Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (3 page)

“No!” they shouted back.

“Is this our spirit?”

“Yes!” they replied.

I had been warned and had read about the Korean drinking culture. Indeed, during my first interview with Hyundai, I was asked, “Do you drink alcohol? Your team will want to show respect to you by giving you drinks.” I told my Korean interviewer that I enjoy a good beer and, I glibly added, I was sure there were other ways my team could demonstrate their respect.

I was wrong.

By most reports, Koreans drink more alcohol than anyone on earth. By a lot. According to a 2014 European survey, Koreans downed an average of eleven shots of alcohol per week. This made them number one in the world by more than double their closest rival, Russia, where the average citizen downs only five shots per week.

Problem number one: I myself am not really a drinker. Neither is my wife. That is to say, we don’t get drunk, for reasons of faith and health. One of my favorite things to do is go out with a couple of buddies and, over the course of a three- or four-hour evening, enjoy two, maybe three excellent beers—say, a pale ale or an IPA or a copper ale. A Korean executive once asked me exasperatedly, “Don’t you drink?” “I drink beer,” I replied. “Ha!” he spat. I soon came to understand Koreans don’t really consider beer alcohol, so skewed, by American grown-up standards, has perception become within the Korean drinking culture.

Each guest at our welcome dinner table had a shot glass for
soju
and a larger glass—about the size of a bathroom sink glass—for beer. Both were kept full. And then emptied. And then filled, and so on. In Korea, it is polite to pour the drinks for your tablemates and considered rude if their glasses go empty. You pour either with two hands on the bottle or the right hand on the bottle and the left hand respectfully touching your right elbow. The person receiving the drink holds their glass respectfully with two hands. Then they return the pour. My new teammates would either toast “
Geonbae,
” which means “To your health,” or “
Wehayo,
” which simply means “To your . . .” (fill in the blank: to your health, to your business success, whatever).

Pretty soon, everyone was shouting “One shot!” and downing the
soju
shots. As the welcome dinner progressed and everyone got drunker and more red-faced, variations on the one shot
appeared: the “love shot,” where two drinkers loop arms, their faces close together, and down the shot; the shot where you prove you’ve downed your shot by turning the glass upside down over your head; and the Korean “bomb shot,” called a boilermaker in the States, where you drop your shot of
soju
into your beer, down it all in one drink, and rattle the glasses to prove they’re empty while the rest of your drinking mates cheer.

The ringleader was Ben, my team leader. Self-confident and tall, Ben was, like most Hyundai men his age, a Hyundai lifer and a patriot. “First job, last job,” they would all say. Once, when asked why he liked working for Hyundai, Ben said, “It makes me proud to help make Korea strong.” Ben was the entertainer in chief for our global PR team; in terms of drinking, he was our enabler in chief. Like many Koreans in business, Ben had taken an English first name because Koreans fear their Korean names are too difficult for Westerners to pronounce. Ben and I were about the same age and, despite our radically different backgrounds, shared a couple of touchstones, including eighties rock. His favorite band was Queen.

As a team leader, it was Ben’s job to execute Hyundai executives’ orders, wherever they may come. Imagine team leaders like army sergeants, carrying out an officer’s orders. If the Hyundai executive—in this case, my boss—orders and hosts the dinner, it is the team leader’s job to carry out his commanding officer’s orders. But that’s the Western way of looking at it. I would come to understand that Ben thought of himself like a father or a big brother to his subordinate team members. Ben’s attitude was just one of the many profound ways the concept of Confucianism—Korea’s de facto national religion—weaves its way into every strand of Korean life.

Ben was also emblematic of Korean working stiffs in another way: He was a
gireogi appa
, or “goose daddy.” In the way that
male geese fly far from their nests for long periods of time to gather food for their families, as the folklore goes, Korean
gireogi
appa
sacrifice time with their families in order to provide for them by furthering their careers with Hyundai. This means living on opposite sides of the world, sometimes for years, missing births, anniversaries, and huge chunks of childhoods, save for a couple short visits per year, to take the job Hyundai has assigned. In Ben’s case, his family had followed him to a Hyundai posting years earlier in the U.S. and stayed behind when he was recalled to Korea. His computer screensaver at work showed the current time in his family’s U.S. time zone. He saw his wife and kids once, maybe twice a year.

For this evening’s activities, Ben’s job was to incite heavy drinking and high-volume merriment, and he ran quite a show. There was yelling, and lots of it. Laughing, and cross-talking, and team members mocking each other, and “
Wehayo!
” shouted three times in a hearty toast, and people running around the table to pour
soju
for each other—and especially for my boss, Mr. Lee—who sat quieter but still amused and fully invested—to show their respect for him. For some reason, one of my team members showed her affection for us by joyfully pinching us with two fingers, like a crab’s claw.

At one point I asked Rebekah, “Have you ever seen anything like this before?” The last time I had seen anyone drinking this way was during quarter-beer nights at West Virginia University in the 1980s. But at least Rebekah knew what was coming.

“Sure,” she said. “Remember, I lived in Asia for four years.”

Rebekah was one of those rare American kids who, when they graduate from college, can’t wait to get out of the country. Not because she hated America but because she felt claustrophobic. From her earliest adulthood, Rebekah sought overseas adventure. Right out of college, she found a job with a Lebanese trading
company in Hong Kong. After two years cavorting with other young, glamorous ex-pats, she was not ready to come home yet. So she went to Sendai, Japan, for two years, where she taught English to Japanese high school girls, bridging the cultural gap in inventive ways, such as leading them in a production of
Pippi Longstocking
.

Rebekah understood that, throughout East Asia, drinking is not only a social pastime; it is a tool for conducting business and for developing tight bonds among employees and business partners. And so here was my almost, not quite introduction to Korean salaryman culture. Before I worked in Korea, I held many of the classic white American stereotypes about Asians: hardworking, good students, quiet, and reserved. More likely to be found in the lab or the orchestra than in politics or sports. Indeed, during my first week at Hyundai, it was remarkable how quiet office life was. Most workers stayed at their desks working or huddled in quiet meetings. There were few desk-side conversations that did not relate to work, little laughing, and none of the loud cross-newsroom bonhomie I enjoyed at the
Post
.

And yet here, outside of work on a Friday night, I was surrounded by a dozen cavorting Korean party animals. Unlike in the U.S., with its more relaxed offices, work culture and after-work behavior weren’t all that different. In Korea, I came to learn, you behave one way at work and another outside of work, and often the two behaviors are jarringly extreme.

Just when I thought the commotion in our private room had reached its pitch, someone pushed a button on the table summoning the waitress and
more meat
was ordered. A guy with tongs humped in another bucket of red-hot coals and set it into the recess in the middle of the table as the waitress fixed a grill over the coals and plopped down more pieces of red uncooked sirloin, slicing them up with a pair of scissors while we watched. While
smoke rose from the sizzling beef, and sparking hot coals were hauled perilously close to bare skin, and there was laughing and jostling and amid all this commotion, I hadn’t noticed that one of my team members had wheeled in a cart lined with two rows of glasses: a row of full beer glasses holding up a row of full
soju
shot glasses on top, each shot glass balanced on the lips of two glasses.

I was told it was my honor to take the customary metal Korean chopsticks and lightly tap the first shot glass in the row, thereby triggering a chain reaction that would drop each shot glass into a glass of beer, which would then be handed out to all the guests, who would down the bomb shot. I was told it was very tricky and only real Koreans can do it. That was a lie, if a well-intentioned one, as it’s almost impossible
not
to make the chain reaction happen. But after I did it, I was welcomed, in a way, to Korea. Just to make sure we were both properly blooded, Rebekah was required to do her own chain reaction, too. My team members quickly adapted to her presence and welcomed her at the dinner, probably understanding I didn’t know the custom.

After two hours of this saturnalia, we were shocked to discover that we had completed only round one of the evening. Round two is
noraebang
, which means “song room,” which means karaoke. Bright lights, more drinking, and lots of enthusiastic singing.

Problem number two: I don’t really
do
karaoke. And that’s an issue because karaoke is no joke in Asia. Every year, there are reports from the Philippines or Thailand or China or Japan about stabbings because someone was intolerably butchering a version of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” which is an anthem of Asian salarymen—because, I think, Asian salarymen don’t get to do anything their way. In Korea, I came to learn, karaoke is a standard part of an evening’s entertainment, regardless of age, gender, professional, or social status. And everyone has their go-to karaoke song.

We all piled out of the restaurant into the street and walked to a nearby
noraebang
, laughing and talking loudly in Korean and English. We crammed into a windowless room with banquettes. Thick plastic-covered songbooks in English and Korean were handed around. The music started and one of my team members began singing while everyone else started clapping and signing along. Ben ordered
soju
and the action escalated over the next few songs as the strobe lights kicked in and the dancing started.

Naturally, my boss sang “My Way.” I sang a couple of English songs, a little bit of Billy Joel because no Clash was available. After an hour or so, exhausted, bloated from ingesting pounds of grilled meat, head spinning, clothes infused with cigarette smoke and sweat (much of it mine), my wife and I begged out and asked to be driven home. The team was disappointed, but we insisted. Apparently, there could have been a round three in the offing.

Escorted into the mercifully crisp and smoke-free autumn air by the most junior member of the team, Eduardo, we waited for the black Hyundai sedan to take us home. Eduardo was a young Korean, new to Hyundai, who had spent several years growing up outside of Korea. His father, a doctor, practiced overseas and Eduardo had attended American school in Peru and had lived in California. He spoke English like an American without a regional accent. Because of this and his junior status on the team, Eduardo had been assigned by Ben to be my man Friday, as it were. Not only was he to help me with whatever work tasks I needed, but he would also help me schedule maintenance for my car with Korean-speaking mechanics, take emergency phone calls from the gas station when my company credit card no longer worked, and inform me, on the QT and after the fact, why I shouldn’t make self-deprecating jokes in front of my team.

Eduardo became my invaluable Tenzing Norgay. Without
Norgay, Sir Edmund Hillary would never have scaled Everest. Without Eduardo, I never would have come to understand the admittedly small bit of this incredibly complex and ancient culture. And I probably would have been sacked from Hyundai within six months.

While we were waiting for our driver outside the
noreabang
, Eduardo, who always had one foot in Korean culture and the other outside, was apologetic about the whole evening. “Sir,” Eduardo said—he always called me “sir,” and still does—“I’m sorry about all this Korean bullshit.”

“No worries,” I slurred, my temples pounding. I felt like I’d been blown through a jet engine and then used to mop the floor of a frat house the morning after an epic party. Rebekah and I piled into the backseat of the car and slumped together, holding hands. Our silent Korean driver weaved through the endless red brake lights of Seoul traffic, as seemingly heavy at eleven p.m. as it had been in morning rush hour. Through the tinted windows of our sedan we saw sidewalks packed with well-dressed Koreans window-shopping and taking selfies. Dancing videos promoting products and Korean soap operas stretched several stories high on the sides of buildings, turning darkness into a pulsing, multicolored daylight. We caught the iron-filing whiff of
kimchi
exhaust on our driver’s breath. I would try, but I wasn’t sure I was ever going to get used to its smell. Rebekah and I looked at each other with the same question on our faces. Where were we headed?
Home?

2

THREE MIDLIFE CRISES

On my first morning of work at Hyundai, at a little after seven a.m. on a Monday in early October 2010, I walked into the brightly lit, marble-floored multistory atrium of the headquarters lobby. With gleaming new Hyundai and Kia models on raised stands all around me, I stood there mystified, entranced, overwhelmed, the lone Caucasian standing stock-still as hundreds of Koreans streamed around me, like an endless school of fish flowing past a rock stuck in a stream. A young Korean colleague noticed my profound sense of lostness and came over to help. He knew what I was thinking, laughed, and said, in lightly accented English, “Too many Koreans!”