Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (7 page)

Now we could move ahead with our next task: all I had to do now was find a job for me in Korea.

It’s a natural transition for journalists to move into what used to be called PR but what we now like to call communications. Same skills—reporting, building source networks, writing, use
of multimedia, storytelling—but now you’re an advocate. Some journalists aren’t comfortable with that, so they never make the leap or fail when they do.

I loved journalism, but as I grew older I came to see it more as a craft than as a calling or as a religion the way many of my former colleagues and friends do. My religion is my religion. I was already looking into communications jobs in Washington, D.C., before I met Rebekah. I would never have thought about doing a communications job overseas until Rebekah’s posting to Seoul forced me to think about jobs in Korea at the same time I was covering the financial crisis for the
Post
in 2009 and assiduously following economic indicators.

Auto sales are a good bellwether for consumer confidence, especially in the U.S., so I watched them closely to try to understand if the country was starting to claw its way out of the Great Recession. But, thanks to Hyundai, just watching auto sales gave no clear answer. A pattern started to emerge. At the first of every month, when automakers report their sales, I’d see pretty much the same thing: Chevrolet down 10 percent, Ford down 8 percent, Toyota down 7 percent, Hyundai . . .
up
5 percent.

This put Hyundai on my radar. A series of phone calls to sources in the auto industry confirmed that Hyundai was indeed swimming against the tide of decline in the auto industry and the general economy and was making its competitors nervous.

I got in touch with the company and, before I knew it, was interviewing for the job of director of global PR, a position that had—coincidentally?—just been vacated.

I was following a familiar route for ex-pats: getting a job outside the U.S. that I never could have gotten at home. I never could have entered GM or Ford at a director level of corporate communications in my first job out of journalism knowing—technically speaking—absolutely nothing about corporate communications.
But in Korea I had certain advantages desirable to a Korean company. I was a native English speaker and would be dealing with auto reporters from all over the world, the majority of whom speak English. Also, hiring me would show foreign journalists that Hyundai was a global company. My job was part show pony, and I knew that going in. But I was determined to make it more than that. I just didn’t know how.

I signed a two-year contract with Hyundai. Rebekah’s State Department posting was for two years. That was all we planned to stay in Seoul.

Before Rebekah and I left for Korea, we had one more thing to do.

We were married in July 2010, outdoors, at a historic mansion in a Washington suburb. Rebekah’s father, Ivan, a Presbyterian minister, walked Rebekah down the aisle, then turned around and hitched us. Rebekah shimmered in the low-angle, late-afternoon sunlight. Instead of throwing rice, our guests blew soap bubbles. The photos looked terrific.

3

AT WORK: ALIEN PLANET

Hyundai’s headquarters is two rectangular towers, each topping twenty stories. At first glance, the buildings look identical save for the blue Hyundai name and logo atop one and the red Kia name and logo atop the other, but a lengthier inspection will confirm that the Kia building is slightly shorter and slightly thinner. It’s this way on purpose. Hyundai bought Kia out of bankruptcy in 1998 and purchased the smaller tower from another company, then the two companies moved in together in 2000. But the newly merged companies were too big for one building, so Hyundai built a second, larger, but matching tower right next door. Hyundai, which has always sold more vehicles than Kia, moved into the new, bigger tower and Kia got the smaller one. This is the physical embodiment of the little brother feeling many Kia folk have.

The headquarters also presents itself as a useful corporate metaphor: the twin towers are joined by the three-story glass atrium
lobby I had encountered on my first morning at the company. As a fellow Hyundai executive explained to me, this is a good way to think about how the two companies relate to each other. As with all other automakers with multiple brands, such as GM and Volkswagen, Hyundai and Kia cars share R & D, car platforms, engines, and transmissions. That was the atrium part of our corporate metaphor: a shared space. But after that the companies—and cars—are purposely quite separate. Hyundai and Kia each have their own separate sales, marketing, advertising, product development, design, and PR teams, in addition to different target markets, brand images, and strategies. As head of global PR for Hyundai, I spoke only for Hyundai. I did not speak for Kia. Those are the separate towers.

As an illustration, the platform of a Hyundai Sonata and Kia Optima are the same. But the exterior and interior designs, the features, even the tunings of engine and suspension, are different, built for different kinds of drivers in different markets around the world, all of whom have different driving desires. That’s why auto magazines will test a Sonata versus an Optima and record measurable differences, such as zero-to-60 acceleration times, and subjective ones, such as steering feel.

My office was on the eighteenth floor of the Hyundai tower. I was trying to get to know my team members and my job. There were plenty of obstacles.

Starting with what to call each other.

Korean workplaces are formal and hierarchical, thanks to Confucianism. A boss could refer to a subordinate by their first name. But the subordinate would always—even outside of work—refer to their boss by title and last name.

I didn’t know this at first, and didn’t know how to address my boss by his Korean title, so I just used “Mr. Lee,” which was fine. My junior colleagues were having a much tougher time with me.

Shortly after I arrived, two junior members of another team screwed up their courage and blurted out, “We don’t know what to call you!” They didn’t know if I wanted to be called “Ahrens Ee Sa” (Ahrens Director) or “Mr. Ahrens” or what. Further complicating issues was name order. In Korean as in many Asian cultures, last names come first. Because I was Frank Ahrens, I was “Mr. Frank” to many Koreans.

Then there was the alphabet issue.

Unlike the Chinese and Japanese languages, Korean is based on an alphabet, not thousands of ideograms that require memorization. The Korean alphabet, Hangul, has twenty-four letters; it is simple and efficient and can be learned by a foreigner in an afternoon.

But my name is spelled using a Latin alphabet. So, as all cultures do, Koreans phonetically convert non-Korean names into Korean. Problem is, Latin languages have some sounds that Korean does not, and vice versa. There is no
F
sound in Korean. So they substitute
P
. There’s no hard
K
sound, so they substitute a sound that is somewhere between
G
and
K
. Korean doesn’t strictly differentiate between
R
and
L
sounds; instead, there’s one sound somewhere in between. Basically, my name was a landmine for Korean speakers. As a result, “Frank Ahrens” ended up looking like “
” on my business card and, if you tried to say it by looking at the Korean letters, sounding like “Puh-lan-guh Ah-lee-laen-sz.”

Some of my Korean colleagues, such as Ben, my team leader, took English first names, which I remembered more easily than their Korean first names. But some of my Korean colleagues did not know their Korean coworkers’ English first names. So there was a lot of me saying:

“William told me . . .”

And my Korean colleagues asking:

“Who?”

“William.”

“Who’s that?”

“You know, William who works on the overseas marketing team. Tall, funny.”

“Oh, you mean Dae Hyun.”

“I guess.”

It got no easier in writing. The common Korean surname “
” sounds like “Lim,” “Rim,” or “Rhim.” So sometimes I would get an e-mail explaining I needed to talk to “Mr. Lim” and later would get an e-mail from someone else saying I needed to speak to “Mr. Rhim.” It took me a while to realize it was the same guy with multiple English phonetic spellings of his name.

Finally, I complicated matters even more with three little words: “Call me Frank.”

I told this to pretty much everybody from the first day I got to Hyundai. This gesture was meant to create an egalitarian feeling on my team, flatten rank, and try to reduce some of the executive status I was trying on for the first time. In other words, I was attempting to establish a Western workplace in an Eastern culture.

This was among my first of more than a few mistakes.

“Call me Frank” made some of my team members uncomfortable and drained me of some of my rank and status. They didn’t
want
to call me Frank, not only because it didn’t feel right, but because it made them feel like they were working for someone of lesser status than all the other directors. This was a workplace where bowing to one another was a routine part of the workday, from quick dipping of heads in the elevator to a higher-ranking colleague to deep bows in front of visiting VIPs. Status was coin of the realm. “Call me Frank” was chump change.

In my team—Hyundai’s global PR team—Ben, my team leader, was the highest-ranking member just below me, and Edu
ardo was the most junior member. In between, and of different ranks, were about seven members, depending on who was rotating on and off the team. It was an unusual team and probably the most international at Hyundai: every member had traveled outside of Korea and several had lived overseas, including in the U.S., either as Hyundai employees or as students. It had a fairly even male-female split, another oddity at male-dominated Hyundai. All the men on the team had completed their compulsory twenty-one to twenty-four months of military service, required of all able-bodied Korean men. One had been an officer in charge of fifty men and tank maintenance. Both Ben and a junior member of my team, Ike, had been KATUSA, which stands for Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army. An elite number of Korean conscripts with excellent English skills are chosen for this branch and do their time embedded in a U.S. Army unit, not a Korean one. As a result, outgoing, whip-smart Ike was, along with Eduardo, the most American of the lot.

Every member of the team spoke and wrote English ranging in quality from superb to pretty good. Some spoke a third language. Many had attended one of the top three universities in Korea and had been chosen for the global PR team because of their English skills, not for their PR skills or even interest. Instead of hiring specialists for certain positions, the big Korean
chaebol
, like many big Western firms, hired college graduates with gilt-edged CVs and assigned them to teams. Hyundai HR worked to match preference with work but couldn’t always. So that’s why, at times during my three years at Hyundai, I had PR team members with degrees in mechanical engineering, French, and Scandinavian language studies. Hyundai likes generalists, one of my team members explained to me, and rotates promising young hires among different teams as they’re promoted; the idea is to create a well-rounded automotive executive.

Despite Korea’s workplace formality, what Hyundai and I were going to call each other had to take a backseat to the business at hand: bringing hundreds of foreign journalists to Korea.

When I arrived in October 2010, Hyundai was getting a lot of interest from journalists outside of Korea. Hyundai recognized correctly that its cars were becoming well known around the world, but journalists and car buyers were less familiar with Hyundai.

People didn’t even know how to pronounce our name. In Korean, you say the
Y
sound, so it’s pronounced “HYUN-day.” But Hyundai Motor America, our subsidiary in the U.S., had spent decades teaching customers the name is “Hyundai, like Sunday.” No
Y
. If you go to England, it sounds like “HI-yun-die.” Why, I can’t tell you. In Thailand, it was repeated back to me sounding something like, “Hee-yun-dee.” This is not a problem that Ford has.