Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (33 page)

Despite its ongoing and sincere efforts to move from a car-selling company to a brand company, the heart of Hyundai was the assembly line. There would be no brand if there weren’t cars, and there would be no cars if an assembly line worker tried to telework. “Soft” work, in marketing, PR, or accounting was less assembly line oriented, but the ethos ran through the company. And as I was finding out, something is missed when somebody—especially the boss—is not in the office. I was on the other side of the planet and so was my authority.

But it was a hit I was willing to take. Not only did my wife and new daughter need me, I couldn’t imagine being parted from them. If Hyundai had said, “You need to come back now or lose your job,” it would have been an easy choice. So I decided to endure the backbiting, focus on doing as much good work as I could, enjoy Rebekah and Annabelle, and try to rebuild bridges when I returned to Korea at the beginning of May. A Korean friend at Hyundai gave me a long exegesis on zero-sum Korean envy, even teaching me a cultural saying: “When your cousin buys land, your stomach starts to turn.” But I think anyone at any company would have looked askance at my special treatment.

Jinho told me flatly that people didn’t like that I’d spent four months working in Washington, away from headquarters. “Who?” I asked. “Everyone who knows,” he responded.

Part of me wanted to hold people to account for talking behind my back and undercutting my authority while I was gone. There is no doubt that some of it happened because I was a foreigner. While I was gone, I was told that one of my team members—no longer with the company, thankfully—said to the others, with unintentional irony, “We don’t need more foreigners on the global PR team.” But I tried to think of most of it as “soldier talk,” the same kind of blowing off of steam that enlisted personnel must be allowed regarding their commanding officers when they’re not
around. Everyone—regardless of culture, country, or century—gripes about their boss. Instead of seeking retribution, I remembered being told at Hyundai that it is the duty of the boss to make good relations with his team, not just the other way around. This is the reciprocal nature of the Confucian hierarchy that is often unknown to outsiders. Something a former president of Hyundai said stuck in my mind: “Yesterday’s leader says, ‘I will lead you there.’ Today’s leader says, ‘We will get there together.’” I talked to Rebekah, prayed a lot about it, and went back to work at headquarters.

I called a meeting with my senior team members. They brought their notebooks, as you do when called to the boss’s office, and sat down across from me. I could feel the tension. I drew a deep breath and told them I wanted to sincerely apologize for my bullying Western style of management, for not appreciating the Korean and Hyundai way of doing things. They, who I guess were expecting to be yelled at, were shocked. One spoke for all when she said, “We are surprised by this.” Ben, my team leader, was gracious and said he understood that in my position it must feel like “I am on an island.” “That’s all I wanted to say,” I told them, “that and I’m looking forward to the rest of 2013.”

A few moments later one of my junior team members e-mailed me to say she overheard one of the senior team members wondering suspiciously “what I was up to.” That was okay, I thought. I felt like I had done the right thing and tried to clear the air. It was time to move forward.

Rebekah had no job to go to in Korea. She was stuck inside a small apartment in a cramped urban neighborhood of Seoul with a five-month-old baby, no car, and almost no friends. The crowded sidewalks and narrow, hilly streets of my Itaewon neighborhood were not stroller-friendly. Nap times were worse. We were employing the “cry it out” method. It works if you’ve got
the stomach for it. After a while I can turn Annabelle’s crying into white noise. But not Rebekah. It tears her heart out. So when she was letting Annabelle cry it out in her crib at the back of our apartment, Rebekah had to sit outside on the tiny balcony at the front of the apartment, out of earshot, fiddling on her laptop. If it was raining, she had to drape a towel over her head. I got lots of sad-Rebekah selfies when I was at work.

One night I returned to the apartment to find Rebekah collapsed on the sofa. “I’m tired, I’m bored, and I’m lonely,” she said.

We rented Rebekah a car to get her some mobility and got in touch with the Filipino cleaning lady who’d worked with us when we lived on base. She babysat Annabelle to let Rebekah get out of the house occasionally. But what saved Rebekah’s sanity was yet another small kindness extended by a fellow ex-pat. One of the families at our church in Seoul was German, sent by the father’s company to manage the Korean branch of the business. Part of his compensation package included membership in the Seoul Club, an old-style city club with a restaurant, bar, gym, and, most important, pool. Rebekah and her German girlfriend would go to the pool at least once a week while sitters watched the children. I’m convinced that one seemingly prosaic thing allowed Rebekah to get through the two months in Seoul.

As our time together as a family in Seoul came to an end, we braced to be separated again. Rebekah and Annabelle would fly back to Washington, where Rebekah would do another month of training for her new job in Indonesia. At the beginning of August, she and Annabelle—and Chairman, back from summer camp—would fly to Jakarta. As we had planned it, I would stay in Seoul and Rebekah and Annabelle would be in Jakarta for more than a year, until the end of my contract, in October 2014. We would be a Skype family, and I would try to fly to Jakarta for a few days each month. It seemed like a plan. I wasn’t sure if Annabelle had
bonded with me yet and I didn’t know how she would respond to me on Skype. I wanted to give her something like a memory key to remember me when she saw me on the computer screen, in addition to hopefully recognizing my face. I tried a bunch of songs and eventually discovered her name works nicely as the lyrics to the “Ode to Joy” choral movement in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. That would be our little song.

If all went according to plan, by the end of our first four years of marriage, Rebekah and I would have been apart for nearly half of it. We rationalized the separation because both of our careers were going so well, because we were saving money, because we were each having intriguing overseas experiences, because . . . well, because we thought we could handle it. Because we thought none of us, now including Annabelle, would be the worse for wear for it. There were times when we thought we’d never make two years in Korea; yet we did. Surely we could manage another fifteen months or so of this lifestyle, then finally figure out a way we could be together by the time Annabelle was starting to be conscious of the separation.

I put a Hyundai calendar on the wall of my Itaewon apartment. It was July 2013. By the time this calendar ended, I’d have only a little more than nine months until we were reunited as a family. In the meantime, I’d make the six-and-a-half-hour flight from Seoul to Jakarta—“commuting,” we called it—for a long weekend once a month.

In the in-between times, when I was alone in Seoul, my life shrank down to a point. Work, home, dinner, Skype, TV, bed. Repeat. My colleagues joked that I must be enjoying my bachelor life, but I was not. It turned out I was no good on my own anymore. But it was more than loneliness. I lacked accountability. When I was with Rebekah and Annabelle, I wanted to be a better man and tried to act accordingly. Left adrift on my own, it was
too easy to slip back into my old slothful, selfish ways. This would probably surprise friends who had known me for years, because I had never evinced a desire for family life, or accountability, for that matter. But now I had no energy for any sort of sustaining human interaction other than with my family, and no personal ideal for which to strive. It all felt hollow and farcical to me; I couldn’t pretend I was having a good time while separated from my family and knowing my wife was in need. I was in endurance mode only. On Sunday nights, after Rebekah and I had hung up on Skype, I’d draw through another week on the calendar with an orange marker—aware that I had simultaneously brought our reunion one week closer and sliced one more week off my life—turn out the lights, and go to bed.

21

GENESIS AND SONATA

I was nearly vibrating with anticipation. It was a midsummer morning during 2013. After months of talking about it, after planning PR campaigns for it, after seeing spy shots of it on the Internet, I was finally going to get my first in-person look at the second-generation Genesis, the car upon which Hyundai’s premium-brand aspirations had been pinned. I had been aching to see the car in person. In the auto industry—heck, in life—there is really nothing to compare with the first in-person look at an all-new car. Unlike a face-lift—a refresh of an existing model—an all-new car is a whole-cloth new creation. Renderings and spy photos of new cars are titillating, but they do not provide the all-senses thrill of seeing the car in person, cleaner and shinier than it ever will be again. The smell of fresh rubber tires mixes with that of new leather when the door is flung open, forming a heady, intoxicating perfume of promise and plenty. Pop the hood and the light industrial aroma of fluids and lubricants reminds us that
the object of our affection is a machine, one with which—even in the digital age—we have a unique relationship. These gorgeous machines transport us away from bad things and toward good ones, wrapping us in a private cocoon of our preferences: our seat settings, our ideal climate, the soundtrack of our life’s milestones. We fall in and out of love in these machines, we make the first and last trips of our lives in them, we ride for miles and miles of contented silence in them, happy merely to be sharing the intimate space with the person next to us.

Strictly speaking, I didn’t have to see or even drive the new Genesis to promote it to the media. All the time in PR you promote people or things you’ve never met or seen. All I needed were the car’s specs to show how superior it was to the previous Genesis and to show how it stacked up to its German rivals. But I felt that in order to convincingly persuade journalists of how good—not just how important—this car was, I needed to see it, to touch it, to sit in it. Mostly I just wanted to. I drove to Hyundai’s Namyang R & D facility, south of Seoul, and walked into the big design presentation hall. The building is a dramatic, domed, skylit structure. It was sunny that day, and the louvered windows shot the room full of light.

The doors to the big room opened, and I saw the car by itself, sitting in profile. My first thought was that the designers had pulled a trick on me and driven in an Audi A7, one of the most beautiful cars on the road. Nope. This was the next Genesis. The first thing that came out of my mouth was “Whoa.” I walked around it a couple times. It was good from every angle. Genesis had a brushed-chrome hexagonal grille. Car companies spend a lot of money and time—years, even—thinking about and perfecting their grilles. They are the first part of a car you see on the road and are the face of the brand. The best ones are memorable. Think of the “twin kidney” BMW grilles, the three-pointed star
in the Mercedes grille, and the diagonal bar across the Volvo grille. Hyundai wanted an equally recognizable and memorable grille, so it was decided that the Hyundai face would be a six-sided grille—sometimes with different proportions and materials, but always a hexagon. The Genesis hood was long, a characteristic of high-performance rear-wheel-drive European sedans like Jaguars, with hoods lengthy enough for landing strips. It had gorgeous volumes of sheet metal along the sides, contoured to reflect the light just right. And it had an aggressive fastback trunk, giving it an elegant and sporty look. The new Genesis would be the first Hyundai to feature what we were calling the Fluidic Sculpture 2.0 look, a muscular, upmarket refinement of the Fluidic Sculpture design that astounded the auto industry four years earlier.

I opened the driver’s-side door and felt a satisfying heft but an easy pivot. I climbed inside and shut the door with a muffled
whoomp
, solid as a safe. The leather seat was bolstered just right to hold you steady when accelerating out of a turn. The interior was roomy, understated, and elegant, with high-end, unflashy materials and a makes-sense cockpit layout. My fingers wrapped around the steering wheel in a way that felt more comfortable than in other cars. I was told that was because this Genesis had an ergonomically designed steering wheel. Hyundai engineers realized that human hands, when wrapped around a steering wheel, do not naturally form a circle, the typical cross-sectional shape of a steering wheel. Instead they form something like an angled oval, and that’s how Hyundai engineers had designed the new Genesis steering wheel. Genesis was loaded with invisible, functional details like this.

The car was the design manifestation of Vice Chairman Chung’s pronouncement in Detroit more than two years earlier when he launched Hyundai’s grand aspirations: “Today, customers do not believe that expensive cars with unnecessary technol
ogy are premium.” The Elantra Car of the Year win in Detroit one year after the vice chairman’s speech was thrilling. The Winterkorn Incident in Frankfurt was satisfying. The favorable press was nice. But the Genesis was
product
. The designers, engineers, and product teams had done it. If there was one Hyundai that could take the brand to the next level—to make people really think differently about Hyundai—this was it. Of course, this was only one PR man’s opinion. The test that mattered would come months later, when we put Genesis into the hands of automotive writers for the first time. An hour or so later I left the hall, upbeat about the car and the direction of the brand.

A few weeks later I walked into the same hall with the same sense of anticipation. This day I would see the new Sonata. Genesis was going to be a halo car for the brand, establishing the design direction and premium-brand aspirations. But Sonata was our meat and potatoes after Elantra, our biggest seller. In the U.S., Hyundai would sell ten times as many Sonatas in a year than Genesis sedans. The previous Sonata had caused a splash, so expectations for the new Sonata were sky-high. Critics wondered: Could Hyundai keep up its design leadership, or was it a one-hit wonder?