Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (2 page)

What did we know about South Korea coming in? Little more than most Americans do: it’s the most wired nation on earth, the kids are ultrahigh academic achievers, and they eat
kimchi
. Surrounded by our LG flat-screen TVs, Samsung smartphones, and Hyundai and Kia cars, most Americans know Korea for its powerhouse consumer brands—and perhaps for the murderous Kim dynasty in the North whose periodic outbursts alternate between lethal threats and farce. Had I been asked to name famous Koreans or Korean-Americans before I arrived in Seoul, it would have made for a short list: U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, a few baseball players and actors. My late father was a Korean War vet, so I’d learned a little bit about the war from him. Depending on the time of year, Seoul is thirteen or fourteen hours ahead of Washington; Korea literally is in the future. Soon after our arrival, we stopped saying “South Korea.” We simply called it “Korea,” because that’s what South Koreans call it. They distinguish the country to the north as Book Han. Book means “north” and Han is short for Han-Gook, which is what South Koreans call their country. South Koreans see North Korea as simply the northern part of South Korea, waiting to be reunified. This drives North Korea nuts, so it calls South Korea Nam Chosun, which means, as you might imagine, “Southern North Korea.”

In our first few days in Korea, we managed a cursory look around Seoul, a ten-million-person Asian megacity split by the Han River into Gangbuk, the older part of Seoul north of the river, and Gangnam, the newer, southern part of Seoul. Gangnam—think Fifth Avenue meets Beverly Hills—was made famous by K-pop star Psy’s YouTube pop hit of 2012, which has enjoyed more than two billion views on YouTube. Many of Korea’s richest citizens live here; all of them shop here. Democratic, exuberant, luxurious Gangnam, south of the river, exists because of decades of labor by Koreans north of the river, who rebuilt the country from ashes, in privation, directed by the strongman who ran the country. At once, Gangnam feels like the place where Korea is heading, and gives a hint of the centuries of tradition it is leaving behind.

Seoul is surrounded by mountains; indeed, most of Korea is mountainous, and the hills reminded me of my home state of West Virginia. Washington, D.C., is at essentially the same latitude as Seoul, so the climates are similar: sultry summers paired with bitingly cold, short winter days that ensure diligent Korean salarymen go to work in the dark and come home in the dark for nearly half of each year. When we arrived in Korea in October, the hills were bursting into familiar shades of orange, yellow, and red.

Seoul lacks the signature skyscraper common in other Asian megacities—the twin Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, for instance. Instead, Seoul’s defining architectural feature is its clusters of beige twenty-story apartment buildings—most with a big identifying number on the side—built like hills, one behind the other, marching into the distance. These are the homes of the millions of Koreans who have moved from the countryside to seek prosperity in the megacity. Nestled between mountains, with flat land scarce, Seoul became a vertical city.

Half of the entire country’s population of 50 million people make Greater Seoul their home. The next biggest city in Korea has only 3.5 million people. In many ways, Korea is a city-state, like Singapore, but with more land. Seoul is the white-hot center of Korea in almost every way that matters, from politics to taste-making trends. And, in many ways, it is the culture engine for much of East Asia, which ravenously consumes K-Pop and Korean TV dramas. DVDs and flash drives of the soap operas even find their way into North Korea, through its bribe-friendly border with China, giving a few of the 25 million North Koreans, shut off from the world, a tantalizing and agonizing vision of what life is like in the well-fed, beautiful, unfathomably rich South. Seoul is also home to Korea’s beauty belt—scores of plastic surgery clinics that make Koreans, per capita, the world’s most cosmetically altered people. It is home to the nation’s best universities and the massive conglomerates that drive its economy. Understanding Seoul is crucial to understanding Korea; it is the shimmering reservoir of the country’s endlessly striving aspirations—the best Korea has to offer.

The U.S. embassy is located in the center of Seoul’s older downtown district, just down the street from the country’s largest and most important historic palace, the seat of a glorious dynasty that ruled Korea for five hundred years. The traditionally Korean curved roof of Gyeongbok Palace—gracefully upturned at the ends like a hat—is an unmistakably ancient and Asian design, stately and handsome. The palace is, as movie directors would say, Seoul’s establishing shot. Rebekah’s first week as a Foreign Service officer at the embassy consisted of getting to know her American and Korean local-hire coworkers and learning the daily work of a consular officer. Basically, her job was to sit in a chair behind a customer service window for eight hours per day, conducting up to 250 interviews (in Korean) with Koreans who had
applied for visas to visit the U.S.—to go to school, for instance. Her job was to determine if their reasons were legitimate.

My job was at the twin towers of Hyundai Motor Group, about forty-five minutes south of the embassy in a part of Seoul called Yangjae, alongside the country’s major north-south highway, which Hyundai’s founder built in 1970. Unlike Rebekah’s neighborhood, there were few traditional structures to be found near my workplace, which grew over the past thirty years as Seoulites sprawled southward out of the city. Next to my office was a supermarket, perhaps Korea’s largest. Across the street, the headquarters of the country’s trade promotion agency. Down the street was a Costco, a Saturday morning destination for thousands of Koreans and dozens of ex-pats, whose cars snaked around the building, waiting for a parking space.

Hyundai Motor Group is Korea’s second-largest company, behind Samsung. It is made up of Hyundai Motor, Kia Motors, and more than thirty affiliate companies, including auto parts makers, a steel company, and a defense company. I worked for Hyundai Motor only, part of a family-owned conglomerate, or
chaebol
, which are similar to the Japanese
zaibatsu
. The
chaebol
powered the rapid growth of Korea and made it what it is today, the world’s thirteenth-largest economy. The
chaebol
are composed of dozens of affiliate businesses—some related to the group’s main business, others not. Through a complicated governance structure that enables family control with small amounts of share ownership, the
chaebol
are handed down from generation to generation. (Though there are other companies in Korea called Hyundai—more on that later—for brevity’s sake, I’ll refer to my employer, Hyundai Motor, as simply Hyundai.)

Each of the big
chaebol
faces a pivotal transition, as all stand on the cusp of being handed down to the third or fourth generations of their founders. One popular joke goes that in
North Korea they hand down governments from father to son. In the South, they hand down companies. Most inside Korea expect—and many outside Korea hope—the coming corporate successions will mark a change in the management style and personality of the
chaebol
toward a more international, less insular feel. Most of the heirs are fluent in English, a first for the
chaebol
. Because of their outsize influence on the Korean economy, the
chaebol
will continue to drive Korea’s remarkable growth story. But Korea is at a crossroads and its future prosperity is not assured. Much of Korea’s future rests on the shoulders of a handful of men in their thirties and forties, the heirs to the great
chaebol
. One of them hired me.

Not only is Korea nearly homogenous—at 97 percent ethnic Korean—but it is also probably the third-most homogenous country on the planet, after Japan and North Korea. Indeed, according to the government, the family names Kim, Lee, and Park are attached to half of the people there. Even Koreans joke that the perfect Korean name is Kim Lee Park. Such was my confusion that first week at work as I met numerous new Korean colleagues, almost all introducing themselves with some variation of this nomenclature. The highlight of my first few days as Hyundai’s director of global PR consisted of being shuttled around from office to office at headquarters, meeting an endless stream of Mr. Kims, Mr. Lees, and Mr. Parks, making some small talk, trying to comprehend the frequent broken English, bowing and smiling a lot, accepting business cards with both hands, as is the custom, and then coming back to my office with a stack of cards and absolutely no idea who was who. My global PR team was feverishly preparing to host several top-flight European automotive journalists and had no time to brief their new
waygookin
, or foreigner, who—as I would come to find out—was not quite their boss.

On the Friday night at the end of my first week of work, my
team invited me to a welcome dinner. In truth, it was my boss Mr. Lee who invited me and my team to dinner. I had not met or even heard of Mr. Lee until my first day; I had to write “my boss” on his business card so I could remember who he was. Compounding my confusion, to my untrained eyes, Mr. Lee looked no different than any other Hyundai executive at headquarters: male, middle-aged, medium height, medium build, black hair, no facial hair. He dressed like other executives, too: dark suit, white shirt, red or blue tie. Mr. Lee was more fine-boned than many men his age and, though not an outgoing man, walked with a bit of a swagger at times. While not outwardly emotive, Mr. Lee would in fact show much kindness to his out-of-place American PR director. On the times when he drove the two of us to lunch, without my asking, he would flip his car radio from a K-pop station to one of the two Seoul radio stations that broadcast in English. I would come to find that Mr. Lee enjoyed good-natured teasing when drinking with colleagues.

Mr. Lee had planned a customary Korean work night out for the team, the sort of forced socialization, I would come to realize, that was common in Asian business. Your availability to the company begins before eight a.m. Monday and ends on Friday night pretty much when your boss decides it’s time to call it quits for the week.

And now Rebekah and I were about to get our first taste of real Korea. More like a force-feeding, really.

The twist was that I had brought Rebekah to dinner. This was wholly unexpected by my team, as wives do not attend work social functions. As it was explained to me, if my wife and I hosted, say, the one-hundred-day party for our newborn—a Korean custom—the wife of my team leader might attend. But every other work-social function, like this dinner, she would not attend. It just wasn’t done, and it was understood implicitly by the Koreans, as most things are.

Not yet aware of this custom, Rebekah and I met the team at a Korean barbecue restaurant, where the meat is brought to the table raw and cooked over a tub of hot coals or a grill in the middle of the table. Every square inch of the table is covered with small bowls of side dishes: greens and noodles and pickled things and tubers and pickled tubers and the ever-present
kimchi
. But no barbecue sauce.

“Korean barbecue” was the first example of a phenomenon our State Department sponsors told us about the day we arrived in Seoul: “Welcome to Korea, the land of Almost, Not Quite.” What they meant was that Korea, or at least Seoul, looks familiar to Westerners accustomed to large cities. But as you dive in, you find things are just a little . . . off. Barbecue with no barbecue sauce. Backing into parking spaces is the rule rather than the exception. No trash cans in any public space: office, sidewalk, theater, anywhere. The utter absence of voice mail. Cleaning women showing up in the men’s bathroom while it’s occupied. Dark tint on
every
car’s windows. Business attire worn in the office with bedroom slippers and shower sandals. Green flashing lights on ambulances. Car navigation screens showing live TV that drivers watch
while they’re driving
. No individual dishes at meals; instead, everyone helps themselves from communal plates. Another State Department friend summed it up this way: “If you live in a foreign country and you have to take a rickshaw to work every day, you’re, like, ‘Okay, this is my life. I take a rickshaw to work.’ And you ratchet down your expectations accordingly. But here in Korea, everything looks like it should meet your expectations and when it doesn’t, it’s all the more frustrating.” The frustration goes both ways. For Koreans, all these things are normal, and my colleagues quickly grew tired of hearing me discover and comment on these mundane (to them) realizations.

We gathered around a table in a private room, as is the custom for business dinners. Mr. Lee sat in the middle of one long side of
the table, which is the seat always occupied by the highest-status person in the room. I sat across from him.

The evening started off pleasantly enough, but once the
soju
came out, things got Korean.
Soju
is the national drink of Korea. It is clear alcohol, typically made from rice or barley, but can also be made from sweet potatoes and other foods. Alcohol content varies by brand but hovers around 28 proof (or “degree,” as the Koreans say). It comes in small green bottles about the size of an old-style Coke bottle, and the Korean government keeps the price artificially low at about $1 per bottle, so all Koreans can afford their birthright: constant access to a momentary escape from their hard lives. And their lives are plenty hard. When they were a country as poor as the poorest in Africa sixty years ago, their lives were hard in a daily survival kind of way. Now that Korea is a rich country, Koreans’ lives are a different kind of hard, with all the physical and psychological problems caused by a lifetime of constant competition. So they get drunk on
soju
.

Soju
—like vodka in Russia—is more than just a drink. It is the means to team building at work and relationship bonding outside of work. Ideally the two become one. At one Hyundai dinner I attended, an executive rose to make his toast, as each male guest is typically expected to do, and shouted to the group. He raised his glass and asked, rhetorically: “Is this
soju
?”