Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (17 page)

Eduardo told me that he’d gone to a doctor, who had chunked out a divot of hair from the back of his head and planted it just in front of his hairline, like sod. He pulled back his bangs to show me the transplant—and the stitches. It cost almost $3,000. It was paid for by his parents, who believed they were helping their son.

“Eduardo,” I said. “You’re not bald. You’re nowhere close to bald. What were you thinking?”

Ah, Eduardo explained, he was worried that
eventually
he would become bald. He’d noticed hair coming out in the shower; I explained this was a natural part of showering. But his sister had teased him about going bald. And when he looked closely, he could see a receding hairline. He wanted to take, in the managerial-speak of Koreans, “countermeasures.” He’d already consulted his fellow team members at work to get their advice; to a person, he said, they believed he was acting smartly and correctly. Eduardo kept trying to persuade me that it was a good idea and no one could understand why I didn’t get it.

This was my first up-close brush with what is often called
“lookism,” the Korean obsession with appearance. If you think Americans are at the extreme when worrying about, and spending for, their appearance, well, you’re wrong. We look like a nation of derelicts and slobs compared to the Koreans. A Korean friend at a big
chaebol
—who happened to shave his head—told me that before he was offered his job, the company’s HR person awkwardly asked if he would consider wearing a wig because his bald head might make coworkers uncomfortable. He declined, to his credit.

Korean women consider, perhaps rightly so, their skin the most flawless in the world. They work to make it so. An executive at L’Oréal told me that South Korean women use on average three times as many daily skin care products as Western women. It’s no surprise that the richest man in Korea is the head of Samsung. But the second-richest? Not the head of Hyundai Motor or LG Electronics. It’s the chairman of a company called AmorePacific. They produce skin care products, including the famous BB blemish-hiding cream that makes up as much as 15 percent of the Korean cosmetics market and is used by men and women.

This emphasis on looks has fueled Korea’s plastic surgery industry, one of the world’s biggest, best, and most pervasive in society. It is not only a way of life in Korea, it is an economic engine. There is a medical tourism booth in Incheon International Airport. Medical tourists come from all over Asia to Korea. Korea has the highest number of plastic surgeons per capita and the world’s highest rate of cosmetic surgery. Buses and subway ads all over Seoul show highly graphic, often gruesome before-and-after photos.

Again, plastic surgery is not unique to Korea, as any resident of Hollywood can tell you. But the kind of surgery popular in each country tells you about the culture’s priorities. In the U.S., liposuction and breast augmentation are the most popular procedures. In Korea, as throughout much of Northeast Asia, the face is the focus,
which I suppose is the literal manifestation of the Asian concept of “face.” The snow-smooth, poreless, perfected Korean woman’s face is almost a point of national pride, like perfectly aligned, gleaming white American teeth and round Brazilian female bottoms.

Lately, the pervasiveness of plastic surgery among Korea’s women has caused a lot of social reflection and self-criticism. The most popular procedure is blepharoplasty, or “double-eyelid” surgery. It is designed to create an upper eyelid and widen the eyes with the aim at making the recipient look more Caucasian. Gaining in popularity while I was in Korea were procedures on the jaw that I had never heard of, involving the shaving-down of bone to create a tapered chin, which was considered more attractive. Critics say such surgeries amount to cultural self-abnegation, the denial of Asian beauty in a quest for Western standards of beauty. Feminist writers decry Korean beauty pageants full of women so unified in their cosmetic enhancements that the contestants look like sisters.

Yet, there is a practical reason behind all this cutting: Korea’s relentless competition. In Korea, as throughout much of Asia, a job applicant’s résumé includes their headshot. Just writing that sentence probably breaks a few anti-discrimination laws in the U.S. Job applicants know that in Korea, as everywhere in the world, the better-looking of two equally qualified job seekers will likely get the position. So instead of being hypocritical, as Koreans would say Americans are by pretending looks don’t matter, Koreans understand the system and try to succeed within it with attractive headshots on their job applications. To not choose plastic surgery, if it will improve your employment and life prospects, would be considered just as ill-advised as not paying for
hagwon
classes.

Fear of falling behind—this is what drives Hyundai. This is what drives Korea. Fear of falling behind your richer family member. Fear of falling behind your smarter classmate. Fear of falling behind your rival company. Fear of falling behind Japan.

Like China, Korea is still in its “new money” phase, and the characteristic trait of new money is showing off that you have it. It’s understandable. Korea has been a rich country for only two generations. China, for only one generation. That’s why 40 percent—that’s
40 percent
—of all luxury goods purchased in France are by Chinese tourists. In Korea, it’s why couples rent strangers to be wedding guests—it’s an actual business—so their real guests will be impressed by the size of their weddings. It’s why one of my young female colleagues kept a label on a sleeve of her camel hair coat stating that the coat had been “hand-sewn.” “Oh, you forgot to take the label off your new coat,” I said to her, thinking I was doing her a favor. She looked at me as you might at a clueless grandparent. “Oh, no,” she said. “I want everyone to know it is hand-sewn.”

The result of all this Koreanness and Confucianism is a nation of extraordinarily well-groomed, attractive, stylish, well-dressed, youthful-looking people. It is often startling to first-time foreign visitors. One of our saltier Australian journalist guests spent a couple days looking around Seoul and asked me in exasperation, “Where are all the scruffy Koreans?”

For the longest time, I couldn’t reconcile the seeming paradox of Korea’s intense competition and its intense conformity: everyone seems to need the latest and best phone, the right-brand winter jacket, the latest Prada bag. Finally it was explained to me by a Korean friend: “In the U.S., you compete to stand out from the crowd. In Korea, we compete to fit into the crowd.”

A SHRIMP BETWEEN TWO WHALES AND THE MADMEN NEXT DOOR

The hunger that drives Hyundai’s uphill assault to become a premium brand—the same thing that pushes a bleary-eyed
Hyundai engineer to try one more way to solve a nettlesome problem at the end of a fifteen-hour day—originated centuries ago and has been reinforced by events ever since. It is a perpetual inferiority complex fueled by slights both real and imagined, and, despite this, by a surprising sense of confidence sometimes bordering on arrogance. It is hard for Americans to wrap our heads around the idea of a people sculpted by a millennium of experience when we think of a two-hundred-year-old building as historic. While Americans think of cycles of economic boom and bust that occur every few generations, the cycles in Asia run for hundreds of years, with glorious dynasties reigning for centuries, and violence and anarchy ruling for centuries more. And, as with many things in Korea, there is a paradox to this thought. In today’s Korea, where the love is for anything new and next, from fashion trend to smartphone, you’d wonder why history has such purchase. Yet Korea cannot, and should not, shake its past.

Archaeologists estimate the first humans appeared on the Korean Peninsula more than 100,000 years ago. Humans that we would recognize today showed up by at least 6000
B.C.
, a few hundred years before Sumerians scratched out the world’s first writing. The first Korean kingdom was founded, according to legend, in 2333
B.C.
by Dangun, called a “grandson of heaven.” But we don’t have to delve into ancient mythology. We can stick to more recent historic facts. To begin to understand the way that Korea sees itself today, and the way it sees its two biggest neighbors, we need only step back to the Chosun, Korea’s greatest dynasty.

Stretching from 1392 to the dawn of the twentieth century, the Chosun dynasty saw the unification of the Korean Peninsula, the invention of the Korean language used today, the rule of Korea’s greatest king, the flowering of the sciences, the establishment
of an efficient administrative bureaucracy, the entrenchment of Confucianism as the cultural norm and de facto national religion, and the isolationist policies that caused Korea to come to be known as the “hermit kingdom.”

Western colonial powers probed at Korea, as they did much of Asia, during the twilight of the Chosun dynasty, in the mid-nineteenth century, as corruption and internecine power struggles ate away at the court. The French and Americans sent missionaries to Korea; Russian and German ships arrived, demanding trade. In 1866, America sent a suspiciously heavily armed side-wheel steamer named the
General Sherman
, laden with tin, glass, and cotton, demanding an opening of trade with Korea. It plowed uninvited up the Taedong River, bound for Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea, despite warnings from the Koreans to halt. A battle ensued, and the
General
Sherman
was sunk with loss of Korean and American lives. Five years later, the U.S. launched a military expedition to investigate the incident. Mutual suspicions and misinterpretation led to a U.S. assault on Korean fortifications at Gangwha Island on Korea’s west coast, the gateway to the Chosun capital of Hanyang, now Seoul. The American sailors and marines killed nearly 250 Koreans and destroyed several forts before withdrawing. Korean isolationism didn’t seem like such an odd policy, given this history.

But for hundreds of years before the Americans or Germans had ever heard of Korea, it was a coveted peninsula for both China and Japan. A buffer between the two, Korea was a tiny country that paid allegiance to one of its giant neighbors and feared the other. This is why Korea has always thought of itself as “a shrimp between two whales.”

North Korea, on the other hand, is a much newer concept in Korean history. For most of Korea’s past, the peninsula has largely been unified as one people. For hundreds and hundreds
of years. It has been separated only since 1948. That’s a drop in the Korean historical bucket, an anomaly. South Koreans believe reunification is inevitable, given enough time. Not for any particular reason, like an impending North Korean collapse, foreign intervention, or an internal coup. Just because it’s inevitable, because both North and South Korean people are Koreans, sharing the same DNA, the same Confucian customs, and mostly the same language. Koreans believe strongly in the concept of race, and North and South Koreans are the same race. Despite their
pali-pali
nature, Koreans play the long game of history.

In the years following its birth right after World War II, South Korea competed against the North. But that race is long over. South Korea has eclipsed the North in every meaningful category. Even though it holds an existential threat over the South in a way that China and Japan do not, North Korea does not drive South Korea. Today, as it has been for thousands of years, it is China and Japan that loom like giants on either side of the Korean Peninsula. Despite a feeling among some that Korea is already bypassing Japan in many ways—in electronics, heavy manufacturing, pop culture, and even national reputation—Korea will never stop competing against Japan. As for China, Korea does not seek to best the authoritarian giant. Korea’s goal is to diplomatically persuade Beijing to regard Seoul as an equal partner in the region and to join with the South in its efforts to reunify the peninsula. These are two mighty and simultaneous missions that Korea has set itself. But it is this rivalry with Japan and China that will push Korea over its midlife hump.

9

ADMIRAL YI: KOREA’S GREATEST JAPAN FIGHTER

Yi Sun-sin was a promising young officer candidate in the Korean military. He had passed his exams in stellar fashion, impressing his senior officers, and only a cavalry test stood between him and what appeared to be a bright military future. But Yi broke a leg during the exam, ending his career before it started. Or so the examiners thought. Instead, Yi fashioned a field splint out of willow branches and completed the riding exam, announcing the character of the man that was to mark his career. Yi Sun-sin entered Korean military service in 1592, the same year Japan launched a massive invasion of the peninsula designed to take over Korea and eventually China.

Five years after its invasion of Korea, Japan held much of the peninsula, but the war against the Koreans and the Chinese, who had come to Korea’s aid, had exacted such a high price on all sides that a truce was called while formal negotiations for a peace
began. Any peace was doomed from the start, however, by a tragic comedy of miscommunication and bad translation. The Chinese Ming emperor was told by his court that Japan was a defeated minor nation ready to become a tributary of China: capable of some autonomy but essentially a vassal state. Meanwhile, the imperial regent of Japan, the warlord behind the invasions, was told that China was ready to surrender, so he issued the demands of a conqueror, which were untenable to China.

This misunderstanding led to Japan’s second attempt to take the Korean Peninsula in 1597, the same year as the first performance of William Shakespeare’s
Merry Wives of Windsor
and ten years before the first permanent British colony in the New World at Jamestown.

By this time, battle-hardened Yi Sun-sin had become Admiral Yi. He was Korea’s greatest naval strategist and the sailor-warrior pride of the Chosun dynasty. In the prime of his career, this should have been Admiral Yi’s greatest moment. But Japanese-instigated intrigue in the Chosun court and Yi’s own headstrong behavior led to his firing and near execution. Yi was replaced by the shockingly incompetent Won Gyun. Without planning or preparation, Won sailed the entire Korean fleet toward the invading Japanese force, anchored off Busan, at the southeastern tip of Korea, in August 1597. Won was routed by the Japanese, who destroyed the Korean fleet save for a handful of ships under the control of a subordinate officer who prudently refused to follow Won. For his part, Won was killed by the Japanese after struggling ashore following the disastrous battle.