or the inferior, paid tribute to the Chinese royal court. It carries forth even to modern Korean contracts, where companies are
gap
and employees are
eul
. So you always know where you stand. It is one reason why a Korean might ask your age shortly after meeting you. They are not being rude, although they may seem to be by Western standards. Instead, they are trying to determine your age relative to theirs and thus your hierarchical relationship to them—partly, at least, to know how to address you. The Korean language, like Japanese, has multiple levels of speech, which range from highly honorific to intimate, depending on whom you are addressing. These manifest in verb endings. One verb ending is used in conversations between male coworkers, another between female coworkers, another when older people speak to younger people, another when a shopkeeper is speaking to customers, and so on. That’s why it’s said the Korean alphabet is easy to learn but the language is difficult.

Anyone who has ever flown on one of the great Asian airlines or stayed at a big hotel in Seoul or Tokyo has been the beneficiary of the Confucian
gap-eul
relationship. The consumer, especially the business- or first-class one, is the
gap
and the service providers are the
eul
. This explains the constant bowing and smiling, the graceful and measured gesturing reminiscent of a spokesmodel
and the ever-attendant service so complete that Westerners unfamiliar with it can mistake it for obsequiousness.

Relationships are so important in Korea that they can overshadow personal identity. For instance, it’s much more common to hear women refer affectionately to each other as
eonni
, Korean for older and younger sister, rather than use each other’s names. A younger brother would usually call his older brother
hyung
in public rather than use his name, which would be considered a challenge to his authority. Girls who want to flirt with a boy will call him
oppa
, or “older brother to a girl.” One adult Korean-American woman swore she didn’t even know the names of her aunts and uncles because she only called them by their family titles. In the West, our names are our identities. In the East, identities are inextricably tied to our relationships to others.

Koreanness is the result, at least partly, of the application of Confucianism to the Korean people and how they have conformed to it. It is also the result of a highly competitive and homogeneous culture, where the pressure to fit into the crowd—a crowd that is always striving to be smarter, better-looking, more prestigious, and richer—is enormous.

A present and constant confluence of Confucianism and Koreanness, and one that was causing me the most friction at work in the months after I arrived in Korea, was the custom of
hoesik
(pronounced “hway-shik”), or “staff dinner.” It turned out that the welcome saturnalia my team threw for us at the end of my first week at the company was not just for special occasions. It was simply the way business dinners went in Korea.

Westerners get just as drunk as Asians. But I soon learned there was a purpose to the Asian drunkenness—or, as they like to call it, the “drinking culture.” It was supposed to lead to closer teamwork back at the office, better productivity, and the creation of real affection between colleagues. The biggest struggle Westerners tend
to find with this practice is not just the excessive drinking but the shattering of the boundary between professional and personal lives. In Korea, at
hoesik
, you bond with one another over delicious beef sizzling on a hot-coal grill at your table, emptying one green bottle of
soju
after the next, repeatedly toasting each other, ribbing and laughing with each other, and then following it up with karaoke, of course. The next morning at work, everyone commiserates in the smoking room at work with the same hangover. As it was explained to me by a fellow Hyundai executive: “Everybody same level of drunk, everybody same.” If you didn’t get drunk, or refused to drink, you made everyone else uncomfortable, disrupted the harmony, and puffed yourself up in their eyes.
Hoesik
is driven by the relentless Korean competitiveness. One drinker may ask another, “How many bottles of
soju
do you drink?” The other may reply, “Four!” And the first will shoot back, “Per hour?”

At
hoesik
, the woes of the salaryman’s life spill forth from Hyundai executives: starting early, staying late, tough boss, working all your life for one company, being reassigned to foreign countries at a moment’s notice, feeling like a number, being yelled at, striving to make money to pay for after-school tutoring and the best universities for your children. Maybe it sounded miserable, but it was a shared misery, and everyone at these dinners had the same points of reference, the same shared culture and experience, the same dreams and disappointments, and within those grew a love for each other. On a larger scale, the drinking culture has created a strong nationalistic bond among Koreans of multiple generations and is partly to credit for the pull-together spirit that lifted the country out of poverty.

I came to see the value of the
hoesik
and the drinking culture within Hyundai and Korea despite the clear health risks to self and society. And, to be fair, today’s
hoesik
is trending milder and less frequent compared to those of years past. A little.

But even though I eventually understood why the Koreans drink like they do, I needed to find a way around it in order to save my liver, my marriage, and my faith.

When our global PR team entertained journalists from Muslim countries, my team members and Hyundai executives, who have done business in Muslim countries since almost the beginning of Hyundai, knew better than to serve alcohol at dinners. We didn’t want to put the journalists in the awkward position of having to refuse our liquor, which would have meant refusing our hospitality, which is as grave an error in Muslim and Arab cultures as it is in Korea. So unless a Muslim journalist was from a more Westernized Arab nation—say, the United Arab Emirates—and asked for
soju
, alcohol was off-limits. It was easy for the Koreans to understand that alcohol was against the Muslim religion. That was the rule, and you followed it.

It was more difficult for them to grasp the idea that drunkenness is discouraged in Christianity, even though drinking alcohol is not. In the Korean drinking culture, drinking equals getting drunk. Why else would one drink? My stance was especially confusing because so many Koreans, and many of my colleagues at Hyundai, went to Christian churches.