Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (39 page)

Before the
chaebol
were players in the world marketplace, they were little more than faint ideas in the minds of risk-taking entrepreneurs. Chung Ju-yung, running his A-do Service Garage. Samsung’s Lee Kun-hee telling his employees, “Change everything except your wife and kids.” Move Chung and Lee into the twenty-first century, place them in a software design studio or a sharing-economy start-up in Seoul—or a boutique hotel on Jeju Island—and they will be the leaders of Korea’s next economy.

Koreans understand this. In a February 2014 speech, President Park said, “Our past . . . way of growth that made us one of the world’s 10 largest economies has now reached its limit.” The
export and manufacturing sector, led by all-powerful
chaebol
, has completely overshadowed the domestic consumer market and services industry, Park said. The president vowed to ease regulations on service-sector industries, such as finance and software, and sink government money into funding start-ups that would be appealing to outside investment. It has started to pay off. In 2015, Japan’s SoftBank invested $1 billion in a Korean e-commerce firm called Coupang, valued at $5 billion. None of this means the end of
chaebol
like Hyundai. It means the birth of something else: a diversified economy. The Korean economy still has its issues: growth will continue to be pegged to the performance of the
chaebol
until diversification achieves critical mass. Korean household debt is high. Currency fluctuation has an outsize impact on the export-heavy economy. But the macro arrows are pointing the right way. In its 2015 Innovation Index, based on metrics such as R & D spending, education, number of high-tech companies, and patents, Bloomberg ranked Korea as the world’s most innovative country. For a country that only two generations ago was making Mitsubishi knockoffs, this is astounding.

Politically, change is coming, too.

Constitutionally, the Korean president can serve only one five-year term, meaning Park Geun-hye is out after the 2017 election. Her successor may be U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, who tops polls of possible candidates. Or it may be Seoul mayor Park Won-soon, who has lured venture capitalists to his city and preaches the work-life balance. I was wrong about Mayor Park: Seoul voters did not toss out the crazy liberal after only one term, possibly because—even with all his crazy liberal ideas—he managed to cut the city’s budget deficit. Instead, they affirmed his direction by reelecting him in 2014. Either way, the options for the country’s next president look more progressive than previous ones.

At the cultural and even personal levels, change is coming fast, too.

Korea’s relentless pursuit of education has caught up to it. The universities produce more four-year-degree graduates than the great
chaebol
can absorb, even though each year they make tens of thousands of new hires. This has had a few effects, one of which is a rise in multiculturalism. Although many college grads can’t find work, there is also an unwillingness among some to do offered work they find beneath them. The upside to this is an influx of foreign labor, changing Korea’s complexion. The highly educated class of young Korean females has created a shortage of brides for less-educated, often rural men. This has also contributed to immigration, as more Korean men are marrying Vietnamese, Chinese, Filipino, and Cambodian women. As many as 10 percent of all new marriages in Korea are now multicultural. This naturally foments tension in the largely homogeneous culture, and problems of assimilation occur. But long-term it will be a good thing.

Another by-product of the glut of college grads is that it pushes Koreans to seek international careers with foreign firms, making them more global. And it encourages others to abandon the “right spec”—in other words, to get any degree you can from the best university you can so you can get hired by a
chaebol
. Instead, Korean kids are starting to major in topics that interest them and that lead to careers they want to pursue. These young Koreans will contribute to the post-
chaebol
economy. “Gone are the days when a degree from the SKY universities guarantees entrance to a
chaebol
,” a Korean friend told me.

When Rebekah and I threw our first Christmas party in Korea shortly after we arrived in 2010, we were struck by how little the Koreans mixed with the Americans. A Korean friend told me that Koreans tended not to make new friendships as adults. Now, thanks to the Internet, more Koreans are meeting others online
who share their interests, forming up in clubs to bicycle, or work out, or go to baseball games. And to make new friends in adulthood.

Not even the revered Korean
hoesik
, or drinking dinner, is immune to change. Both the
chaebol
and the government are now warning against excessive
hoesik
s—what we would call binge drinking—in public service ads. Not only does binge drinking lead to early deaths, the ads say, it costs the Korean economy $20 billion annually in lost productivity. The ads indicate that the
hoesik
is not always a form of bonding; for nondrinkers it can be harassment. Don’t think the
hoesik
is going away anytime soon; it’s not. It’s still a fundamental part of the Korean salaryman’s life, and that’s a fundamental part of the Korean culture. But now the costs of the practice are being acknowledged, and that’s the first step.

All of this change—often radical, on-a-dime change—taught me that the greatest Korean trait turns out to be adaptability, the key to species and cultural survival. Add adaptability to other key Korean traits, such as diligence, loyalty, velocity, and
jeong
, and that’s why I argue it makes sense to put your chips on Korea among the three major powers of East Asia. Korea has radically changed once in recent history—growing from foreign aid recipient to aid distributor—and can do it again. It has several factors in its favor. Unlike China, Korea is a democracy. This makes it more stable, more dynamic, and more innovative than authoritarian China. Korea’s industrialized infrastructure is only fifty years old and is not yet facing a breakdown. Unlike the great
zaibatsu
in Japan, Korea’s
chaebol
are still on the rise and have not yet hit cruising speed. Unlike Japan, Korea has great relations with the region’s largest power, China. Unlike China, Korea has not built islands in the South China Sea that inflame its neighbors. Unlike Japan, Korea doesn’t have a meaningful ultranationalist wing to
destabilize regional politics. And Korea is the most U.S.-friendly power in the region.

The final factor in South Korea’s long-term success is North Korea. Instead of being only a perpetual threat, North Korea is South Korea’s eventual ace in the hole when the peninsula is reunited. It can give South Korea something that no other economy in the region has at the ready: an overnight doubling of landmass, access to natural resources, and an infusion of 25 million new citizens who are younger and have more children than their South Korean cousins, helping to defuse the South’s demographic bomb. This will be more complicated than reuniting East and West Germany. Who knows how many North Koreans will become South Koreans and how many will melt away into China. And there will be other problems to resolve with China, which would share a border with America’s best friend in the region. There would be an economic shock and a decade-long sag to the South Korean economy with the absorption of the North Koreans. The less-educated, unworldly North Koreans would be an underclass for a couple of generations. But in the long run, citizens of the two Koreas speak (mostly) the same language and they have the same DNA, heritage, culture, and customs. They are, in the end, Koreans. The North will collapse one day; the only questions are how dramatically and when. When that happens, South Korea—by then truly “Korea”—will be the beneficiary.

ME: A NEW IDENTITY

When I am asked what it was like living overseas, I have a few brief go-to stories. Some are designed to explain, others just to get a laugh at my expense. It’s what people want. But often the question prompts me to think of Tri, our nanny in Jakarta. I usually don’t tell this story.

About a week after we were forced to put Sati on a plane and send her back to Indonesia, Rebekah’s iPhone chimed, signaling a text message. It was from Sati. Without warning or context, in curt and cruel broken English, she texted: “Dear Mrs I hope you and Mr are fine. Tri already die this Friday.” Shocked but unbelieving, thinking Sati must have made an errant keystroke or meant something else, we called and learned that Tri—only twenty-seven, the single mother of a young boy—had gotten sick with something that gave her a fever. Unable to pay for treatment at a clinic, her condition got worse until, a few days after she became ill, she died. That was all the information Sati had and all we were likely to get secondhand out of a rural Indonesian village on the other side of the planet. It seemed so senseless, almost absurd. For the want of—what? Maybe $100 of care and medication? Yet, for Tri and millions of Indonesians like her, spending that towering sum of money on herself was probably unimaginable. It is a tragic fact that in Indonesia, and all around the world, poor people die of things that should not kill them—that is, if they had access to good health care, the money or insurance to pay for it, and the knowledge and expectation that many illnesses can be cured. Early mortality is a grim and familiar presence in every one of these families. Dying of old age is a First World luxury. Tri held Annabelle through many crying nights and was a part of our family for a time. Annabelle was too young to remember Tri, but we do, and we will show Annabelle pictures of Tri one day and tell her about the woman who heard her first words and watched her take her first steps.

This was one of the many sobering experiences of living overseas, and a catalyst of the change I saw happening in myself. Now, as a husband and father and no longer an aging #YOLO bachelor; now, as an accountable member of a church family and no longer an outlier of the faith; now, as the leader of a business
team and no longer a journalistic observer, I came to understand that my identity—the person I was becoming in my second act—was completely enmeshed with and dependent on others. I had become, odd as it sounds to say, a bit Korean.

In Korea’s hierarchical Confucian culture, who you are at any given moment largely depends on your relationship to who’s around. You are something like a cultural chameleon, adapting to environment, showing deference and respect in one direction, authority and leadership in another.

In the West we are taught that we are individuals above all. Our identities are either inherent in our being—expressed by gender, color, height, weight, intelligence—or they are handcrafted by accumulating things, money, connections, ideology, experience, fame. Either way, we stand at the center of our world and announce ourselves loudly.

This is how I lived most of my life. Now I have come to understand that my identity is in fact based on my relationship to God, my family, and others. My identity is not dependent on my profession, my salary, my nationality, my home state, my college sports teams, or anything else I used to think defined me.

I have become a husband and a father, and I’m good with that.

I read an awful lot about parents bemoaning the loss of their identities when becoming parents. They talk about no longer being able to enjoy their hobbies or have the kind of intense political conversations they had in grad school. I can sympathize. I used to ride a motorcycle. I really liked it. It was fun. But now that I’m a parent, I’m probably not going to ride a motorcycle again. I have too many people depending on me and it’s one unnecessary risk, and an extra expense, I can cut out of my life while significantly lowering my wife’s anxiety. But am I less of who I am because I no longer ride a bike? Of course not. Once I became a parent, I stopped doing a lot of the things I used to do when I was single—not just dating—and that’s as it should be. I now
answer to people other than myself. And it turns out that my selfishness as a single man was overrated. As a parent, I get to do so many more satisfying things with my family than I ever got to do when I was single. That’s something I never saw when I was unattached; I surely did not believe it when my happily married friends explained it to me. Marriage and family, like the most important things in life, are leaps of faith.

But each day there’s a payoff. More than a year since Annabelle and Rebekah returned from Jakarta and we were reunited as a family, I’m still grateful and thrilled when Annabelle climbs all over me in a restaurant booth or clings to my leg while I’m trying to walk around the house. When I was a stranger to Annabelle and she wouldn’t let me hold her, I wasn’t sure if she ever would. “Ode to Joy,” with Annabelle’s name as the lyrics, is finally part of our relationship: it’s the song she requests when she’s swinging. Do I sing it on a public playground? Yes, I do. At age two and a half, Annabelle’s personality is forming each day, with surprising new bits like leaves shooting from a growing tree. On the downside, this means she has learned willful disobedience, and at times she tests and tasks us. On the upside, it means that she is learning the important things in life, such as how to tell a joke and how to totally melt her father.

“You know what, Daddy?”

“What, Annabelle?”

“I love spending time with you!”

In October 2015, our little family expanded, adding Penelope Honor. Annabelle has fully embraced her role as big sister, including giving her little sister a nickname a two-and-a-half-year-old can pronounce: “Nelpy.”

It astounds me, when I think of it, that all of these early childhood memories I’m making with my daughters—ones that I will carry to my grave—they will probably never remember. I watch
the girls and the scenes are etched into my brain like acid into rock. How is it possible they will forget all this? This is the point where Rebekah would probably refer to my circle-of-life issues again.