Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (9 page)

Being out of the office for fifteen-hour days two or three days a week was exhausting. But being in the office for normal eleven- or twelve-hour working days could be exhausting, too, as I tried to learn a new culture and the folkways of Korean business; tried to form alliances with other executives; tried to figure out exactly how to relate to my boss, Mr. Lee, who was kind to me but not very talkative; and—for the first time in my life—tried to really understand how to succeed in a business environment.

It turns out, spending two decades in a newspaper newsroom not only does not prepare you for corporate life—it is probably the worst training for it, this side of a Marxist summer camp.

Newsrooms are horizontal structures full of, essentially, independent contractors—reporters who usually do their best work alone and not always on the company’s schedule. This is even more so in the era of digital journalism, where journalists pack up and take their audiences with them from one publication to the next. Journalists are either born or bred to be at least skeptical of, and frequently openly hostile toward, authority structures of all types: governments, corporations, religions, the armed forces. Historically insulated from the world of commerce by their employer newspapers—which, until recently, enjoyed local monopolies on advertising markets—journalists, even business journalists, are traditionally indifferent to or even dismissive of what has been called the “business side” of their newspapers. By their code, they are chasing the truth, revenue be damned. It was considered a
badge of honor if you wrote a story so critical of a business that it led to the business withdrawing its advertising from the newspaper. Such a thing would be—should be—grounds for dismissal in a normal business. The atmosphere of the newsroom is informal. My Korean colleagues at Hyundai were incredulous when I told them there were only four levels between me and my boss, the
Post
’s executive editor. And that I called him by his first name. At the
Post
, we e-messaged bits of breaking “Did you see?” information and trivia back and forth among each other all day. In journalism, information is not necessarily judged for its usefulness; just being in the loop with the latest Internet meme or political gossip is currency in itself. At Hyundai, pretty soon after I arrived, I was upbraided by one of my senior team members for interrupting her work with trivial information I’d seen on the Internet—even though it was about the auto industry—that I was distributing to the team. If it didn’t pertain directly to the doing of one’s job, such information was a distraction.

Corporations—and Korean corporations are similar in structure to most in America and much of the developed world—are vertical structures. They are hierarchical and frequently operate in silos. Everyone works toward goals that are in the best interest of the company. (If I’d said I’d tailored my reporting at the
Post
to be in the best interest of the Washington Post Company—my employer—I would have, and should have, been fired. This is the upside-down world of journalism.) Korea’s Confucianism adds a workplace formality to its corporations and can create a powerful motivational force that is absent in America.

If it’s not already obvious how unprepared I was to work in a corporation, here is the only detail you need to learn: I didn’t know how to use Microsoft Office, a necessary evil for virtually everyone else on the planet. Yet I had never sent or received an e-mail in Outlook, had never made an Excel
spreadsheet, had never drafted a PowerPoint presentation. The
Washington Post
newsroom, like most, used a customized content-management system designed to bring text, pictures, and advertising together into a publishable format and used IBM e-mail software. Microsoft Office is used by more than 1 billion people worldwide. It is the beating heart of business. And I had never touched it.

“Okay,” I thought. “While I’m scuffling to communicate with other teams using PowerPoint and spreadsheets, at least I know how to use e-mail.”

Wrong again!

In the West, we use e-mail for everything, from official documents to relationship break-up notes. In a Confucian society, form matters as much as function, style as much as substance; often more. Thus, e-mail is not thought of as just one more value-neutral delivery system, as it is in the West. Instead, it has been assigned a higher rank: for official communication. Younger Hyundai employees, who have grown up with a more Western view of e-mail’s neutrality, are sometimes scolded for using e-mail to send around informal notes to fellow team members.

Not only should an e-mail in Korea contain a greeting and eschew casual language, it is important to e-mail the right person. And that doesn’t necessarily mean the person who has the information you need.

If I e-mailed a coworker of lesser rank on another team, there’s a good chance they would not e-mail me back, but not out of rudeness. First of all, it was highly uncommon for an executive to e-mail anyone below him but his Team Leader; further, e-mailing from higher rank to lower rank or from team to team can almost be seen as subversive.

Let’s say that I, as a director, wanted some information that I knew an assistant manager on another team had. Instead of my e-
mailing them directly, it was proper form for me to tell one of the assistant managers on my team—or, better, tell my team leader to tell one of my assistant managers—to contact the assistant manager on the other team to get the information and relay it to me.

A few times, I e-mailed juniors on other teams and they answered, but typically to tell me that my e-mail made them uncomfortable because they were afraid their team leader would ask why they were exchanging e-mails with an executive on another team and would I please stop?

I was eventually able to master Korean e-mail style. I never mastered lunch.

Lunch at Hyundai headquarters is exactly—exactly—from noon to one p.m. Several thousand Hyundai, Kia, and affiliate workers in the two towers rush to the massive cafeteria to form long lines to get trays and pick one of a few choices of Korean food for lunch.

Toward the end of my time at Hyundai, the lunch choice got a little more diversified and a Western counter was added to the cafeteria, where, if you were among the first couple hundred employees in that line, you could get a hamburger and a soda with no ice in a small cup from a fountain. This choice proved so popular that employees packed the hallway outside the cafeteria door nearest the Western stand and shoved, chest to back, like they were trying to board a Tokyo subway to get in at 12:01 when the doors opened and claim their burgers. I once asked a colleague why Hyundai didn’t stagger lunch hour to ease the crush: for example, odd-numbered floors could eat from 11:30 to 12:30, even-numbered floors from noon to 1:00. He believed the idea that lunch is at noon is so ingrained in the Korean business brain there was no changing it. To paraphrase Peter Drucker, culture eats strategy for lunch.

Staff-level employees ate in the big cafeteria. The handful of
non-Koreans at headquarters—about seven of us—could eat in the “foreigner’s café,” a small room with a few tables and a limited daily menu of what the Koreans thought Westerners would like to eat. This was a good effort by Human Resources, but imagine an American short-order cook trying to prepare quality Korean food.

I ate with my team the first couple days in the big cafeteria, making a go of trying Korean food. Then they told me I could—probably should—eat in the executive cafeteria. There, we sat at tables with white tablecloths and were served by waitresses. Typically, a senior executive and his top junior executives would all walk to the executive cafeteria right at noon and sit at the same table each day. Per Confucian custom, the waitress would serve the table’s senior executive first, then everyone else after. Everyone would be done eating by 12:30 easily, but would wait if the senior executive was not finished. When he finished, he rose, everyone else at the table rose, and they all left.

I ate several times with my boss and his other junior executives, and they certainly tried to be hospitable, but the problem was language. If I was at the table, they felt compelled to speak English, and their English did not lend itself to the long, wandering conversations I was used to at the
Post
. There was a lot of this:

Boss: “I’m going to Brazil.”

Me, hopeful that an English conversation was about to commence: “Oh, really? Why?”

Boss (pausing): “To check the situation.”

Me (realizing that was the end of the conversation): “I see.”

Eventually, everyone at the table would lapse back into Korean and I’d be left out. I didn’t blame them. I was the obstacle to conversation at the table and I felt bad about it. To the quite natural question “Why don’t you learn Korean?” I would plead the following: I was trying to learn a new job, a new career, a new
culture, and a new corporate culture all at once. It was, frankly, overwhelming, and I wasn’t doing so well at it. I didn’t have the bandwidth to take up a new language as well.

It was just awkward all around, and so I started coming to lunch in the executive dining room by myself at around twelve thirty, after everyone else had eaten and left. I’d catch a quick nap in my office chair—it’s completely common and even encouraged to see people sleeping at their desks at lunchtime in Korea, either with their heads down on their desks or leaning back in their chairs—and then head down to the dining room as everyone was walking out. I know this created the impression that I didn’t want to eat with Koreans, but I just couldn’t bear the awkwardness of those stilted and uncomfortable and frequently silent lunches.

But eating alone did not solve the problem of actual lunch. I’d sit down at the table by myself and try to guess what they would bring me.

Usually it was a tray packed with food, twice the normal amount, that was a surprising mix of Korean and Western food from every meal. So I’d have, say, a bowl of Korean soup with a huge unshelled prawn floating in it, waffles,
kimchi
, noodles, Korean sirloin, French fries, and sometimes—and this was my favorite—a hot dog (no bun) with one end split into four slivers so it blossomed like a lily. The lengths to which the serving staff went to accommodate and please me was stunning and unheard-of in the West.

The problem here was that many of the side-dish staples of the Korean lunch—the pickled foods, the fish jerky, the bean sprouts, the shredded squid with chili pepper, the lotus roots, the cold noodles, the
kimchi
—were not to my liking nor filling. A small cooked fish was also typically offered, served whole, which meant I had to use chopsticks, which I was just learning, to pick out the fish’s dozens of sliver-like bones. I ended up with about a finger
nail’s worth of fish and a fistful of frustration. This meant that the only things I could really eat were the beef and the noodles. So every day my lunch was meat and starch.

My eventual solution was to bring my lunch from home or get in my car and drive ten minutes to the closest Subway or Outback Steakhouse or Tony Roma’s, where I could get a turkey sub or a chicken Caesar salad.

The other choice for lunch hour was a workout in Hyundai’s well-appointed gym.

I decided to take advantage of the gym on one of my first days at Hyundai. When I walked into the locker room with my gym bag, I got some curious looks: first, because I forgot to take off my shoes and put them in a small locker at the front of the locker room; second, because I was carrying a gym bag. I quickly realized that everyone working out in the gym was wearing the same gray shirt-and-shorts set. Workout clothes, including socks, were provided in the locker room by the company.

But even before I tried on the shorts, I knew it was folly. I was able to pull up the Korean XL shorts to my mid-thighs, where they stopped. The shirt was a second skin. I looked like a bursting bratwurst and could barely move. I peeled out of the company togs before too many people saw me, pulled on my own gym clothes, and worked out. I never really fit Korea. Too big.

After the workout, I walked into the shower room with my towel and found rows of showerheads along two walls with only symbolic dividers between them. There was no privacy. There was a large soaking pool and smaller, floor-level sinks where you could sit and wash. Naked Korean men were everywhere, chatting amiably in the pools, joking while waiting in line for the showers. Not an optimal time to start recognizing coworkers.

For me, anyway. For everyone else, it was as routine as work
ing together in the cubicles upstairs. Same-sex public nudity in Korea and other East Asian countries is simply part of the culture, from the required military service for men to the gyms at work to the mass public spas, called
jjimjilbang
. At one high-end Korean resort Rebekah and I visited in the southern beach city of Busan, Rebekah got into animated conversations in Korean with a succession of hotel employees who marched into the sauna where she was seated, alone, wearing a bikini, shouting: “Suit off!” It didn’t matter that there was nobody else in the sauna: the hotel’s rule said that everyone using the sauna must be nude, regardless of how they feel about public nudity. She was eventually allowed to keep her suit on because she was a foreigner, but there was initially no recognition by the hotel staff that not everyone feels comfortable with public nudity. For the Korean managers, it was simply a rule, like the rule that said you had to wear a swimming cap in the pool, and because it was a rule it superseded any moral or modesty reasons anyone might have for not wanting to strip down in public.

I would come to learn that showing skin in public was just one more way East and West were opposite. Where Westerners may feel uncomfortable in the all-nude same-sex Korean bathhouses, they would think nothing of wearing a revealing bikini or Speedo on a public beach. Koreans, on the other hand, are so much more modest about revealing themselves to the opposite gender that you’ll often see them swimming at the beach in shorts and shirts instead of revealing swimwear.