Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (34 page)

The doors opened again, the sunlight streamed, and there was the new Sonata. I didn’t say it out loud, but the first thought that popped into my mind was:

“Oh.”

The new Sonata was sitting next to a new Genesis. It was undeniable, for the first time in Hyundai’s history, that these two cars belonged to the same family in the way it is undeniable that all Audis and Benzes belong to the same family. That was good. The new Sonata was handsome. It had strong, sharp lines around its nose and daytime running lights under the headlights that gave it the feel of a European touring car. Its interior resembled the more expensive cabin of the new Genesis. It had new features.
It was superior in every measurable way to its predecessor, in performance, safety, fuel economy, and even price.

And yet . . .

Hyundai’s designers had taken the powerfully arcing “orchid stroke” character line on the previous Sonata’s side—the one that drew comparisons to the Mercedes C-class cars—and flattened it out, Honda-style. The just-over-the-top shiny chrome grille was redesigned into a signature hexagonal shape and changed to brushed chrome to give it a statelier look and so it would fit into the family. Everyone acknowledged the previous Sonata’s styling was polarizing, but it stood out among its bland competitors, such as the Toyota Camry, the Honda Accord, and the Chevrolet Malibu. The buzz around the company was that the previous Sonata, which had wowed the pants off of American motoring journalists and made it a success among American customers, was too wild for Korean customers, who were turning to the more conservative Kia Optima. This is a calculus every global automaker must make, as buyers’ tastes are so varied across the world. Will a new design gain sales in one market but hurt sales in another? I had an uneasy feeling in my stomach about this Sonata. I was afraid that auto writers and customers would see the new Sonata and think that Hyundai had settled back into the pack of its competitors rather than leaping out in front of it. Yes, the new Genesis would be on American roads, but it would be outnumbered by ten times as many of the lower-priced new Sonatas. I was afraid it was the new Sonata, rather than the new Genesis, that customers would think of when they thought of Hyundai. If it didn’t quite feel like slipping back down the hill that Hyundai was trying to climb, it did feel like a rest on a trail-side bench. And that didn’t feel like Hyundai; it was certainly not the experience I’d had during the Hyundai team-building mountain climbs.

22

JAKARTA IS NO SEOUL

On our first day together in Jakarta, Rebekah and I passed through two fortified security gates at the entrance of our apartment compound, greeted the smiling soldier holding a machine gun, and stepped out into the riotous Indonesian morning. It was September just south of the equator, and the sun pushed the temperature past 90 degrees. The humidity clung like a damp wool blanket. We could barely hear each other over the lanes of traffic rushing by—a seemingly endless stream of cars, scooters, and covered three-wheeled buggies known as
bajaj
, powered by howling motorcycle engines. Vehicles zoomed past in a sort of self-regulated, organic flow of moving bumper-to-bumper traffic, obeying a seemingly telepathic, driver-to-driver control system. How does every starling in a murmuration of hundreds know to turn left at the same moment? I don’t know. Same way Indonesian drivers know how to get around Jakarta without constantly bashing into each other. The smell of gasoline exhaust and the
odor of burning wood, likely from smoldering rice husks in fields outside of the city, hung in the air. As we began walking along the broken sidewalk, a green lizard about six inches long scurried out of a hole, scuttled under our feet, and disappeared into another gaping crack.

Rebekah and I looked at each other and laughed, breaking something of a subsurface tension between us. Each of us knew separately that this was going to be our greatest challenge yet as a married couple and, now, as parents to an infant. We had exhaustively talked through all the logistics, planned my first few long weekend visits from Seoul to Jakarta, and gotten everything set up as best we knew how. We had approached this rationally as an obstacle to be hurdled and as a discomfort to be mitigated, much in the way I had stocked up my pantry back in Seoul when forced to leave the plenty of the U.S. military base. We were consciously separating our family by thousands of miles and creating, we acknowledged, a physical distance between us. We knew that. What we had not banked on was the emotional distance.

You don’t see a lot of lizards on the sidewalks of Gangnam. None, actually. Our new friend underfoot was not only a reminder of the vast difference between Seoul and Jakarta; he was one of many points that drove home a big takeaway from living in the Eastern hemisphere: the word “Asia” is almost meaningless. The countries of East Asia can on the surface seem pretty similar to an outsider. After a while you learn of the cultural rifts and historic grievances, along with intense nationalism, that divide Korea, Japan, and China. But once you start comparing East Asia to Southeast or South Asia, “Asia” becomes little more than a gross bucket into which dozens of cultures and more than 2 billion people are wrongly dumped, no more descriptive or insightful about what they are like than “Caucasian” helps you understand the people of North America and Europe.

Seoul has four seasons; Jakarta has two, dry and flooding. Seoul has Confucianism; Jakarta is the capital of the world’s largest Muslim country. Korea is a geographically small land filled with a homogeneous people who speak one language; Indonesia is an archipelago of more than two hundred islands stretching for two thousand miles, filled with three hundred ethnicities and seven hundred languages. At first contact, Koreans can feel overly mannered and a bit distant; Indonesians are instantly artless and familiar. In Seoul, state-of-the-art video displays in store windows enchant sidewalk shoppers. In Jakarta, beggars hold on strings monkeys that dance for coins. Korea is First World; Indonesia is developing Third World. In Seoul, I was a
waygookin
. In Jakarta, I was a
bule
, or white foreigner.

Rebekah embraced most things about Indonesia in a way she did not in Korea. She loved the hot temperature, even if the humidity played havoc with her hair. She loved the smiling warmth of the people. She loved that she wouldn’t be stuck in a visa window for a year, as she’d been at the U.S. embassy in Korea. In Jakarta, Rebekah would be a science and technology officer, with a portfolio that included maritime issues, such as illegal fishing, shark fin poaching, and coral restoration. She would meet with her counterparts in the Indonesian government to advance her government’s position. She was, at last, a real diplomat.

She was also instantly in charge of a household staff.

Ex-pats will often say their favorite part about living in developing countries is the ability to afford household help. But this is an entirely new concept to most Americans, whose only exposure to housing staff is
Downton Abbey
. Through references from U.S. embassy diplomats already in Jakarta and those who were leaving post, even before Rebekah arrived in Jakarta, she’d already hired a live-in nanny for Annabelle, a housekeeper who would come
from nine to five each weekday, and a driver. All for about $700 per month, the going Jakarta market rate. It was our first taste of pricing disparity between the First and Third Worlds.

Tri was our nanny. She was a sweet, smiling single mother in her late twenties who came from a village outside of Jakarta. She had been left by her husband and was the sole earner for her and her son. She would live with us during the week while her mother watched the boy and return home on the weekend. She had the ability to instantly make Annabelle smile. She would be the first person to see our daughter walk, and the first to hear her talk.

Sati was in her early forties and would run the household. She’d shop with money Rebekah gave her, walk Chairman, cook dinner—including dishes for the weekend—do laundry, and clean. Sati had worked for several Western diplomat families and had even gone on vacation with them to watch the children. She, too, lived outside of Jakarta, and had a son and a daughter and a husband who could not find work, making her the family’s breadwinner. She would sometimes ride to and from work in a puttering
bajaj
.

Our driver was Pak Wandi, “Pak” being the polite and familiar Bahasa word for “Mr.” Pak Wandi didn’t have a lot of English, but his knowledge of the streets of Jakarta would best Garmin and Google Maps. Like many Third World megacities, Jakarta, with a population of 11 million, grew organically and without plans. GPS was useless. You navigated by landmark, moving from one neighborhood to the other, counting how many highway overpasses you’d driven beneath and then, when you were pretty sure you were close to your destination, you’d slow the car, pull over, roll down the window, and ask a local. Pak Wandi was a middle-aged Indonesian with a trimmed mustache and a seemingly stern bearing whose face animated into a handsome smile at the sight of Annabelle.

Considering we’d hired them sight unseen, we felt really lucky with Tri, Sati, and Wandi. Our one concern was Tri’s English, or lack of it. Sati’s English was good, but it was Tri who spent the most time with Annabelle during the day. Living as an ex-pat, you learn pretty quickly how to communicate in simple words, gestures, and sketches. Tri fully comprehended what we told her; that wasn’t the problem. We worried that Annabelle’s language skills might develop slowly. In retrospect, this was typical first-time-parent overreaction. Between Rebekah and Rebekah’s embassy friends, Sati and nightly Skype calls with Dad, Annabelle heard plenty of complex English. And besides, she was only nine months old. This wasn’t going to keep her out of Harvard. Her dad’s hillbilly genes would take care of that.

Rebekah’s new home was in a high-security U.S. government housing compound surrounded by a tall brick wall strung with concertina wire, like the U.S. military base back in Seoul. Each time we drove in and out of the compound, the car had to pass through a twelve-foot-high security box made of steel bars with sliding gates front and back as guards used mirrors to look under the car for bombs, then popped the trunk and hood. There is a violent Islamist movement in Indonesia: a 2002 bombing on the resort island of Bali killed more than two hundred. For this reason, and due to the fact that Americans should not drink Indonesian tap water for fear of parasites, Jakarta is designated by the State Department as a “hardship” post, which bumped Rebekah’s salary up a bit.

Inside the compound were about six four-story garden apartments around a driveway and small courtyard planted with towering palm trees that dropped surprisingly heavy six-foot fronds and stunning flowering shrubs that would probably win prizes at garden shows in the U.S. but were run-of-the-mill flora in ridiculously verdant Indonesia. Embassy personnel shared the com
pound with U.S. Marines who guarded the embassy, and every morning at six a.m. jarheads would be out in the courtyard, doing pull-ups and push-ups. In both Seoul and Jakarta, Marines kept my family safe. If those guys wanted to “
Hoo-wah!
” at six in the morning and politely flirt with Rebekah at the embassy, it was fine with me.

Unlike the U.S. base in Seoul, which covered more than six hundred acres and felt like a small town you could walk and drive around in, the compound in Jakarta was the size of two football fields and felt tighter. The broken sidewalks and car fumes outside the complex did not make for pleasant baby strolling or dog walking. So Annabelle and Chairman did lap after lap around the complex driveway led by us, Tri, and Sati.

Rebekah’s apartment had three bedrooms, tile floors, and dark wood cabinets throughout. Built probably during the 1950s, Jakarta’s wet weather had taken its customary toll: the building was streaked with soot and mold on the outside and mildew was an occasional smell. Around the back of the compound, grim, dirty servants’ quarters had been built to accompany the apartments. No one lived in them anymore, but Pak Wandi and the other drivers liked to hang out back there and talk and nap during the day, and Sati, a Muslim, would often use one of the small rooms to pray. The high humidity and frequent, violent cloudbursts combined to create a feeling of general dampness in Jakarta, even when the sun was out.

From time to time, even inside the safety of the walled compound, there were unexpected reminders that my family was living in an authentically tropical climate. During one of my visits from Seoul, I was walking Chairman on a patio at the back of the compound and noticed him quickly lifting his feet, one after the other, like he was walking on hot coals. Before I could figure out why, I felt a sting on an ankle, then another and an
other. I looked down and saw dozens of red ants swarming up my sneakers and socks. They were on Chairman’s paws, too, biting through the fur. If this had been a horror movie, this would have been the part when the camera does a fast zoom out, pulling back to show Chairman and me standing in a surging sea of thousands of biting fire ants. I yanked Chairman out of there and spent the next several minutes washing the red marauders out of his paws.

Given that Jakarta traffic could turn a three-mile trip into a three-hour nightmare, Rebekah was lucky that her new home was only a fifteen-minute walk from the U.S. embassy.

Her whole life, Rebekah had only ever wanted to do one thing: work overseas or in the international sector. The Foreign Service allowed her to do that. Now, in Jakarta, she had one tour under her belt and understood the State Department’s peculiar, often vexing folkways. She had mastered its endless paperwork. She was making good contacts elsewhere in the service and maintained a professional “hallway reputation,” eschewing gossip and bad work habits. In Jakarta she was meeting with high-level Indonesian government officials who worked on science and technology and they regarded her highly, as an emissary from the U.S. government who deserved attention and respect. She would take to her new job with vigor.