Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (35 page)

Only weeks after she arrived, Rebekah put on a successful public seminar on shark fin fishing, a key element of the embassy’s public diplomacy initiative. Several species of sharks around Indonesia are in danger of becoming extinct because shark fins, usually served as soup, are considered a delicacy throughout much of Asia. Shark fin soup is served at prestigious events, such as weddings. Despite the lack of any scientific proof, shark fin soup is believed to increase sexual potency, lower cholesterol, improve skin tone, and impart other benefits, especially in China. Shark finners typically strip the fins from a shark and leave it to
die, a cruel and indefensible process. This has led to a growing number of bans on shark fin soup. When I was running my team at Hyundai, I would not allow it to be served at business dinners.

For other parts of her job, Rebekah traveled to faraway parts of the Indonesian archipelago, planting mangroves and doing market-entry evaluations for potential U.S. investment. Her section inside the embassy was an important one, meaning her work was noticed and well regarded. As I enjoyed telling her about the new Hyundai cars I was seeing, she loved telling me about the colorful characters she was meeting and dealing with. Her work intersected with officials in the Indonesian government, with people at U.S. NGOs, and with private-sector U.S. corporations. As a U.S. diplomat and as a natural and skilled communicator, Rebekah could build bridges among parties that others could not. The job was not always comfortable, but it was gratifying and vital and hands-on experiential in the way Foreign Service jobs are supposed to be. By turns, the service took her to pink coral reefs so gorgeous they could hardly be believed and to an island so remote it required two plane rides and a two-hour drive over mountainous jungle roads so perilous and twisty, she lost her lunch on the roadside. She made good friends at the embassy, where she found an esprit de corps similar to what she experienced during her post-tsunami time in Tokyo. On her off hours, she went to parties at the embassy deputy chief of mission’s home, a sprawling Dutch compound dating from that country’s early-nineteenth-century colonization of Indonesia, filled with exotic artifacts—and fascinating stories—from a career in the Foreign Service. Here, finally, was what Rebekah had thirsted for most of her adult life. She was, in many ways, living her ideal overseas life.

But the professional satisfaction Rebekah derived from her work and the richness of her tropical ex-pat life conspired to high
light the one thing missing from her life: her husband. It was a weekend getaway Rebekah planned that brought it home to us.

She had rented a three-story guesthouse surrounded by rice paddies a few hours outside of Jakarta in the Indonesian countryside, more than enough room for Rebekah, me, Sati, and Annabelle. By day, Annabelle toddled around the breezy, open-air villa, weaving around wicker furniture and padding across cool tile floors, holding Sati’s hands. At ten months, Annabelle was crawling up stairs and walking almost on her own. They splashed in the villa’s pool and took in the staggeringly lush scenery. Indonesia may be the world’s most biodiverse country, and this place demonstrated that fact with an almost vulgar glee. At their edges, the carefully laid-out rice paddies surrounding the villa were overtaken by a high-canopy rain forest that displayed all shades of green. The jungle blared with the peculiar and often startling calls of winged and legged animals. Some were recognizable. Others might prove a stern challenge to taxonomy. Nighttime noises only deepened the mystery. The effect was to place a guest out of time, in a previous century, and beyond civilization. I know all of this because Rebekah recorded it on iPhone video and e-mailed it to me. I couldn’t make it down from Seoul for their trip. My experience of the sumptuous weekend was sterile, detached, edited. When they returned to Jakarta, Rebekah recounted the trip and she and I laughed over Annabelle’s antics, but we both realized this was the beginning of a problem. I was watching my daughter grow up on Skype and thirty-second iPhone videos. One parent was living her child’s life; the other was just watching it. Skype and Apple FaceTime and the other modern tools for maintaining contact are technological miracles that seemed like science fiction only twenty years ago. And there is no doubt it is better to see your loved ones than not. Yet, at the same time, the video link only emphasizes the distance between you and others, acting
as an unavoidable real-time reminder that you are indisputably apart. Video swells the ache.

On the other end of my video link was this tiny, stunning on-camera presence that I could not touch. Annabelle was born with almost no hair and had very little for the first year of her life. This focused all attention on the brown, luminous, doe-like eyes that dominated her face and quizzically probed her mother’s computer screen. Transfixed more by the moving colors than by any recognition of her father, I was only a human face to Annabelle. On Skype we had no connection: my oh-so-clever “Ode to Joy” trick wasn’t working.

Rebekah and I had at least anticipated this problem with Annabelle and tried to steel ourselves for it. But there was another problem we had not foreseen. With a live-in nanny, a housekeeper, and her mother focused on her, Annabelle was exceptionally well taken care of. But no one was taking care of Rebekah. As her husband, that was my job, and I was failing.

When I was in Seoul and Rebekah was on her own in the U.S., even pregnant, she was lonely but felt safe and had her parents in a nearby state. Her only professional responsibility was language class. In Jakarta, the entire weight of making sure our child stayed alive fell on her while she was trying to execute diplomacy on behalf of her government and look after the needs of a household staff. For five nights a week Tri shared the apartment with Rebekah but, per custom, retreated to her room after Annabelle went to sleep. She would not have felt comfortable hanging out with the boss after work hours. Despite Rebekah’s work friends, she had no ally, no one who was always, unequivocally, on her side 24–7. She had no intimate support. She had no one to wake up to or snuggle with while watching TV. Rebekah had no husband.

Any parent will tell you the time you most need your spouse
is when your child is sick. No one wants to be the sole safety net, the lone decision maker for a child in pain and misery. You need someone to consult with. Someone whose face you can search for answers. Someone who will defuse the situation or say, yes, we need to call the doctor now. There is no greater feeling of isolation and helplessness than what a lone parent feels with a sick or injured child.

Going in, veteran Jakarta parents had told us to expect Annabelle to contract a “funky rash” from time to time. Given the heat and humidity and who-knows-what in the air and bathwater, that was not a surprise, nor terribly worrisome. But what would happen if Annabelle got really sick or was badly injured? The U.S. embassy had a doctor, nurses, and a well-equipped office open during business hours. In Korea, if our medical situation exceeded the capacity of the embassy doctor, we had a U.S. military hospital on base and access to some of the world’s best health care moments away in Seoul. In Jakarta, that was not the case. There were big hospitals, but the level of care so poor and the English-speaking ability so spotty that the U.S. embassy urged its employees to avoid them. Instead, the embassy recommended use of a handful of small clinics called “SOS” scattered around the city. But they had no ability to handle serious or longer-term conditions or do surgery. This meant that the best option for Annabelle—if she needed serious medical help—was a six-hour medevac helicopter ride to Singapore. On my own in Seoul, I had felt cut off from medical care. But that was only by language. In Jakarta, Annabelle—and Rebekah—could truly be in danger if things turned badly and they had to build in a six-hour gap until top-level medical care was available. And things could turn bad for any number of reasons: a car or pedestrian accident on the city’s crowded streets; a mosquito bite that leads to dengue, a disease that can cause hemorrhagic fever; the faint but still real
threat of domestic terrorism; getting caught in a violent public protest . . . Even a minor language problem with a member of our household staff or the compound guards when every second counted could lead to disastrous consequences for our daughter. This was the reality of Jakarta.

Our fears were realized in a terrifying manner one weekend night in Jakarta when Rebekah was alone with Annabelle. Tri and Sati had gone home for the weekend. I was in Seoul. Annabelle was sick with a cold, and Rebekah was trying to administer liquid Tylenol through an eyedropper, a familiar drill for parents. She had done it several times before but now, possibly because Annabelle was crying and gulping air, as Rebekah squeezed the sticky pink liquid into the back of Annabelle’s mouth, something went wrong. Annabelle tried to gasp but couldn’t get air in. Her eyes got big and her mouth gaped as she writhed in Rebekah’s arms. Mere seconds were passing but it seemed like hours to Rebekah since Annabelle had breathed. There was no food stuck in her mouth, so there was nothing Rebekah could reach in and pull out. More seconds ticked by as Annabelle silently gaped and heaved. Her little pink lips began to turn purple. Not knowing what to do and having no one to call to for help, Rebekah remembered her infant choking training and flipped Annabelle over on one hand while striking her upper back with an open palm, hoping it might somehow open an airway. After another few seconds Annabelle drew a big gulp of air and resumed breathing normally. Before long, with full, pink lips, Annabelle was cooing and cuddling Mommy, who could barely hold her in badly shaking arms. “I thought she was going to die,” Rebekah told me the next morning by Skype.

I sat alone in my apartment in Seoul, staring into my laptop screen, listening to the story in rapt, impotent horror. Rebekah spoke while Annabelle snuggled in close on a sofa in their apart
ment in Jakarta, 3,300 miles away from where I was. Annabelle was seemingly no worse for wear. But this brought no sense of relief. Instead, it convicted and shamed me. I didn’t feel like part of a cool twenty-first-century, ex-pat, jet-setter family. I felt like an absent father who hadn’t been there for his wife during the scariest moment of her young motherhood. My dereliction of duty as a husband and as a father had not really hit me until that moment. I’m certain that I would not have reacted better or more swiftly than Rebekah did had I been there when Annabelle choked. But that wasn’t the point. I would have been there. Dads are supposed to
be there
. What was I doing? What were
we
doing?

What Rebekah and I were doing, we were finally forced to realize, was trading time together as a family for nothing more than money. And that was a devil’s bargain.

23

ESCAPE PLAN

Rebekah and I could speak of little else other than how to get the family back together. I had seen my wife’s personality start to change once before, when we were forced to get rid of Lily. Now I was seeing it change again. Rebekah was lonely. Despite all of our planning, despite our rational attempts to create workarounds for our family separation, a growing realization began to overtake us. It didn’t look like we were going to make it living apart for another year. When I was able to visit in Jakarta for three or four days at a time, Annabelle wasn’t comfortable with me, at least not initially. She wouldn’t sit next to me until the last day of my visit. During playtime, she crawled away from me on the floor. When I’d pick Annabelle up to cuddle her, she’d cry and reach for Rebekah, or Sati, or Tri. It was heartbreaking.

On a Sunday night during one of my commutes to Jakarta, Rebekah and I sat on a sofa in her living room and ran through our options as we saw them. She could quit her job with the For
eign Service and bring Annabelle to Seoul, where we’d ride out the rest of my contract. The problem there was threefold. First, we’d lose Rebekah’s U.S. government health insurance, which covered me as well. Second, Rebekah really didn’t want to come back to my little apartment in Seoul again with a one-year-old, no job, and no friends. Finally, what would happen after my contract ended? When I signed my second contract, I had told Hyundai that four years in Korea would be enough and that I’d like them to find me a job in the U.S. or Europe. But any such job was likely to be a step down from my current one and there was no guarantee there would even be one available.

I broached the idea of just quitting Hyundai and moving to Jakarta without a job. With government-supplied housing, we could live on Rebekah’s salary through her two-year posting. But what about after that? We could see where her next posting would take her. But we doubted it would be as easy for me to find as good of a job as I had at Hyundai, so I’d either be out of work again or lucky to score a job in the embassy mail room. Or she could quit the Foreign Service and we’d head back to the States with a baby and both of us looking for work. Good luck with that.

We concluded there was no solution that enabled both of us to keep our jobs, or for me to keep my higher-salary job without Rebekah being miserably cooped up in Korea. My faith instructs me to turn to prayer first, acknowledging God’s sovereignty in all things. Instead, as a prideful human, believing I had control over the situation, I turned to prayer only when I was out of options.

Rebekah and I began to pray together but we were interrupted by a knock on the front door. It was Pak Wandi, ready to drive me to the airport. Time to leave my family again. I would catch the 10:05 p.m. Korean Air flight from Jakarta, touching down in Seoul at 7:05 Monday morning. I’d rush home, take a shower, and get to work a little more than an hour late. Another of my
too-short visits was over, leaving me hungry for more and unsettled about the future.

Annabelle was long asleep, so I patted Chairman, hugged Rebekah, and slid into the backseat of the silver minivan. As Pak Wandi drove, I silently stared out of a window at the scooters zipping noisily by. Festive flashing lights and billboards cut through the hazy, damp Indonesian darkness. “There has to be an answer,” I thought. “Something we’re missing.”