Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (32 page)

Second, my heart burst with love and admiration for Rebekah. I had never seen anybody do anything more amazing, scary, dangerous, and heroic than Rebekah had just done. In many ways it cast any and all accomplishments I’d gathered in my life into pale relief. What had I possibly done to equal that? Write a front-page story? By the time I left journalism, robots were writing newspaper stories. I had never—would never—take on such a months-long, risky, constantly burdensome, and selfless task as Rebekah had when she became pregnant. I was in Korea for months five through eight of Rebekah’s pregnancy, and she always wanted to put on a good face for me on Skype, so I thought her pregnancy was going swimmingly, completely unaware of all the things pregnant women—even in healthy pregnancies—deal with: the perpetual exhaustion; the suppressed immune system leading to more colds and sinus infections; the shifting baby pressing on Rebekah’s round ligament (her what?), causing the occasional stabbing abdominal pain; and the utterly random, mysterious pains pregnant women wake up with in the mornings and that stick around for days before disappearing. Adding to Rebekah’s heroism was this fact: she gets awful migraines. Debilitating, three-day, can’t-move,
can’t-stand-light, vomiting migraines. Has for years. She’s tried every possible prophylaxis to little effect. The one thing that works is a drug called Relpax. If Rebekah feels a migraine coming on and gets to her Relpax fast enough, it frequently—but not always—stops the pain before it can spread from the point behind her eye or up her neck to envelop her head in a blinding agony. But here’s the rub: pregnant women can’t take Relpax. So, during her pregnancy, much of it spent by herself, when Rebekah felt a migraine coming on, she couldn’t reach for the one thing that might stop it. Imagine knowing that relief was within your grasp—seeing it on your medicine cabinet shelf—and being unable to take it because it may harm the child you’re carrying. Instead, you simply have to accept the fact you’ve got three days of misery ahead of you, with only largely ineffective Tylenol in the offing. That’s called selflessness. This, to me, was awesome, as in: I was full of awe. I felt utterly, eternally bound to her. Single people are always told by parents that having children puts life into perspective. Part of what they mean is the way it binds the parents together in ways unknowable before the pregnancy and even unknown to their children.

In the hours right after Annabelle was born, Rebekah was taken to her room and began the arduous healing process from the cesarean. Nurses brought the baby to our room and we took our first family pictures and called Rebekah’s mom and dad and . . .
Chairman!

We had totally forgot about Chairman, who had been in his crate for about fourteen hours by this point. I raced home and heard him barking, hoarsely, from outside. Once I got inside, I saw that poor Chairman had soiled himself. I let him out of his crate without thinking and his poo-soaked Labrador tail spattered the apartment’s walls like Jackson Pollock attacking a canvas. Jackson Poo-lock, we called him. It was hard not to laugh. A fine preparation for what was ahead of us, I thought.

Soon enough, Rebekah’s mom and dad arrived to see their first grandchild. Then Rebekah and Annabelle came home, Chairman met and sniffed his new baby sister, and we set up our little family.

I worked hard to be a new father and found myself surprised by some of what I would later realize were the no-duh moments of parenting. (“Wait a minute. You mean we have to give her a bath
every
night?”) I also worked hard to be Hyundai’s head of global PR. I stayed in touch with my team and other colleagues back in Korea through a daily dump of e-mails that arrived in my in-box overnight, sent by my colleagues in Korea. One morning, I opened a devastating e-mail from Eduardo: He was leaving Hyundai. My man Friday, my trusted navigator of Korean culture and corporate life, my good friend. Leaving. In any workplace, you can typically count your true allies on one hand. As the only American at Hyundai, they were even more precious. And now I was losing one.

Eduardo was getting married and thinking about joining his wife’s family business. Or he was considering buying wholesale hotel supplies and retailing them to hotels. Or anything besides Hyundai and the
chaebol
life. Eduardo had been with Hyundai for a little more than two years and had become a trusted part of our team. He was smart and savvy and could negotiate a sharp deal with outside vendors, such as website designers. Thanks to his international childhood and excellent language skills (Korean, English, and Spanish), he had a bright future at Hyundai. I could easily see him as a manager at one of our overseas affiliates in a few years. By the time Eduardo was in his fifties, it was not impossible to see him as a president of Hyundai Motor Spain or the like.

But that was just the point. One day Eduardo came into my office and summed up his frustration with the
chaebol
life. “Sir,”
he said, “I know what my salary’s going to be twenty years from now.” For generations of Koreans who grew up in the privation of the 1950s, the 1960s, and even 1970s, this knowledge was comfort. They knew that once they managed to get hired by Hyundai or Samsung or one of the other
chaebol
, they were set for life, assuming they didn’t commit a massive screwup. Whole lives were planned around this fact, and offspring were encouraged to follow the same arc of security and prestige. Hyundai’s slogan for a time was “Hyundai for life.” It was more than a tagline meant to sell cars. It was an accurate description of the lives of generations of Koreans.

But it was not for Eduardo. Eduardo was a natural entrepreneur, not a company man. In university, he’d run a couple of pop-up bars, haggling with beer distributors as a twenty-year-old. He wasn’t sure exactly what was next for him after Hyundai, but it would be something more on his own terms.

I was in Washington when Eduardo left Hyundai. In his good-bye e-mail, he wrote: “Sir, when you first came, I was going through a rough time . . . and I was in hell. However talking to you and hanging out with you was sort of a vacation for me. Felt like going to States for a few minutes. I was your right hand, but in a way, you have given me a lot of support too.”

He concluded: “I sincerely hope that Rebekah and Annabelle will always be healthy and right next to you . . . I also wish you become a president somewhere, so you could give me a job when I go bankrupt.”

Without realizing it, Eduardo, by quitting Hyundai and striking out for the territory ahead, was a symbol of what Korea must become in order to launch the next chapter of its remarkable growth story. Eduardo might become the very guy whom President Park and Mayor Park both described when they talked about the need for Korean entrepreneurs to start their own businesses.
Eduardo was aiming to become, probably without thinking of it, the vanguard of the next chapter of Korea’s great growth story—and possibly an answer to its midlife crisis.

Only a few years earlier, I had scoffed at the idea of having a midlife crisis of my own. As a young-feeling bachelor with a great job, my own house, and a 6-speed, 270-horsepower car, to me, my forties and fifties were going to be nothing more than the next decades, hopefully with a little more money. Unmarried, childless, the stakes were low. I had little to lose and therefore little to fear. I knew I wouldn’t live forever, but such ghoulish thoughts rarely crossed my mind. I was focused on the next home improvement I’d make, the next story I’d write, the next date I’d go on. I was moving forward, I suppose, but denying an end. Now, as a new father, I had everything to lose. But it was more than that. The birth of my child not only marked the beginning of her life but, in a real and meaningful way, the beginning of the end of mine.

The late Christopher Hitchens wrote that, upon seeing his baby son, he realized, “I knew at once that my own funeral director had suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage.” My reaction to Annabelle’s birth wasn’t quite as morbid as that, but I was hit with an unexpected and instant gut punch of mortality—mine. It lingers to this day and I suspect it will forever. Part of this comes from being an older dad, but a larger part, I think, comes from finally, after all these years, really having something to live for. I’ve come to realize that parents wish for immortality just as they did when they were single, but for different reasons. Now it’s so they can spend forever with their children. My faith teaches of eternal life with God through the salvation of Christ, and the Bible speaks of maintaining our identities in heaven; Moses and Elijah, long dead, appeared to some of the apostles during Jesus’s transfiguration on the mountain. I want more than anything to spend eternity with my wife and child, and there is biblical hope
to believe I will, but for now I am stuck in this failing corporeal body in this fallen world, and I am occasionally lashed with the horror that one day I’ll lose everything that matters to me. Losing a house? A car? A job? Now utterly meaningless by comparison. This is the other part of the perspective you always hear parents talking about. If anyone asked, I’d encourage prospective parents to have children earlier than I did, not necessarily because you’ll have more energy—you will—but so you can spend more time with them. Barely a week goes by that I don’t catch myself silently watching Annabelle playing, or eating, or doing nothing and think, “I wish I just had ten more years with you.”

When I let these silent thoughts slip into words, Rebekah, in her typically straightforward way, tells me: “You have trouble with the whole ‘circle of life’ thing.”

But, oh, how baby Annabelle chased those dreaded moments away. Before we had our baby, one of our friends gave us some lasting advice, which I pass along to every expectant parent. “Everyone tells you how hard it is to have a baby, and it is,” she said. “But no one ever tells you how much fun it is.” Rebekah and I had always laughed a lot; it is one of the best parts of our marriage. But we never laughed so much until we had Annabelle. She’s a ham and a crack-up by nature, which was probably inevitable, given her parentage. She got the most giggles as an infant, it seemed, by presenting me with a fully loaded, pestilent diaper when it was my turn to change her. She’d lie there on her changing table, laughing and gurgling away as I hazmatted the evil thing to the diaper bin. “Yuck it up now, laughing girl,” I’d tell her. “In about thirty years, you’ll see how much fun it is changing Daddy’s diapers.”

And even the difficulties she had learning to sleep made for unforgettable moments. Annabelle wouldn’t sleep in her crib. Just wouldn’t. She wanted to be near us. By way of a solution, we took
the mattress from her Pack ’n Play and put it on one of the beds in the apartment, shoved up against the headboard and wall. We piled pillows at the bottom, safeguarding her on three sides. Then we lay down next to her on the bed, which soothed her. I usually wrapped my arm around her—she curled up right inside my forearm and biceps—and pulled our faces close together. We’d both go to sleep with her quiet, warm breath brushing my face.

After four sweet but sleep-deprived months in Washington with my wife and new baby girl, it came time for me to return to Seoul. Rebekah still had three months of leave from the State Department remaining before she had to fly to her new posting in Jakarta in August, separating us again, so there was no point in extending the separation at the front end. So before I flew back to Korea, we took Chairman to live with Rebekah’s mom and dad in North Carolina; we called it his summer camp. Then Rebekah, Annabelle, and I boarded a plane to Seoul. It was Annabelle’s first transpacific flight, at four months.

I didn’t know how I would be greeted at headquarters after my “vacation in America,” as I had been told some back in Korea were calling it. About a month into my four-month telecommute in the U.S., I started to sense a distance growing between me and my team. It was understandable, given the fourteen-hour time difference and the fact that our working hours overlapped only early in my morning or late in my night. The weekly teleconferences with team leadership tapered off as I began to feel I was inconveniencing them by forcing them to sit around a speakerphone and keep me up to speed.

I hadn’t realized at the time—or, more likely, hadn’t wanted to realize—what damage my four-month telecommute could do to the crucial force of bonding that holds together every Korean team. Sacrifice, willing or otherwise, is always called on—more from the culture than the company—from every team member
for the greater good of the team as a whole. I’d seen the resentment during my two-week vacations. But this, I hoped, was different. I’d still be working, just on the other side of the world. Truth was, however, no matter how much work I was doing, I was not physically part of the daily life of my team or of headquarters. The news that I was going to work in America for four months was at first greeted with shock—no one had ever heard of Hyundai doing this before—and then, understandably growing resentment. Some of my colleagues used the opportunity to carp about my special treatment.

Before returning to Korea, I turned to Jinho, my trusted adviser at work. In Korean fashion, Jinho was direct. He told me that if he had been offered the same deal, he would have refused, even though it would have meant missing the birth of his child and leaving his wife on her own. Such is the expected commitment to company. At the time I thought it unnecessarily harsh and particularly Korean. But now, with a few more years of business life under my belt, it’s hard for me to imagine how many other companies, anywhere in the world, would allow one of their executives to do what I did.

The idea of teleworking boomed with the explosion of high-speed Internet. We were told we would all have a perfect work-life balance, that flexibility was the future and rigidity and routine were the past. We were told that the need for workers to gather in one place every day was an idea as archaic as the Industrial Revolution. Turns out not quite and not for everybody. At about the same time I was not-quite-launching Hyundai’s telework experiment, Marissa Mayer was taking over at Yahoo and ending telework at the company. She talked about the need for face-to-face contact and in-person collaboration. And, let’s be honest, a dozen or thousands of miles from our offices, we probably work a little less and a little less hard. If there’s slack, we will take it.