Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (28 page)

Not long after the Elantra’s big win in Detroit, spring came to
Seoul, and with it the annual Saturday-morning team-building hill climb that had crushed me the previous year. I again showed up in my shorts and college sweatshirt. But that was the only similarity. If there was any sign that my 2012 was different than my 2011 and that my life in Korea was starting to change, forget about learning the culture, building a website, or winning awards: it was all about the hill climb. This time I was carrying twenty fewer pounds and a better attitude. I gladly participated in the bullhorn-led warm-up calisthenics, which now seemed not at all odd. I made the summit in the middle of the pack, ahead of even a couple of my younger team members, including Eduardo, whom I teased mercilessly as he huffed to the top. When we arrived at the grilled duck lunch, at the same open-air restaurant as the year before, my boss invited me to sit with the other executives at the head table. I was handed a microphone and encouraged to make a toast. I drew cheers and laughter with a little butchered Korean. On the drive home afterward, I thought, “That was fun.”

17

BYE, BYE, BABY

With the summer of 2012 coming, Rebekah and I found ourselves in a hotel room in London with her parents next door. They were celebrating their fortieth anniversary with their first trip to the motherland. Rebekah is the only member of her family not born in New Zealand; the rest are Kiwis. Rebekah’s father, mother, and older brother and sister came to the U.S. in 1976 so her father could attend a seminary in Mississippi. They had, quite literally, never seen a black person in real life before coming to the U.S., and they set down right in the geographic focal point of the U.S. civil rights struggle only a generation after the worst of the mayhem. Although Rebekah’s parents became U.S. citizens and moved to North Carolina long ago, they—especially her mother—maintain ties to their heritage in the British Isles. Rebekah and I joined them and we all packed into a Hyundai station wagon and spent a very fun, very British week driving around England’s Lake District, the Cotswolds, and London.

One night in our hotel room in London, while I was reading, Rebekah told me she was late.

“Late for what?” I asked, not looking up from my computer. “We’re already in for the night.”

“No,” she said, with pantomime exaggeration, “
late
.”

“Oh,” I said. A beat. “Oh! Oh!
Late
late!”

“Yes, my dense husband,” she didn’t say but doubtless thought.

Without telling her parents, Rebekah and I slipped out of the hotel and walked to a nearby drugstore. We scanned the aisle for an early pregnancy test, which this pharmacy kept not only near the birth control but also some very adult toys. One-stop shopping, I thought.

We returned to our hotel room and Rebekah took the test. She came out of the bathroom smiling a smile I’d not seen before. It seemed to have a mind of its own: unrestrained, dancing, laughing nervously, animated by the joy of what the little white stick had just told her. The test was positive. I was instantly overwhelmed. I thought I didn’t show it, but Rebekah told me later I did a poor job hiding it. Rebekah was setting the mental clock ahead about nine months; our baby would be born, God willing, in January 2013. I was setting the mental clock ahead eighteen years: I’d be sixty-eight when our baby entered college. “Welcome,” the chirpy university representative would say to me as we dropped off our son or daughter in 2031. “And you’re the grandfather?”

The hard part was keeping the secret from the grandparents-to-be for the next few days of the vacation. Because of the high risk of first-trimester miscarriages, we decided not to tell anyone for several weeks. We needed a code name to refer to our unborn baby. We found one of those websites that compares your baby’s size to produce at certain weeks during the pregnancy. The first time we checked in, at four weeks, the site told us that our child was as big as a poppy seed. Not only did this blow our minds and
illustrate the magnificence of God’s work, it gave us a name: we’d call our unborn baby “Poppy.”

Back in Seoul, Rebekah took a blood test at the U.S. embassy medical unit that confirmed her pregnancy and estimated the due date at January 24, 2013. We had to find a Korean ob-gyn, because the embassy didn’t have one. Our doctor recommended a female Korean ob-gyn named Dr. Choi, who was located just off base and spoke English.

Our first visit to Dr. Choi revealed that she was an ob-gyn
and
plastic surgeon. Korean pragmatism. It simply makes sense to have the doctor who delivers your baby do your tummy tuck afterward. Of course, this odd-to-us combination put us off, in the way that you never want to eat at a sushi-and-ribs restaurant. It usually means they don’t do either well.

But we didn’t have a lot of choice. Dr. Choi’s English was capable and well-meaning, but she did not have what Westerners expect in a bedside manner. In the U.S. we shop for doctors, rate them online, and treat them like service providers. We want information and engagement and to be treated like intelligent equals. We want to know what our doctors are doing before they do it. In Korea, patients rarely ask questions of doctors, as they are near the top of the Confucian hierarchy. You simply do what they say. My wife’s Korean coworkers at the U.S. embassy would come back from their doctors with bags full of pills. “What are those?” my wife would ask. “I don’t know,” the Koreans would say. “The doctor just said to take them.” This creates a culture clash when U.S. embassy personnel are referred to Korean specialists. They’ve reported Korean doctors walking out of the room when the Americans start asking questions.

As such, Korean doctors don’t always explain to the patient what’s coming next. In one of our early follow-up visits to Dr. Choi, we were sitting at her desk, looking at the photocopied
handouts she gave us regarding prenatal care. Then Dr. Choi said, “Come in here,” and led us to a room next to her office without telling us where we were going or what was going to happen there. In the room was an exam table tilted up at an angle and fitted with foot stirrups. “Get on, please, and take off underwear,” Dr. Choi told Rebekah, smiling. “Okay,” we realized, “it’s some kind of exam.”

As Rebekah complied, she started to ask, “What are you . . .” Dr. Choi then began doing two things simultaneously: giving instructions on what Rebekah should do during our baby’s delivery that sounded very important while probing Rebekah with a cold and uncomfortable scope.

In the next moment a color television hanging on the wall flickered on, showing a wet, pinkish scene. It took us a second, but we realized with shock that we were looking at Rebekah’s innermost thoughts, live. I gasped. Rebekah grabbed my hand. Meanwhile, Dr. Choi was chatting amiably about contractions and pushing, all the while guiding her
camera
scope on its appointed rounds. It was one of the most surreal—if medically fascinating—experiences either of us had had.

By the end of summer, Rebekah’s two-year posting to Seoul was nearing its end. Several months earlier, the bid list for Rebekah’s next tour had come out. It became clear to us that if Rebekah was going to remain in the Foreign Service, this was going to be our routine every two years: seeing the list of all the places we might be sent next, angling to find the best city and job for Rebekah, trying to find something for me, and praying for a positive outcome.

We initially thought I would spend only two years at Hyundai in Seoul, to coincide with Rebekah’s two-year embassy posting, but now my job was looking more promising. And with his offer of letting me work from the U.S. when Rebekah was there, Mr.
Lee told us that Hyundai wanted to keep me for another couple of years. I had gotten to that point in my job where I had started to understand how to do it, had seen the things that needed to be done, and realized it would take more than two years to do them. Rebekah and I thought and prayed long and hard on it, and we decided that I’d sign on for another two years. The key was figuring out where Rebekah would work next. It turned out that the Foreign Service doesn’t allow first-tour officers to do consecutive postings in the same country, so the ideal solution—another Seoul tour—was out. We contemplated other options: Rebekah would bid on a one-year posting in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan that would be “linked,” or followed by, another two-year posting back in Seoul. This would keep us together for two of the following three years. The downside? Well, the intense amount of daily danger in any of those three countries—while pregnant—and the isolation of effectively being a prisoner in a heavily fortified U.S. compound subject to enemy shelling. She bid on the combination posting but lost out on the Iraq job she was shooting for. In hindsight, thank God.

There was nothing suitable or available in nearby China or Japan, so our next best open job that Rebekah was qualified to apply for was in Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, a six-and-a-half-hour plane ride from Seoul. Years ago Rebekah had been to Jakarta on a short business trip. My only impression of the country came from the film
The Year of Living Dangerously
, which was not exactly upbeat. Rebekah put in a bid for an economics officer’s job in Jakarta.

After several months of anxious waiting, the news came: the State Department granted our wish and gave Rebekah Jakarta. It was a terrific job: Rebekah would be an economics officer with a portfolio in science. No more drudgery in the embassy’s visa window. In her second Foreign Service tour, Rebekah would be
working on vital issues in a bilateral relationship with a key strategic ally.

Rebekah would be sent back to Washington for several months to learn Indonesia’s main language, Bahasa, and study up on her new country and job. She would also be pregnant and without her husband. But she had friends in Washington and her parents lived in North Carolina. We told ourselves we’d manage with Skype. And I would be joining her in Washington from Christmas 2012 until May of 2013, thanks to the telecommuting deal my boss had graciously arranged. It worked out perfectly: I would be with Rebekah for the birth and first four months of our baby’s life, before I had to return to Korea. After that, we’d “commute” as frequently as possible between Seoul and Jakarta.

This all looked good on paper; we thought we’d planned out every eventuality. We figured being separated would be tough but manageable. We knew plenty of ex-pat married couples who pulled it off, even for years. We told ourselves we were doing it for our family’s future. Probably the greatest benefit of the ex-pat life is that it frequently comes with no housing expenses: either the U.S. government or your foreign employer pays for housing. That’s why it’s so seductive for some Americans and why, like us, they’re willing to trade what seems like just a little time away from family and friends, even from each other, for financial rewards.

With Rebekah leaving Korea at the end of August—and taking Chairman with her!—I was getting kicked off the comfortable U.S. military base where we had lived for the past two years. I had to find housing in Seoul “on the economy,” as the U.S. government phrase goes. I knew I’d be able to find a fine, modern apartment in Itaewon, the most international of Seoul neighborhoods, which abuts the U.S. base. What broke my heart was losing access to the base and shopping rights at the PX and
commissary. The base was my American refuge, my comfort food. Now that would be gone.

I could get our friends who still lived on base to sign me on as a guest, but there was no way I could keep PX and commissary rights: the U.S. military took away my ration card when Rebekah left. So that meant I had to stock up on U.S. goods on my last days on base. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Korean products; I used some. But if I wanted any U.S. products, the prices on the Korean economy were exorbitant. A $2 box of Quaker Oats at the little store in Itaewon that sold some U.S. goods cost $12. I could order U.S. goods online and have them shipped to the embassy, but that would have required one of Rebekah’s coworkers to lug a big box back to the base and sign me on as a guest so I could pick it up. It was much easier and less of an imposition on others if I just bought what I needed for the next two years at the PX and commissary while I still could and took it to my new apartment.

If I was planning on being at Hyundai until October 2014, I had to figure out how much stuff I’d need. I checked how long it took me to go through a roll of toilet tissue, for instance. It turned out to be one week per roll, my research showed, so I multiplied that by 104 and added 20 percent to allow for unanticipated gastric events, and bought that many rolls of toilet paper. I did the same for toothpaste, shaving cream, deodorant, and all my toiletries. I assembled a decent-sized pharmacy of almost any over-the-counter medication I thought I’d need. I also bought a fifty-inch flat-screen TV and a bunch of electrical transformers to run all my media, appliances, and lamps, because Korea operates on 220 volts, not 110 volts like the U.S. Basically, I had assembled a Little PX in my apartment overlooking the bustling Korean neighborhood of Itaewon, and could have run a fine black market.

Thus established, I got on a plane with Rebekah at the end of August 2012 and we flew together back to the States. Hyundai
allowed me to work from Washington for a couple weeks while I helped Rebekah get set up and to see how this telecommuting arrangement would work come January. The two weeks back in D.C. were wonderful. We ate at our favorite restaurants, saw family and friends, and introduced Chairman to America. We had to explain his Korean commands several times at dog parks. My team and I spent the two weeks sending documents back and forth as we prepared for the big Paris motor show and the unveiling of our revolutionary hydrogen fuel cell car and the surprise announcement that Hyundai was returning to racing, also set for the Paris show.

At the end of the two weeks, Rebekah and Chairman dropped me off at Dulles International Airport. Amid tears, we told each other I’d be back for Christmas and the birth of our child, and that three and a half months apart wasn’t so long. We could do this, we said. I gave Rebekah one last hug, and the bump in her belly pressed into my stomach. I gave Poppy a little squeeze and turned to walk into the terminal. Rebekah got back in our car and drove off as Chairman watched me through the window. “Doesn’t feel right,” I remember thinking. Now, like my team leader Ben, I was a goose daddy, or
gireogi appa
.