Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (30 page)

As the awful hours passed that night, and the fear coursed through my body and kept surging up in waves of anxiety—it felt like a blackout was impending—I tried to think straight. I didn’t call Rebekah even though it was daytime in Washington, partly because I didn’t want to worry her—there was nothing she could do—but also because I couldn’t stand to speak to her, or to anyone. That’s the wicked nature of the attacks. They fully consume their victims, making it unbearable to do anything besides endure them.

With shaky hands, I called up the website of a local hospital on my phone and programmed the route from my apartment in case I had to show it to a taxi driver or confused neighbor I would have to wake up. All I could do was lie down, pray, keep telling myself it was “only” a panic attack, and wait for the first gray streaks of morning, which I knew, along with the passing hours, would bring relief.

After an interminable wait, day broke and the worst had passed. But now I had another problem.

My flight to Brazil was meant to take off in just a few hours.
I knew bloody well that any corporate culture would have a hard time understanding “Sorry, can’t go: panic attack” as an excuse. I also knew that my attacks could come in multiples, like earthquake aftershocks, and was not about to get into a claustrophobic environment like an airplane for the next twenty-four hours without some help. I knew I could handle the noon flight if I could just get my hands on some Ativan, a powerful, fast-acting drug that stops panic attacks in their tracks and leaves you feeling drained but functional.

My only hope was the U.S. embassy doctor. Our previous embassy doctor had just left Seoul for another posting. He was replaced by a doctor whom Rebekah and I had met only once. And technically, because my wife was no longer posted to the embassy in Seoul, he probably was not supposed to treat me. I called Ben, my team leader, and spilled it all. I told him I was trying to get the drugs that would allow me to make the trip. But I might not get them. If I couldn’t get them, I couldn’t get on the plane. To his credit, he told me to take care of my health and that he’d explain to our bosses if I couldn’t go. I was grateful.

I called the embassy as soon as the doctor’s office opened. I told the doctor what had happened and, thank God, he understood right away, telling me to come in immediately. He gave me several of the tiny, dot-sized Ativan tablets. The attack had subsided, but I could feel another one lurking. I took two pills, thanked him profusely, went home, and finished packing. Thanks to him, two hours later I slumped into my seat—feeling like a wrung-out dishrag—and took off on a twenty-four-hour trip to Brazil. The Ativan would not leave my side during the entire trip to Brazil; I carried the orange plastic bottle in my pants pocket. I was still on such a knife edge that even the realization that I had accidentally left the pills in my hotel room and was unable to get to them in a matter of minutes could trigger another attack. Once back in
Seoul, I went back on my old meds and will be on them until I die.

Ex-pats have their own
jeong
, even if it may not feel as emotional as Korean
jeong
. There is a sense of bonding among ex-pats of any sort, which explains why immigrant communities form by geography: to build a support system. You find yourself going out of your way to help ex-pats you may not know particularly well. When you’re an ex-pat, away from people who love and care for you and away from safety systems you know how to navigate, the small kindnesses done for you by sympathetic ex-pats feel like winning lottery tickets. I will remember the U.S. embassy doctor’s kindness forever.

Back in the States, Rebekah moved into her eighth month. Her pregnancy was healthy and largely free of problems. There was one thing: our little girl was sitting upright, facing outward. We joked that she was riding around in Mommy’s tummy and trying to look out at the world. More seriously, if she did not turn, she would have to come out by cesarean. We were agnostic on delivery method, other than wanting the most help, the latest technology, and the best drugs. But natural versus cesarean made no philosophical difference to us. The thing is, a cesarean delivery is major surgery: essentially, the mother is cut in half and complications can happen.

To take our minds off that, we focused on settling on a name for our little girl. Like all expectant parents, we sent each other a stream of “What do you think about . . . ?” e-mails. One day in Seoul, as I was driving around at lunchtime, I flipped to one of the two English-language radio stations. One of the hosts was named Annabelle.

Huh, I thought. Annabelle Ahrens. Sounds nice together. The more I said it to myself, the more I liked it. It was traditional but not musty, and it would give our daughter some flexibility as she
grew and her personality formed. She could be called Annabelle, or Anna, or Belle or even Bella. I bounced it off Rebekah and she liked it right away. Now all we needed was a middle name.

We wanted our little girl to have a middle name that expressed our faith and what we prayed would be hers, too. We considered the so-called virtue names found in the New Testament—Faith, Hope, Charity, and so on—but thought them too common and old-fashioned.

I was in my Seoul apartment one December evening after work, talking to my wife on the phone. I was looking out of my fifth-floor picture windows across my neighborhood of Itaewon. Because of its proximity to the U.S. military base, Itaewon was once known only as Seoul’s red-light district. Some of that remains along a steep side street called Hooker Hill and its attendant seedy bars. In recent years, however, Itaewon had begun gentrifying, adding Nike, Adidas, and other Western retail outlets, along with high-end Korean skin care stores, restaurants, bars, and coffee shops, all of which crowd the
ajumma
s and
ajusshi
s (older Korean women and men) who haul their hand-pulled, wheeled souvenir trollies to their sidewalk spots each day, creating a vibrant street bazaar. The result of all this commerce was a dense packing of brightly colored signs like you see in photographs of most big Asian cities, some in Korean, some in English, lighting up the Itaewon night. From my apartment window, signs flashed for “Rio” and “DVD” and “Mr. Kebab” and “Richard Copycat” and “Cozy Massage.”

Speaking to Rebekah, I idly scanned the signs until my eyes lit on one: “Café Jubilee.” It was not a massage parlor, thankfully. It was a chocolatier.

I started laughing.

“What is it?” Rebekah asked.

“What do you think about ‘Annabelle Jubilee’?”

Rebekah howled with laughter. “I like it! I really like it!”

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Jubilee is a regular, special year of universal pardon and forgiveness of debts. In ancient Israel, as recorded in Leviticus, Jubilee occurs every fiftieth year, and slaves and prisoners were to be set free. In the American South, January 1, 1863, became known as Jubilee Day as the Emancipation Proclamation became law. Many evangelical churches adopted “Jubilee” into their names to expand the word from earthly to heavenly meaning. Rather than a forgiveness of earthly debt, the true Jubilee is God’s forgiveness of our sins through the redemption of Christ. The name was Christian, and it was Southern, as are Rebekah and I. It was genteel and it was pleasantly quaint. Even if you didn’t know the word’s history, as a name for a baby girl, it made people laugh with delight. It was a happy name. She would be Annabelle Jubilee Ahrens.

19

SANG MOO WAYGOOKIN

My two-year contract with Hyundai was coming to an end and there were some things I needed if I was going to sign another deal. Hyundai had made it pretty clear they wanted me to stay another two years, so I felt like I had a position of strength going into negotiations. Neither of my predecessors, a Canadian and a Brit, had risen above the rank of director despite several years in the job. To show that a non-Korean could rise at Hyundai headquarters, I wanted a promotion to vice president. I felt I had earned it and it would send a good message to the media.

There was another thing I needed. Shortly after I came to Hyundai, I learned I was not quite the boss of my global PR team. Below me was Ben, my team leader. Above him, though, was not me, but Mr. Lee, my boss. I was to the side between the two of them, a horizontal line in an otherwise vertical organizational chart. Like my predecessors in the job, I did not have evaluation
authority over my team—the stick to the carrot. This meant that, in order to get done the things that I wanted, I either had to persuade and cajole my team or I needed an order from my boss. My team was polite and helpful to me, and a number of them went way above and beyond to help me through rough patches in my three years at Hyundai, but even the most helpful ones knew the score. Not that it mattered to me, but no one bowed to me in the morning when they came into the office, as other team members did to their Korean bosses. I didn’t realize where I stood in the organization before my hire because I simply didn’t think to ask. I didn’t know how companies were structured or how Asian companies dealt with foreigners. I wasn’t the only one surprised by my station. My boss didn’t realize it, and neither did some other executives. But not long after I discovered my position, I told myself: “If I re-up for another two years with Hyundai, if I am going to be a real executive, this is something that’s going to change. I need job performance evaluation authority with my team.” Without this, my authority had fewer teeth.

To make my case, I crafted an impressive PowerPoint presentation: my PowerPoint skills were finely honed by now. I made my case in sequential, logical order. I rehearsed at home what I would say to the head of HR in our meeting. Then the big day came. I marched in with my PowerPoint and assertively but respectfully made my case. The head of HR listened politely and nodded through the overlong presentation. Once I was finished—master negotiator!—the head of HR said, “The vice chairman has already approved your promotion to vice president.” And my other requests, including evaluation authority, were granted. I had not heard of another non-Korean at Hyundai who had evaluation authority over Koreans.

It was humbling, in a number of ways. I correctly felt my puffery deflated. But I also was grateful for the vice chairman’s act.
This told me that the man who had hired me felt I was doing a good job. Two years after my cold-shower transition from journalism to PR, from newspaper to corporate culture, from America to Korea, I was succeeding. I felt loyal to the vice chairman and to the company.

Was this it? Was this the sign that I’d navigated the shoals of middle-age transition and made the leap to my next life?

My promotion, coincidentally, helped solve, for some, a two-year-old problem: what to call me. Quite charmingly, after I was promoted to vice president, or
sang moo
in Korean, some of my team members simply took the first sound of my first name (remember, Koreans substitute the
P
sound for
F
), added it to my title, and started calling me “Poo Sang Moo,” which sounds like a pet name I might call my wife.

However, the I’m-on-a-roll-at-work feeling didn’t last for long.

A month after I signed my new deal, Hyundai’s PR people were earning their paychecks. Hyundai and Kia announced that about 900,000 cars had been sold in the U.S. and Canada with false mileage estimates on their window stickers. Every U.S. car consumer is familiar with the numbers—Environmental Protection Agency estimates for gas mileage in city, highway, and combined driving. In Hyundai’s case, the numbers for several models were too high by 1 to 2 miles per gallon. Even though every rational car buyer understands the estimates are just that—estimates—and could be achieved only under ideal driving conditions, this would be seen as a breach of trust between Hyundai and its consumers. Furthermore, Hyundai Motor America had aggressively marketed a “4 x 40” campaign: four of its models were rated at 40 miles per gallon on the highway, the highest in the industry. It was embarrassing and potentially disastrous for our brand. A brand’s tenuous hold on its customers is trust.

Immediately, we had a reputation problem. We knew there
would be a further EPA investigation and probably a substantial fine, and of course the class-action lawsuit mills would heave into motion to get their cut. This could seriously damage the two years of progress Hyundai had made in pushing its upmarket ambitions into the public eye. This was more than a stumble over a tree root on a long uphill hike, as the ungrammatical Hyundai newspaper ad had been. This was the sickening feeling of a cliffside path giving way under your feet.

What most consumers don’t know is that the U.S. is just about the only country where the government doesn’t test the mileage of new cars. In other countries, either the government or a government-appointed agent actually drives the new cars, runs tests, and comes up with mileage estimates.

In the United States the EPA issues guidelines for testing and tells the automakers to use the guidelines to determine the mileage estimates on their own. Then the EPA “certifies” those estimates and occasionally randomly tests vehicles to see if the estimates match up.

In the months prior to our announcement, the EPA had been getting complaints from some Hyundai owners that some of our cars were not hitting the window sticker mileage estimates. The EPA did its own tests and found a discrepancy between its results and ours.

Our engineers met with the EPA engineers and the methods were reviewed. On November 2, Hyundai and Kia said that a procedural error had caused the discrepancy and both companies printed new window stickers with the lower mileage estimates. A technical explanation would take pages, but essentially it came down to this: because the EPA doesn’t spell out exactly how all these tests are to be conducted, the agency tells automakers to use “good engineering judgment.” Hyundai engineers did so in one test designed to estimate the impact of tire-rolling resistance,
wind drag, and friction on gas mileage. They made their tests, then made their good-faith judgments and came up with their data. The variables they had to contend with, and judgments they had to make, were legion. In my three-plus years at Hyundai, I saw everyone—engineers, designers, salespeople—pushed hard for results. But I never witnessed anyone cheating or being ordered to cheat or doing it on their own.