Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (24 page)

. . . and she was off!

Lily ran toward the back of the neighbor’s house, sure that this was a game. I spent the next five minutes futilely trying to catch her as she darted back and forth just out of my reach, toying with me. Then she sprinted to the front of a neighbor’s house and out of view, toward the sidewalk, as I ran behind. My eye tracked upward and saw three small neighbor girls walking on the sidewalk with their tiny white Maltese in front of them.

“Oh, God, no,” I thought. We were at Jindogae 1.

I didn’t see it start, but I heard the screams. Three little girls shrieking in terror, pretty much the worst sound in the world. As I rounded the corner of the house, I saw Lily with the Maltese clamped in her mouth, trying to shake it to death.

I don’t know how I did it, because all I remember is a violently
twisting, furry storm of teeth and white fur, but I managed to pull the little Maltese, “Pokey,” from Lily’s jaws and set it down as I held Lily’s collar. Lily was still silent. No barking, no growling. The girls were hysterical. Pokey, somehow not dead, sat on the sidewalk shaking. Rebekah by now had heard the commotion and came running.

Short of blowing up a neighbor’s house, this is the worst kind of neighbor you can be: your dog attacks the neighbor’s dog in front of his three little girls, probably traumatizing them for life. Forget about the vet bill: Send me the therapy bills. The girls’ father, a Korean-American U.S. Army colonel, was, as you might expect from his training, levelheaded, calm in a crisis, and reasonable. Pokey was taken to the vet and worked on; Lily had somehow sheared layers of skin apart with her puncture wounds and shaking. Over the next several days, we paid plenty of visits to the colonel’s household to check on Pokey—“
Please, Pokey, don’t die!
”—and repeatedly told the girls how sorry we were.

Pokey would come to make a full recovery and the family bore us no ill will. But of course the attack had to be reported, and the judgment of the U.S. embassy was swift: Lily could no longer live on base. We were heartbroken in the way that parents of criminals and drug addicts are. But we could no longer avoid the fact: Lily was a killer.

Lily’s last night with us, I left the house on some errand and turned to look at our front window. There was Lily, standing on her hind legs, front paws on the back of the sofa, looking out at me as she always did when I came or left. A few steps behind her stood Rebekah, sobbing.

A year after we got her for only $50—and she ended up conservatively costing us about $5,000 in ruined products, wasted training, home repairs, and vet costs—we drove Lily back to the shelter, finally admitting to ourselves what everyone else could
see all along: that Lily was too wild to be a pet. If she were lucky, her best-case outcome would be adoption by a Korean farmer and chained to a stake, serving as a guard dog. Later we came to joke that we’d let a wolf live in our house for a year. And we told ourselves that we gave Lily maybe the best year of her life: shelter, food, warmth, and a target-rich environment.

I was not ready to bond with another dog after Lily. But Rebekah needed a dog. This provided a critical lesson to understanding my wife. If she has something to love, and you take it away from her, you’d better get her something else to love right away. The absence of Lily caused her to change, and I feared she might be dipping into depression.

The house did feel too quiet and stagnant. I relented. We’d get another dog. But where? Through a Korean-American diplomat friend at the U.S. embassy, Rebekah learned that Samsung, the Korean electronics giant, as one of their corporate social responsibility or charity programs, trained service dogs for the blind and other needy Koreans. Bred at a beautiful, state-of-the-art complex outside of Seoul, the Samsung guide dogs, mostly Labrador retrievers, spend the first two years of their lives in training and then are given to the blind. The training to be a service dog is so rigorous: only 30 percent graduate. The rest are put up for adoption. We had the chance to adopt one, but only because the mother of Rebekah’s Korean-American friend was friends with the Samsung chairman’s wife’s niece or something.

Rebekah and her friend went to the dog training site a few days before Christmas 2011. She met four Labs that had been selected for her. Among them was a one-and-a-half-year-old male golden Labrador named Chae Um, a common Korean boy’s name that means “fill up.” We came to understand how well it suited him. He ran directly to Rebekah, kept shoving his head into her knee, and then sat on her foot. Then licked her.
The bond was instant and complete. Chae Um was wonderfully trained and docile and already had all the classic lovable Lab traits; he was just too playful to be a service dog. He was not only the anti-Lily—he got along with everyone—he was balm for the wound of losing Lily.

Rebekah and Chae Um came home and my wife was happy again. We decided we’d keep his commands in Korean, because that’s how he learned them: “Sit” is “
Anja
.” But we wanted to give him a Western name. We knew it had to sound like Chae Um so he wouldn’t get confused. We considered “Charlie,” “Chips,” and so on.

A couple days after we got Chae Um, I was driving home from Hyundai one night after having what I came to call a particularly “Korean” day at work, meaning it was a combination of my inability to communicate with my team members, their frustration with me and my frustration with them, and the whole Confucian corporate hierarchy that I found so difficult to comprehend and manage. I was feeling particularly foreign and a little peevish. Maybe I had a few peppercorns in my soul.

I walked into the house and told Rebekah, “Honey, I know what we’re going to call this dog. We’re going to call him ‘Chairman.’” It was a perfect combination of homage to my Korean employer and gentle subversion. It sounded a lot like “Chae Um” and the dog responded instantly to his new name. Plus, it’s just hilarious to call a dog “Chairman.”

Most of my Korean team members had met Lily, knew how her sad story ended with us, and also knew we’d gotten a new dog to replace her. I confess I took some puckish glee in telling them our new dog’s name. Their reaction was a combination of delight and horror. So deeply freighted was my dog’s name that, whenever friends at work would message me to ask about Chairman, they would type, “How is Ch*****n?” I don’t know if they
were worried their messages were being monitored or if they were behaving like ultra-Orthodox Jews, who spell God’s name “G-d” to show the ultimate respect.

Chairman filled the Lily-shaped hole in our lives. We drove him around the base and he sat up in the backseat, just like Lily.

A few weeks after we got Chairman, my wife, the dog, and I visited the Burger King drive-through. In the window was the employee who I saw most often, a charmingly friendly young woman called Yu Chin, who was maybe nineteen. Yu Chin gave us our drinks with her customary cheer: “Hello, sir!” she always chirped.

Just as we were about to drive off, Yu Chin’s happy face suddenly morphed into what I could only think of as an exaggerated cartoon sad face.

“Sir,” she said, “what happened to Rlirly?”

It took us a moment to translate in our heads, but then we realized she wanted to know what had happened to Lily. It seemed Yu Chin had waited weeks to screw up her courage to address an older social superior—and a foreigner—and ask a highly personal question. It was courageous.

I gave an answer I had pretty much waited my whole life to give. “Lily went to live on a farm,” which was close enough to the truth. Her sad face turned happy again and Rebekah and I drove off, laughing at the improbability of it, but also astounded and moved by what had just happened.

14

SEOUL SURPRISES

By age twenty-seven, Park Geun-hye, daughter of the man who built modern Korea, had lost both of her parents to assassins. When her mother was killed in 1974, she was twenty-two and became the nation’s de facto first lady to her strongman father. When she was told of her father’s murder five years later, her first question was “Is North Korea attacking?” This sort of iron nationalistic sentiment and pragmatism in the face of tragedy mirrored her father’s and won her admiration around the country, along with sympathy. She became a star in Korean politics by the 2000s, even expressing measured regret for the treatment of political dissidents under her father’s rule. She resuscitated a failing conservative party as its head, earning the title “Queen of Elections.” She made her first bid for the presidency in 2007 but narrowly lost to Lee Myung-bak, a Hyundai man. By the end of Lee’s term five years later, he had become so unpopular—even within his own conservative party—that Park, then the head of
the same party, cannily gave the party a different name to distance herself from the toxic president. Personally, Park remains something of an enigma. Despite a lifetime in the public eye, Park has maintained tight privacy, and many Koreans feel they don’t really know her even though she has been a constant presence in their lives. An anomaly among major world political figures, Park has remained single, saying repeatedly she is married to Korea.

In 2012, Park made a second run at the presidency. Initially, Koreans wondered if it would be more of the same conservative party dogma: Play tough with North Korea, befriend the
chaebol
, set ambitious economic growth targets, stay cozy with the U.S. Opponents darkly hinted that if Park were elected, she would mimic her father’s autocratic ways, and democracy and transparent government would suffer.

Instead, Park spoke of different things.

One of Park’s campaign planks called for the establishment of a “creative economy” in Korea. She recognized that the country could no longer keep doing business solely as it had done. It had to diversify, evolving from a stable, manufacture-and-export economy where innovation and employment came from the mighty
chaebol
in a top-down fashion, into an entrepreneurial, risk-taking economy where ideas came from the ground up and found the economic funding to grow. Korea needed a more robust start-up scene. It needed big-money venture capital. It needed, most of all, its well-educated youth to opt out of the “right spec” and follow their own dreams apart from lifelong employment at Samsung, Hyundai, and LG.

Park promised government-backed venture capital funds to help entrepreneurs launch their businesses. She lured Western tech titans such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg to personal meetings to pick their brains on how to find and nurture their analogs in Korea. She visited the U.S. to talk to venture capitalists
and learn the secret of the U.S. success. She openly questioned the future of the very corporate titans that her father helped build, and that built modern Korea: “The past economic model designed to catch up with advanced economies drove Korea’s rapid growth, but it has lost steam,” she said. Koreans believed, and elected her.

At the same time President Park was trying to coax Korea through its midlife crisis and into its second act, the same thing was happening in the Seoul city government—basically, the proving ground for the Korean presidency—where another remarkable political transformation was playing out and under dramatic circumstances.

The mayor of Seoul, Oh Se-hoon, was seen as a rising star in the national conservative party and popular enough to have won a second four-year term in 2010. He was a polished, well-educated man who looked great in a suit and fit the time-honored mold of what a grown-up Korean leader should look like. The previous mayor of Seoul had become president, as had some of his predecessors, and Oh had similar ambitions—until he staked his office on a foolish stunt. The liberal party, which controlled the Seoul City Council, wanted the city to provide free lunches for all schoolkids. Mayor Oh wanted a more limited program. The issue was put to a referendum. As a way of trying to defeat the referendum, I guess, an overconfident Mayor Oh said he would resign if it passed. The referendum failed to draw enough voters to make it valid, meaning the liberal free-lunch-for-all plan went through. Mayor Oh was bound to follow through on his vow, and he resigned.

This proved to be a turning point for Seoul. A special election was held two months later and, literally out of nowhere, an older lifelong liberal social activist named Park Won-soon won the election. He had been imprisoned during youthful democratic protests against the Park Chung-hee dictatorship. He had since
built a gilt-edged left-wing résumé, heading a watchdog group that fought government corruption; establishing a foundation to promote volunteerism and community service; and heading a commission to examine human-rights abuses in Korea, whether they came at the hand of foreign occupiers, such as the Japanese, or domestic dictatorships.

Park, now Mayor Park, was swept into office on a wave of dissatisfaction with the status quo in Korea. He was backed by a strong block of angry young voters who had spent their lives doing as they were told: studying until midnight and competing at school, following the well-trod path that made Korea great. Now they found themselves among the tens of thousands of similarly high-qualified applicants for a limited number of jobs at Samsung and Hyundai. They wanted change.

Like President Park, Mayor Park understood the need to diversify Korea’s economy. He traveled to Silicon Valley and lured venture-capital money to Seoul. Grasping the coming sharing economy, Mayor Park initiated a range of sharing businesses and services in Seoul, including the creation of a city-funded sharing-economy business incubator. He said he would convert a disused downtown Seoul highway overpass built in the 1970s into an elevated walking park, Seoul’s equivalent of New York City’s High Line. This was the kind of mayor that Seoul had never seen before. Citizens of big European and Scandinavian cities were used to this kind of municipal administrator, but not Koreans, who have been taught that life is an uphill climb to make Korea great.

One of Park’s first acts as mayor was to renovate the mayor’s office, replacing solid walls with glass ones, making the office literally transparent. He live-streamed his inauguration on the Internet, showing his new-media savvy. Outside the mayor’s office, he commissioned an eight-foot-high red and white sculpture,
loosely based on a human ear, that includes a microphone and recorder. Seoulites can walk up to the ear and record their complaints into the microphone.