Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (15 page)

Basically, the early conversations with my Hyundai colleagues went like this:

Me: “I don’t want to get drunk.”

Korean colleague: “For health?”

I could have said yes, or made up a reason, but that would have been a lie and it would have denied my faith. I could have told them about genetic predispositions and my alcoholic father, who drank two six-packs a night for decades, turning him into a mean drunk. Or not. I actually had a more relevant answer, although it proved less understandable.

Me: “Well, health, sure, but mostly because the Bible teaches me not to.”

This answer provoked a variety of responses, from sympathy to puzzlement to accusation. For those who were offended, not only was I disrupting the group harmony by not getting drunk, but I was also acting holier-than-thou and, worse, telling them, if they also went to church, that they were poor Christians.

If my Hyundai coworkers were curious about the biblical instruction on drunkenness, I was happy to share it: Romans 13:13; Ephesians 5:18. Otherwise, I just tried to defuse the situation. There would have been no problem if I objected to eating dog or to one of the other peripheral Korean activities. But to object to the excesses of the Korean drinking culture was, basically, to spit in my host country’s face. I was keenly aware of this and wanted desperately to avoid it.

I consulted experts for their opinions. An American who spent years in Korea told me that, when no one was looking, she’d dump her shot glass full of
soju
into her soup, refill the glass with water, and toast away, skipping over the soup course. A Korean executive told me he once filled his shot glass with “cider,” or the Korean soft drink similar to Sprite, but his colleagues saw the carbonation bubbles. Busted, he was forced to drink even more
soju
.

I eventually found a solution for
hoesik
. As waitresses streamed in and out with food and hot coals, amid the laughing and teasing and arms thrown around colleagues’ shoulders, I poured
soju
for my boss, and poured for those around me, and let others pour for me, and partook in the endless toasts each salaryman was required to make. For each toast, each time everyone else did a bottoms-up shot of
soju
, I took one sip from my shot glass. By the end of the night, my colleagues may have had ten or twelve shots of
soju
; I had a total of one or two.

My strategy became known and understood, mostly because my boss said it was okay. I was there, I was participating, I was honoring the process. Indeed, I was not invited or required to
attend every
hoesik
because of my stance. But I, as always, had been afforded a foreigner get-out-of-jail-free card that none of my Korean colleagues had.

At one dinner, one of my Korean colleagues slipped into the seat next to mine, leaned over, and whispered: “I do not like to drink, either. But if I do not, it will hurt my career.”

Fitting in at work was not limited to drinking. It also included mandatory extra-work activities, such as an annual Saturday morning team-building hike, to which I had no religious objections, only selfish ones.

During my first spring at Hyundai, I found out that our entire international sales division was required to meet at a mountain near headquarters at 7:30 a.m. the following Saturday for a team-building hike. “You’re kidding” was my response. Nobody was kidding. I asked several pointless and prickly questions: “If this is mandatory, why aren’t they holding it during work hours?” And so on. Pointless. The hike was happening and attendance was required. These outside-of-work team-building activities are common at Korean companies—and at American ones, too. It was my background as a journalist that made me ignorant of the practice. If you tried to get American journos on an early Saturday morning team-building hike, well, I can only imagine the snarkiness and derision that would spew forth on Twitter in the days before the hike, forcing embarrassed executives to call it off.

I showed up at the appointed mountain on the following Saturday, which was sunny and cool but not cold. I wore typical American hiking wear: cargo shorts and a college sweatshirt. First off, I was the only hiker there wearing shorts (aside from a Kiwi Hyundai executive who happened to be in town and decided to lark along). Second, all the Koreans were dressed like they were about to assault K2; top-end, brand-name Lycra gear, the best hiking boots, even walking poles. This was to hike a
2,000-foot-high hill. With paths. We lined up in our work teams and started with group calisthenics, which are unavoidable in Asia. They were affably led by a Hyundai colleague who did his required military service in the Korean marines, and he broadcast instructions through a handheld PA. As an American, who had grown up with grainy video images of mass communist calisthenics and strongmen with bullhorns, it was hard not to laugh at what I thought was a caricature of this one-people behavior. Yet it is not caricature. It just is. Then we attacked the summit the same way we attacked work: hard and fast. I could not keep up, and became a sorry, wheezing drag on the procession. Of more than three hundred Hyundai hikers, the only American was the last one to the top of the hill. My team leader kindly stuck with me, making him the second-to-the-last up, when he easily could have left me. With each step, I got more and more resentful that I was forced to endure this extra-work activity, when, in reality I was angry with myself for being unable to compete.

Blunt as it was, here I was in the middle of a live-action metaphor for what Hyundai was trying to do with its brand and what Koreans saw as their lot in life: a never-ending uphill climb. It was how they got to where they are; it was how they would get to where they were going: the top. Like me, everyone else climbing the hill—Hyundai’s automaker competitors, Korea’s regional rivals—would have to stop a few times to catch their breath. I looked around at my Korean colleagues. They did not stop.

After we came back down the hill, we were treated to a delicious open-air lunch of grilled duck. Even though it was barely noon, the
soju
was flowing and guys were standing on benches, leading team cheers and toasting each other with love shots.

I could enjoy neither the duck nor the camaraderie. Sweaty, sore, and sullen, all I wanted to do was leave. I told this to one of my team members. “We can’t leave before our boss leaves,” she
said, meaning the division’s top executive, whose exuberant toasts indicated he had no intention of leaving anytime soon.

“But I’m dying here,” I lamely protested.

“We’re all dying,” she replied sternly.

I am not proud of this behavior and attitude when it comes over me and I allow it to show. It is ungenerous and un-Christian and it is among the things I’d like most to change about myself. Rebekah has a phrase she uses when I act like this: “You’ve got peppercorns in your soul.”

Around this time, I caught wind of a rumor going around that I was giving up and going back to America. I never heard where the rumor came from, nor did I care. The fact that it was out there was challenge enough. Hyundai, and Korea, were going to be stuck with this
waygookin
for at least two years.

Something had to change in me before next year’s hill climb.

7

READING THE AIR

Going along with others for the betterment of the whole is a concept that was embedded in Korean culture from the earliest ages. To reference
Star Trek
again: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

A female Korean friend once told me, “In Korea, we teach our children do not be outstanding.” This was surprising to me, given the society’s emphasis on educational excellence. But then I thought for a moment.

I said, “I think you mean to say, ‘We teach our children not to stand out from the crowd,’ right?”

“Yes, that’s right,” she laughed.

I told her, “In the U.S., we teach our children to do everything they can
to
stand out from the crowd.”

Westerners would call the Korean practice “mindless conformity.” Easterners would call it “harmony.” My Western definition of conformity was nonoperative in Korea. American workers
crave positive and public feedback from their bosses just for doing their jobs. When I applied my “attaboy” management style to Korea and singled out my individual team members for praise, they were mortified. To a person, they would reply, “It was a team effort.” Boldly expressing individuality for the sake of it—or basking in selfish public glory—was not a sign of independence and accomplishment, as it was in the U.S. It was rude and inconsiderate to all those around you.

I felt this when I told my boss and my team that Rebekah and I planned our two-week 2011 vacation for May. First of all, no one in Korea who has a job takes a two-week vacation, and certainly not two consecutive weeks together. It would be inconsiderate to ask your team members to carry your work for that long. Furthermore, Hyundai employees are expected to take their vacations in July or August. Finally, the higher up the corporate ladder you climb, the less vacation you are expected to take. That’s not different from the U.S. You don’t see a lot of American CEOs checking out of work for two-week stretches. However, it was almost impossible for Rebekah to take two weeks off from her consular work at the embassy in the summertime: that is the peak season of visa processing for Korean travel to the U.S. So we chose May. My boss never said anything about our vacation plans other than okay, but when I returned after our two weeks in Cambodia and Thailand, my team taught me the meaning of the Korean word and skill
noonchi
.

Noonchi
translates to “eye measure,” but a better definition is “reading the air.” The closest translation to English is reading body language. But
noonchi
is more subtle and complex than that. If you tell your supervisor you want to take one of your allotted days off and he says yes, you’d better use your
noonchi
to interpret his face, his tone of voice, his current job status, his ambitions, his estimate of the abilities and mind-set of your fellow team
members, your work and social rank relative to him,
his
work and social rank relative to
his
boss, the circumstances of his personal life, and on and on in order to determine if he really means no. Smart corporate climbers must have finely tuned
noonchi
.

The trip to Thailand and Cambodia was a terrific, eye-opening, exotic time. There was much I wanted to share.

The Monday after we returned, I walked from my office to my team’s cubicle area and effused, “Good morning, everyone!”

I got a few muted “Good mornings” and a couple of briefly upturned faces with awkward smiles, and that was it.

I hung there in the silence waiting for someone—anyone—to simply ask, “How was your vacation?”

Nothing. Even a novice
noonchi
reader like myself knew what that meant.

Back I went to my office, lesson received, muttering to myself, “It was great! Thanks for asking!”

But it was I who had failed, not only as an outsider, but also as a manager, to see things from my team’s point of view. When the big, refreshed, tanned American came bumptiously bounding into the office to share photos and tales from his amazing two-week vacation, they were thinking: “What about us? We had to work while you were on your TWO-WEEK VACATION.”

It was becoming clear to me that I had a lot of learning and changing to do, or else I would remain frustrated and angry all the time. If I was going to stick it out for two years here, I was going to have to adapt to a totally different definition of what it meant to be crowded, what it meant to be rude, what it meant to be considerate, what it meant to be a team player—and learn a thousand other lessons, quickly. Rebekah, veteran of East Asia, warned me that I should probably try to tone down my act a little to fit in. I tend to speak loudly. Even as a child, my mother advised me, “Your voice carries.” I enjoy laughing and having animated
conversations with people, including those I’ve just met. People might describe me as “garrulous.” On top of that, given my history as a journalist and occasional humorist at the
Washington Post
, I liked to riff on topics, make jokes, and spread opinions with the focus and subtlety of a runaway fire hose.

In short, I was, as Rebekah termed it, an “America bomb” dropped smack into the middle of an Eastern, harmonious, formal workplace culture.

HAN AND JEONG

I found most of my Hyundai executive colleagues eager for our visiting foreign journalists to truly understand Korean culture. On the long bus rides with journalists, at
hoesik
, during tours of historic Korean sites, the journalists and I learned about two critical concepts that form the base of Koreanness:
han
and
jeong
.

Han
is a concept that was probably birthed by the first foreign invasion of the Korean peninsula millennia ago and was pounded deeper into the Korean psyche in the ensuing years with each of the hundreds of successive invasions, pillages, indignities, injustices, and setbacks at the hands of a superior opponent in a constant battle against insurmountable odds. One writer called it “collective melancholy.” That helps get at the concept, because it introduces the concept of bondedness.
Han
is felt individually but it is experienced collectively. It’s a feeling that we’re all in this together, we’ve all been wronged, and we all wait for justice. It’s simplistic to strictly call it pessimism, because Korea’s entire stunning modern growth story is built on implied optimism, even if the results were achieved with head-down, sometimes joyless doggedness. Indeed, plenty of people who’ve studied the Korean success story attribute much of it to
han
. After surviving hundreds of invasions over history, beating Toyota and Apple at their own
games is, to use the Korean expression, “like eating rice cakes while lying down.”