Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (37 page)

Maybe this was the sign that I’d made it through my midlife crisis and become something else, maybe something better; that I was manning up and walking away from a job that I was good at to take a flyer on an unknown gig for the greater good of getting the family back together. Maybe this was it.

BGR made its offer. Now it was time to tell Hyundai. I gulped hard and went to see Hyundai’s HR head, who had helped recruit me three years earlier.

I started by telling him how well Hyundai had treated and supported me and how grateful I was to have the opportunity—maybe a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—to have had my job. But, I continued, “you know the situation I have with my family, with me here and my wife and daughter in Indonesia.”

He did, he said.

“Well, I’m being recruited by a PR firm back in Washington, D.C.,” I said. “They want me to start January 1. And I need to take the offer.”

The first words that came out of his mouth: “I understand. Family must come first.”

I was floored. I didn’t know what to expect, but this was not it. It was generous, understanding, and gracious. Who knows, maybe they expected I’d bolt when Rebekah left Seoul. Maybe they’d got one more year out of me than they thought they would. The head of HR said they’d start the separation paperwork and ask me for some recommendations for my replacement, then told me the company would miss me.

I immediately got in the elevator and went back to my office. I walked to the area where my team sat and asked them to join me in my office right away. They looked at each other in a puzzled fashion—a couple sighed with annoyance—and they trundled in.

I shut the door and told them. Stunned silence until Ben, my team leader, broke the ice with a laugh and called me an “asshole” for leaving. He immediately followed up by saying he completely understood my situation—as he would, with his wife and children still living in the States—and most of the rest of the team congratulated me and said they understood. Those who didn’t probably thought this was just another incident of the American
always getting what he wanted—a promotion, four months in the U.S. with his wife, an early exit from his contract—at the expense of the team and the company. If I put myself in their shoes, I could see that point of view. I had tried my best to smooth that over but could not.

I said good-bye to my team and my friends at Hyundai on December 6, 2013, three years and two months after I walked into the headquarters lobby, the lone American, hopelessly adrift in a sea of Koreans. As I walked out, I saw things differently. Now everyone looked like individuals. I saw a couple young women walking arm in arm through the lobby and realized I would miss that kind custom. I might even miss the smell of
kimchi
, if not the taste. I had accomplished a lot at Hyundai, but could have done more if I’d been smarter about it earlier in my time there. But this was not a time for reflection. I was an arrow pointed south toward Jakarta. The next day I was on a plane, headed to my family.

I’d like to write that the reunion was instantly sweet, but it was not. I had work to do in building a relationship with my eleven-month-old daughter, to whom I was largely a stranger. She was learning to walk and talk, could recognize individuals, and was communicating basic desires. She was becoming, in a word, interactive. Aside from the fact that I was unfamiliar to her, she was not accustomed to men. She was being raised by three women: Rebekah, Tri, and Sati. She had almost no meaningful interaction with men, so I had to get her used to my size, my smell, the deeper sound of my voice, the hair on my chest—everything. The good news was I didn’t have to start my new job back in Washington until just after the New Year, so I had a month in Jakarta with no job, which meant I could spend all day with Annabelle.

Tri and Sati were terrific. Although Tri was the primary caregiver, whenever Sati had a free moment she wouldn’t take it for
herself: she’d get down on the floor to play with Annabelle and Tri and me. As for Tri, one day I was looking for something in the apartment and glanced into her bedroom. On the nightstand, next to her bed, was a well-worn and dog-eared paperback English dictionary. She was trying to improve her English. Neither Rebekah nor I had ever said anything to her about our concerns regarding Annabelle’s language development, but maybe she’d overheard us talking. Or maybe she had just taken it upon herself. In either case, I was deeply moved.

At home during the day in Jakarta, I was able to play with Annabelle, get to know Sati and Tri better, take Annabelle to a pool for a swim, and walk over to the embassy and have lunch with my wife. Rebekah and I both realized our ex-pat lifestyle, and all the perks that went with it, was coming to an end. Rebekah was simply happy to have her husband back in her house. For both of us—and for most families, I’m sure—being separated felt deeply unnatural: each of us was single without being single; each was married without a spouse.

Now it was Rebekah’s turn to engineer her exit. Her request received support from the embassy in Jakarta and a cable announcing her curtailment was sent to Foggy Bottom.

And then it all went south.

One day after her request was sent to State, Rebekah got an e-mail from the State Department saying her curtailment was being strongly opposed. This was the beginning of a wrenching, two-month churn through the confusing—and what eventually felt spiteful—bureaucratic machinery of State. Rebekah appealed to various entities and would get encouraging strategy from one that would be rejected by another. By now it was January 2014, I had gone to Washington to start my new job, and Rebekah was trying to manage this on her own while still being a U.S. diplomat in Jakarta and trying to find good new positions for her three house
hold staff members. And it wasn’t lost on us that, once again, our family was separated.

Throughout January in Jakarta, Rebekah would routinely awake in the morning to a negative or even hostile e-mail that had arrived overnight from the State Department in Washington as communications volleyed from one side of the globe to the other. She and her career adviser cobbled together one plan that was given the preliminary okay by the higher-ups—raising our spirits—only to have them change their minds two days later and rescind it, dashing them once again. At one point the State Department warned Rebekah that if she somehow managed to get a curtailment from Jakarta, she would be reassigned elsewhere overseas instead of being allowed to return to Washington. This was the part that felt spiteful.

Finally we pulled the rip cord. With the help of the embassy in Jakarta, Rebekah got a short-term leave of absence. It would protect her job for the time being and give us a few months to mull over the options. She and Annabelle would come to Washington, where she would continue her appeal in person with the full intention of remaining in the Foreign Service. She didn’t want to walk away from the only career she’d ever wanted and had worked years to achieve—and had turned out to be very good at.

We asked Sati to come with us to the States. The fact that she was older and had traveled outside Indonesia with previous Western employers made her the better choice over Tri. Both Tri and Pak Wandi were very worried when we told them Rebekah was leaving—she was their only income—but we found each of them equally paying jobs with Western diplomats. When Tri had to say good-bye to Annabelle, she squeezed her hard and sobbed.

For Sati, it was the windfall of a lifetime. In the U.S. we’d pay her four times what she was making in Jakarta. We wanted her to stay at least until we had a prayed-for second child. The
money she would earn from us would be a life changer for Sati, her husband, and their two children. It would literally lift them into the middle class and set them up for future generations. We were delighted to have Sati help us in the States, but also happy we could help her.

Rebekah, Annabelle, and Sati arrived at Dulles International Airport in early February 2014. I caught the moment with a photograph of a tiny, colorfully dressed, and slightly dazed Annabelle, only thirteen months old, standing by herself in the middle of the airport’s vast, gray arrival area. At last we were all together and would be for the foreseeable future. We all squeezed into a small rental apartment and spent our Saturdays house hunting. It was especially fun to take Sati with us simply to experience her awe at walking into empty suburban Washington homes that, for us, were of average size and amenities but, for Sati, may as well have been palaces.

I settled into my new job at BGR. Documents were in English. I could attend meetings on my own and understand what was being said. We all addressed each other by our first names, even our bosses. I could walk outside my office and there were a dozen good lunch options within five minutes.

But events did not turn out as happily for Rebekah. It became clear that there were no options that would allow Rebekah to get a job at State Department headquarters in Washington. As far as they were concerned, her job—and the only job she could have in the Foreign Service—was back in Jakarta. She could either return to that one or resign.

It was finally the end. Rebekah was not going back to Jakarta. State would never tell Rebekah why her compassionate curtailment application had been rejected and why so many others were approved. It didn’t matter. She tendered her resignation from the only career she’d ever really wanted. This was a crushing blow for
Rebekah. When she was younger, she’d taken jobs overseas just so she could live overseas. None had been a career. The Foreign Service posting in Jakarta was the first time Rebekah had a career in a foreign country—her dream life. I had once walked away from the only career I had ever wanted—a job at the
Washington Post
—but my professional arc from the declining
Post
only pointed upward: better salary, more adventure, new experience. For Rebekah there was no professional promise in her future. She was, at least for the time being, going to be a stay-at-home mom. We valued that and were glad Annabelle would have one parent with her at home, but Rebekah and I knew it was not going to be professionally satisfying. My wife was taking a major hit for our family.

You might think the State Department was finished with us. You’d be wrong. Another overnight e-mail, this one from Jakarta to Washington. Rebekah awoke before me one morning in February, then came back into the bedroom to wake me up.

“Sati has to go home,” she said, her face fallen.

The U.S. embassy in Jakarta said that Sati’s visa status, which allowed her to live and work in the U.S., was dependent on Rebekah’s continued employment with the State Department. Now that she’d resigned, Sati’s visa was no longer valid. She had to return to Jakarta immediately.

I spent a day talking to an immigration lawyer and learned nothing promising. We would miss Sati terribly, but for us, losing her was an inconvenience. For Sati and her family, losing us meant a return to near poverty in Indonesia. Her family’s future of economic assurance, a college education for her daughter, a house they could own—all evaporated in a five-minute conversation in our apartment.

“This was always my dream,” she told us heartbreakingly. “Now it is gone.”

The next day I drove Sati back to Dulles Airport and put her
on a flight to Jakarta. Driving home alone, I realized that our ex-pat adventure was truly over. All the ties to our frustrating, dangerous, gorgeous, glamorous, absurd, exciting three-plus years had now been cut. It was all just pictures on an iPhone and Facebook updates. It was jarring to have been a corporate executive in Seoul and to have been a diplomat in Jakarta and then, within a few weeks, suddenly become an agency PR man and stay-at-home mom living on a cul de sac in suburban Washington. The truth was, I quickly realized, it didn’t matter whether we lived in Seoul, Jakarta, or Arlington. Even though so much of our previous three years had been defined by exotic geography, we were not a place. What we were, in fact, was a family. Wherever we were.

A couple months after Rebekah and Annabelle arrived back in Washington, the three of us were puttering around our little rented apartment. I was sitting on a low inflatable sofa—my furniture had not arrived from Korea yet—and Annabelle walked up to me and stood between my legs, putting her hands on my knees. She didn’t have anything particular she wanted to say or that she wanted from me. She just wanted to stand there, touch her daddy, and make some tongue-clicking noises she had been experimenting with. A total throwaway moment in most parents’ lives, barely noticeable, but for me it was a revelation. Only a few months earlier, back in Jakarta, Annabelle cried each time I tried to hold her, and wobbled off to her mother or Sati or Tri. Now here she stood before me, sure-footed, comfortable with her father, gently patting his knees, and clicking away. Seated, I was the same height that she was, and instead of looking down at her, as I usually did, I got a different view. This was one of those moments when her face hit a certain angle, or when she threw me a certain look, and it felt like she’d suddenly crossed an age threshold. She was only fourteen months old, but her pinched baby features were growing and migrating apart on her face, like
tiny continents slowly traveling to their eventual destinations on a globe. I felt like I was getting a glimpse of what she was going to look like as an adult—a glimpse of her future. Years telescoped out ahead of me as I sat there probing her face, extrapolating. I could see her as a little girl, as a teenager, as a young woman, as a mother. “You’re it,” I thought. “You’re the proof that I made the turn—that I made it through my midlife crisis.” Annabelle was the proof that I’d written—that God had written—a second act for my life that was something wonderful, and unimaginably better than the first one.

EPILOGUE

Change happens
pali-pali
, or quick-quick, in Korea, faster than in the U.S. When Rebekah and I arrived in Seoul at the end of 2010, we could count on one hand the number of high-quality Western-fare restaurants we found that weren’t located in luxury hotels. By the time I left three years later, because of new laws, new entrepreneurs, and new fads among Koreans, I could get an excellent craft beer on tap and top-drawer bar food at any of a number of microbreweries that had sprung up around the city.