Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (16 page)

In her smart and funny 2014 book,
The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture
, in a chapter hilariously titled, “The Wrath of Han,” Euny Hong describes it like this:

Han
doesn’t just mean that you hate people who have wronged you for generations. It also means that random people in your life can spark the flame of
han
. Someone who cuts you off in traffic or disappoints you with his or her friendship can unleash the anger of generations. I have never seen so many roadside fist fights, or so many people permanently shunning their friends, as in Korea.

Han
lingers in the Korean soul, and then it boils up with great wailing grief, when a tragedy strikes the nation, such as the 2014 ferry disaster. In such a homogeneous society, the 250 high school students who died on that ferry are everyone’s children.
Han
manifests itself in the unashamed displays of public mourning seen in the wake of the catastrophe. You can hear the subtext in the tears: “Not again. Why us?
Why us?
”
Han
manifests itself in the physical scuffles that break out in Parliament: “Oh, no.
This will be on the international news tomorrow.”

The happier companion to
han
, the
yin
to its
yang
, is
jeong
.

At one of our dinners with foreign journalists, one of my very friendly Hyundai executive colleagues, who had worked in several foreign countries for the company, rose at the table and told the journalists that in order to understand Korea, they must understand
jeong
.

Trying to explain
jeong
in English to non-Koreans may be close to impossible. There is no English equivalent to the feeling.
But it is essential that foreigners understand that it exists and that it matters deeply to Koreans. Indeed, a Korean friend mentioned to me, it is considered a drawback in Korean culture if someone is too analytical or too rational. If they are not emotional or passionate—if they don’t show the
jeong
—they are considered lacking a vital ethnic trait.

In succinct English, the Hyundai executive told the journalists, “
Jeong
is, even if you hate someone’s guts, you understand their situation.” It is much more than just love. Once I learned about
jeong
, I started to understand a little better the way many South Koreans feel toward North Korea. On paper, it makes no sense to engage North Korea, to trust North Korea, to do anything but resist and work toward North Korea’s downfall. But
jeong
softens the South Korean feeling toward the North. Logically, it makes no sense. Emotionally, it makes perfect sense.

After years of treating Korean-American patients, California psychiatrists Christopher K. Chung and Samson Cho published a paper titled: “Significance of ‘
Jeong
’ in Korean Culture and Psychotherapy.” They write:

An even clearer understanding in this regard may come from
jeong
’s characteristics as a “centrifugal” tendency. The more common expression in Korean is “
jeong deulda
” rather than “I feel
jeong
.” A literal translation would be “
jeong
has permeated.” An even bolder translation would be “I am possessed by
jeong
.” It is important to understand this in comparison to the English expressions of love, depression, hate, or anxiety; “I love you,” “I feel nervous,” or “I feel depressed.” If love has a centripetal effect, then
jeong
has the opposite, i.e., centrifugal effect. . . . [
J
]
eong
affects the individual’s ego boundary; an individual’s “cell mem
brane” becomes more permeable, so to speak, thinning the ego boundary.

This last sentence is crucial, as it dovetails perfectly with the Confucian concept of harmony—the diminution of the “I” for the “we.” This extends outward to the loyalty and commitment Koreans feel toward friends and family members—to company and country—often without reason or assurance that it will be reciprocated. In the West, we institutionalize commitment with contracts. In Korea,
jeong
suggests commitment is understood.

It is important to note that
jeong
does not permeate to everyone. I was struck early and often in Korea by a lack of what we Westerners call common courtesy. No apologies are offered if someone bumps into you on the street. Merging into traffic requires aggression. Forget about elevator chitchat with a stranger. It would be considered rude to impose your conversation on a stranger. Another U.S. Foreign Service officer told the story of going to a busy Korean supermarket with his wife and infant son in a stroller. He walked ahead to open the door for his wife, but before she could push the stroller through, Koreans pushed past her and through the door her husband held open. I came to understand the binary relationship Koreans seemed to have with others: If you’re a friend or family member, there’s nothing a Korean won’t do for you. If you’re a stranger, you’re invisible. Not because you hate him, but because you have no formal context for knowing him.

Anyone who spends more than a vacation in Korea will find that it is what sociologists would call an implicit, high-context culture. Like many things in Korea, this is the exact opposite of the U.S., which is an explicit, low-context culture, as many Western cultures are.

From a practical point of view, this means important cultural lessons in Korea are learned by osmosis as much as they are directly taught. It is much easier for this to occur in a homogeneous culture. To use Drs. Chung and Cho’s language, the cell membranes of individuals in a homogeneous culture are much more permeable, and information flows more freely and rapidly among people than it does in a multicultural society, such as the U.S., where our cell membranes are not only of differing permeability, but they are also set up to repulse, rather than take in.

In a high-context culture, how a thing is communicated—the honorifics, the
noonchi
, the relationship of one person to another in terms of age, gender, social status, and so on—is just as vital as the information being communicated. In the West, this is not so. We could call this “style over substance.” This is why American business e-mails are a few words long—“How’s this look?”—and Korean e-mails are not: “Dear First Vice President Kim: Thank you for your earlier e-mail. I hope you are doing well today. We would very much like to receive your sincere opinion regarding the procedure for . . .”

I was often frustrated in Korea and at Hyundai by what I wasn’t told. This had the effect of making me feel even more like an outsider and less informed than my most junior team member. The surprises ranged from important to trivial. One day during my first May at Hyundai, I walked in and every nonexecutive male employee was wearing a short-sleeve button-up shirt, in white or light blue, with no tie and no jacket. The massive and abrupt sartorial switch was jarring and a little disorienting. What was happening? Was I at the right company? I came to understand that, because Korea summers are so hot and because the Korean government forces big companies to keep their thermostats above 80 degrees to prevent summer brownouts (and sends around inspectors with thermometers to check), Korean offices are warm.
So the big companies take it easy on their male employees, allowing them to work in their shirtsleeves in the summer. (Women’s dress, less restrictive but still professional, varies little throughout the year.) What startled me was the way the change came, as most changes do in Korea: big and all at once, like a scenery change in a play. One day a few thousand Korean men walked into Hyundai in pretty much the same dark suit, white shirt, and colored tie. The next day those same few thousand Korean men walked in all wearing pretty much the same dark pants and same light, short-sleeve, button-up shirt. It was like a performance-art prank was being played on the
waygookin
.

I came to understand, late in my time in Korea, that if you learn things implicitly by osmosis, you just assume everyone else does, too, so there’s no need for explication. It’s the same way I wouldn’t think to tell a friend that the sky is blue. It’s just obvious.

8

CONSTANT COMPETITION

Implicitly, Koreans learn early that life is a constant competition. And for a long time everyone was aiming at the same prize: a prestigious, well-paying job at one of the big
chaebol
, a top government job, or a profession, such as medicine or the law. Korea has attacked education with a fury seen almost nowhere else in the world. Children start attending
hagwon
s in elementary school and can stay in them through high school. The government outlawed
hagwon
teaching after ten p.m., but the
hagwon
s merely began setting up out-of-classroom classrooms and teaching until midnight, because the parents insisted on it and paid for it, worried that their child could be losing a competitive edge to another. To combat this, the government pays snitches to rat out illegal
hagwon
s.

Hagwon
s are expensive, and parents spend their salaries and run up big debt to pay for the best education for their children. All of this is geared toward the annual national college entrance
exam in the fall. It’s not an exaggeration to say Korean children work for years for one make-or-break day. SAT pressure in the U.S. is tough, but nothing like this. Official Korea honors each year’s test takers by stopping construction around test sites for the day and even limiting air travel over Seoul so the students can concentrate. The test, as do most in the Korean education system, rewards disgorgement of facts and is starting to be questioned by many Koreans, who say it is an exercise in memorization rather than critical thinking.

The demands of managing their children’s round-the-clock education schedules falls on Korean mothers, as fathers are committed to long working hours and drinking dinners during the week and often golf with the bosses on Saturdays. This—and the historically male-dominant culture—is why so few female executives exist in the
chaebol
. Like so many American working women, Korean women can sometimes juggle a full-time career with one kid in school, but if they have a second child, it’s impossible, and they drop out of the workforce.

A good score on the national college entrance test allows entrance into one of the three Korean Ivies, or the “SKY” universities: Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University. A degree—any degree—from these schools almost guarantees a job at Samsung, Hyundai, or LG Electronics—or else a prestigious public service career. So much so that this process—from
hagwon
to college entrance test to SKYs to
chaebol
—even has a name. It is called “the right spec.” Korean students assault their higher education strategically, such is the lifelong value of a diploma from one of the SKY universities and the connections you make there. For instance, if it is harder for a high school graduate to gain admission into Seoul National’s engineering program than, say, one of the school’s foreign language programs, a student will study the foreign language and even take
their degree in it even though they may have loved engineering and have no interest at all in the foreign language. The value of a Seoul National degree is quantifiable: a study by the Korean Educational Development Institute found that graduates from Seoul National made on average 12 percent more than their colleagues from other Korean universities.

When younger Koreans asked me how the American higher education system differed from Korea’s, I phrased it like this: in Korea, it seemed to me, a student aimed to get a degree from the best university possible so they could get a job at the best
chaebol
possible. Once there, they did the job assigned by the company, even if they hated it, to enjoy the lifestyle and prestige that job provided. The point was being at the big-name company. The U.S. Ivies still had undeniable clout, I said. But for everyone else, a student is more likely to think, “I would like to have a career in marine biology. Which universities will best prepare me for that?” And the student would apply to those universities, whether or not they are Ivies. The graduate would then try to get a job in marine biology. The point was pursuing the career you loved. Doesn’t always work out, I said, but that’s the ideal.

The annual college entrance test isn’t kind to many Korean kids. Some take it year after sad year, even into their late twenties, in hopes of improvement. Surveys of Korean millennials, conducted by pollsters both inside and outside of Korea, find them to be pessimistic about their future and the direction of the country. A 2015 study showed Korean teens are the most stressed of those in thirty developed countries. Modern Korea was built on constant, diligent, hard work. Yet, the millennials say, hard work alone is not enough to succeed in today’s Korea. That’s partly because the country’s overriding importance on education has created too many four-year college graduates. A stunning 65 percent of Koreans aged twenty-five to thirty-four hold four-year degrees.
About 40 percent of Americans of the same age hold a four-
or
two-year degree.

Competitive pressure is not limited to improvement of one’s mind. Everything is a competition and every part of you can give you an advantage—or create a stumbling block.

One day at work, Eduardo came into my office to deliver the newspapers. But he was acting a little sheepish, like he wanted to tell me something. After a little prying, he blurted out, “Sir, I got a hair transplant!”

Eduardo was in his mid-twenties, with a full head of hair worn long enough to touch his collar and cover his ears and his forehead. If you looked at Eduardo’s head, there was no place you could think of to put more hair.

“Wha . . . ?” I said. “How? Where?”