Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (26 page)

The interview room was set up in the corporate style: two tables facing each other, with a gap of maybe eight feet in between. My place was set up at one of the tables. A folded tent of cardboard was printed with my name and title; there was water and juice. Aurelia was to sit at the other table, facing me, a Grand Canyon of unease between us.

“This poor young person does not need any more intimidation,” I thought, so I came to her side, pulled out the chair next to her and sat down. The HR manager was alarmed. “That is your chair over there, sir,” he told me. “I’m good here, thanks,” I said, and sent him away, breaking all sorts of corporate and cultural formalities in the process.

Aurelia calmed down and gave a fine interview. She would later tell me my move to her side of the table put her at ease. I later gave her a writing test in which I’d hidden a couple Easter eggs: hard-to-find errors that must be found by a good editor. She nailed them.

Integrating Aurelia into the team proved difficult. There was plenty of blame to go around, and I take my share of it. But some of the team members didn’t make it easy on her, either. I had failed in defining exactly what her role would be in relation to our team. The team asked me: “Will she edit only English generated by our team?”

“No, she would edit English generated by any team that wants to use her,” I replied.

“How can we make the other teams use her?”

“We can’t. We can tell the other teams about her and strongly encourage them to use her.”

“But there is no process for that.”

“We’ll find a way.”

“Well, because she is a contractor, we will not show her sensitive company information.”

“You must, because she has to edit it and she is a part of our team.”

“No she isn’t.”

“Yes she is.”

“Her English may be good, but her Korean is not.”

“She was not hired to be a Korean editor.”

And then: “She is young and this is her first real job. Why doesn’t she have to do the same kind of menial jobs every entry-level employee at Hyundai has to do, like bringing the newspapers up from the mailroom in the morning?”

“Because she was hired for a specific skill.”

“But we don’t do that here.”

“Well, we just did.”

You can see how it went: basically, bullheaded foreign executive versus lifelong Hyundai employees who knew and followed the Hyundai way of doing things, and this was most definitely not that. I was certain the team would not help integrate Aurelia—would not spread the word about her—and she would be deemed a failure. Worse, Aurelia would be emotionally damaged by the fiasco.

It was, to be honest, a bumpy start. There were conflicting directions, cold shoulders, and hurt feelings. Aurelia’s dedication, good humor, and undeniable value to the company won the day.

And I took a lesson in humility. I admitted to my team leader that I had handled her integration clumsily. He began to see her
value and helped spread the word about her to other teams. As young Aurelia proved both her competence—her English was equal to mine—and her flexibility, dozens of other teams sought out her skills. They became grateful for her ability. One team of Hyundai engineers had proposed an article to a technical publication that was rejected because of its poor English. They turned to Aurelia, she helped them whip it into shape, and the piece was accepted. I had hoped by the end of her first year that she would have worked with a handful of other teams. Instead, thanks to her resourcefulness, her fighting spirit, and a maturity beyond her years, she more than doubled my expectations.

At one point I told Aurelia, “You have saved this company millions of dollars in brand value simply by correcting English.” The bungled language in the Hyundai newspaper ads was only a one-day embarrassment. The positive change that resulted from it—the hiring of an English editor—would be lasting.

But that wasn’t my ultimate satisfaction with Aurelia’s hiring. That came on a day not too long before I left Korea. I took several of the junior members of my team out for lunch. As we were walking to a nearby restaurant, I looked behind me to see one of the other young women on my team walking close by Aurelia, her arm slung around Aurelia’s neck, the two of them laughing. She had been accepted.

“BUT . . . REPORTERS WILL JUST CALL US.”

I had a hard time finding a lot of information about Hyundai when I was researching the company before I was hired. As a journalist, the first thing you do when looking at a company is go to the media website, where you’ll find press releases, photos, videos, financial information, company history, biographies of the top executives, statements about corporate governance, and the
e-mail addresses and phone numbers of the company PR people. It was easy to find the media site of Hyundai Motor America. But I couldn’t find the media site for Hyundai’s headquarters. It was puzzling.

About five minutes after I started my job at Hyundai in October 2010, I found out why I couldn’t find the headquarters’ media site. There wasn’t one. Hyundai was, in fact, the only major global automaker that did not have an English-language media site. They had one in Korean, for the Korean media, but nothing for the English-speaking world. All we had in English was a list of press releases. A media site is like a front door to a company for journalists. Ours was effectively closed.

To me, this seemed like Job One. My team needed to build an English-language media site, stat. If we were truly going to be a premium automaker, this was basic blocking and tackling. This was an easily achieved marker along the way to Hyundai’s drive to become a premium brand, or so I thought. Some senior members of my team objected to the idea of creating an English media site, questioned its necessity, or wondered who the target audience would be. I found it difficult to understand how to answer their objections and questions: Would you question why human beings need oxygen? One of my team members even said, “But if we put our contact information on the Internet, reporters will just call us.” I was speechless. We
were
in PR, right?

The problem was, my incredulity and outrage were putting the cart before the horse. I didn’t yet understand how, why, and at what speed things move in a corporation. My view was: Problem? Fix it. But despite what I initially thought, some of my team members were not actually trying to stop my idea. (Well, a couple were. The English-language media site would mean more work for my team and, more important, greater potential for making a mistake they could be blamed for.) Instead, most of the people
on my team were asking smart questions about how best to build the site, what it should look like, and whom it should serve, and raised legitimate questions about the risk versus the benefits of the additional public exposure such a site would bring. As a corporate outsider, I did not yet understand this. And, in many ways, I was still thinking like a journalist: Make information available to journalists. Soon I would come to think like a company employee: Is this in the best interest of the company? One way of thinking is right for one job; the other way is right for the other job.

After several months of frustration, I eventually learned how to get it done. I made a brief and effective PowerPoint presentation to my boss showing him screenshots of what we had—our meager list of press releases—and the sophisticated, full-service, world-class media sites that our competitors, specifically our Japanese competitors, had. “Theirs look like a news site,” my boss said, correctly. He was a smart man and got it right away. He authorized the building of Hyundai’s first English-language media site. We contracted with a Web designer and started the meetings. Of course, the designers spoke only Korean, so my two best junior English-speaking team members, Ike and Eduardo, were assigned to the project to make sure the designers understood my ideas and directions and to ride herd on the designers, making sure they nailed down the details. They did more than that: they gave me valuable ideas about how to improve the site and even took the lead in eventually upgrading it a year after it was launched.

Several months after the website process got off to a rocky start, it was launched, just before a key motor show. At the same time I put Hyundai headquarters on Twitter, slowly and cautiously. This was risky territory for all concerned, but pretty quickly my team and others saw the value of having an English-language media site—although no one on my team wanted their contact
information on the site. I learned to pick my battles. I don’t think I ever won over anyone to the value of Twitter, even though Hyundai Motor America used it to great success. But that’s okay. I came to see the cautious side of it: with a Twitter feed, Hyundai opened itself up to negative and attack Tweets it couldn’t delete. This, too, is a part of brand management and protection.

WHO BROUGHT THE BGM?

The hiring of our English editor and the building of our website—and my daily, often tortured, often hilarious clashes with almost, not quite English—caused a philosophical question to bubble up in my mind. The Konglish and incorrect English produced in Korea, however jarring to native English speakers like me, was just fine in the alternate universe in which hundreds of millions of people reside and where Korea, Inc., does a lot of business: the huge swath of the world’s people who are not native English speakers but nevertheless speak some version of English, the language of global business.

The philosophical question was: Whose English is it now, anyway?

There are still plenty of people in native-English-speaking nations such as the U.K. and the U.S. who are appalled at what is happening to “correct” English in their countries, thanks to generations of immigration and the assimilation of their languages into ours.

To them I would say: You should see what’s happening
outside
your countries.

When I was back in the U.S. and my mother was still alive, she bemoaned the “corruption” of English by foreign languages. Even though my mother was well read, she had never lived outside of West Virginia and had not encountered a lot of people not
like her. Also, as with many older folks, as she aged, she became more fearful of a lot of things.

I used to joke that she was afraid she was going to wake up one morning and everyone was going to be speaking Spanish except her. I assured her that’s not how languages change. I noted that she ordered fettuccine in restaurants, using it like it was an English word. I told her the wonderful thing about English is how malleable it is and within that is its strength. Much like the U.S. itself, English defeats revolutions by absorbing them.

Once I moved to Korea, my take on English got a lot less liberal, at least at first.

Suddenly, here I was, a lone protector of my language, besieged on all sides by a fusillade of incoherent, casually applied, and brazenly reckless English sentences.

But if I was going to be intellectually consistent, I came to realize, I had to endorse and even celebrate what nonnative English speakers are doing to my language. If it was okay for English to change within the boundaries of my own country—let’s be honest, if it’s okay for fast-food restaurants to invent Spanish-sounding words like
quesarito
and American travel magazines to invent “glamping”—it must be okay for it to change outside the U.S. I just felt like I had so much less . . . control. Out here in the rest of the world, it’s everybody’s English, and there’s nothing particularly special about it, as there is to me. For me, English is as much a part of my being as my spine. For the rest of the world, it’s only a tool. I wasn’t as initially okay with this as I thought I might be.

Koreans, possibly because of the
pali-pali
ethos, modify and abbreviate every language they come in contact with. Because Korea is a homogeneous society with the bulk of its people plugged into the same mass media delivery systems, abbreviations spring up and are spread instantly throughout the Korean body,
and are therefore understood by everyone. So it goes with English in Korea.

Koreans use easy-to-understand shortenings such as “aircon” and “biz.” Others are harder to decrypt. “Backdancer” is a musical group’s backup dancer, and “combi” is a sportcoat-and-slacks combination. Every digital camera is a “dika,” from the first sounds of “digital” and “camera.” You use a “dika” to take a “selca” (self-camera) photo, not a selfie. And every beer restaurant is a “Hof.” (This one’s a bit of a maze. The Hofbräuhaus is a famous and historic Munich brewery. But “Hof” doesn’t mean “beer”; it means “court.” “Bräu” means “beer.” It must have been an original mistranslation that just stuck.)

To learn the culture, I had to learn Korean English. If you were to say that many people at Hyundai speak English, you would be correct. But that would be the fact of the situation, not the truth. Just because a Korean “spoke English,” I could not assume they knew all the English words I did, or the idioms or the jokes. In order to “speak English” with Koreans who “speak English,” I had to learn the English that Koreans know. I had to learn the Korean English vocabulary.

As in England, a Korean “diary” is your calendar or schedule, not your personal journal. “Fancy” is fine stationery. “Glamor” means a buxom woman. “Sharp” is any mechanical pencil. Every overcoat, regardless of brand, is a “Burberry”; every clear carbonated beverage is a “cider,” even if it’s not cider. A “mind control” book is not meant to turn you into a brainwasher; it is a self-improvement book to help you learn to control your own mind. Window-shopping is “eye-shopping.” Men’s dress shirts are “Y-shirts,” because they are invariably white, which sounded to the occupying Japanese like the letter
Y
, and it stuck. Women with attractive curves are said to have the desired “S-shape.” Once at dinner, one of my colleagues, a little tipsy and well meaning,
complimented Rebekah (she was not there) by saying “she has the perfect S-shape!” My favorite Konglish word? “Stamina.” For the first year I was in Korea, I kept hearing that certain foods, like a kind of chicken soup, were good for “stamina,” and this was followed by chuckling from the men at the table. “Sure, you guys work such long hours, you need your stamina,” I thought, and ate up. Then I came to realize that when Koreans say “stamina,” they mean sexual stamina.