Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (40 page)

As for Rebekah, she still smarts from the forced separation from her career, like a bandage ripped off too soon. Blood still pools at the wound. She is a stay-at-home mother, which has enabled her to spend crucial developmental time with Annabelle and to build a solid support network of similarly situated mothers from our church. Like many places, the church is full of highly qualified, accomplished professional women who’ve made the tough choice—or been forced to make the choice—of sidelining, downsizing, or abandoning their careers for their families. Rebekah once pointed out that her circle of church friends includes a former diplomat, a senior-level government manager, a medevac helicopter nurse, a scientist who worked on Ebola, and a professional ballet dancer. This is the work-child choice that we fathers are almost never forced to make. Nevertheless, along with her like-situated friends, she is working to come to terms with it. In an e-mail to a friend, Rebekah wrote: “I’ve learned that my identity was rooted in my work, and that I was overly confident and prideful in my abilities, which didn’t look awful on the outside, but I can see God has taught me through letting go that He is in charge, not me. I’ve learned that God gave me intelligence and the ability to have a career, but my energy and intellect is His to direct, and that by feeling empty without a work project is a sign of my priorities out of place. I still struggle with ‘boredom,’ especially on the intellectual side, but I have really come to learn that God is using this in a powerful way in my life.” You can call it justification; Rebekah calls it learning to follow God’s will instead of her own desires, as all Christians struggle to do.

I learned that I made the right decision to leave journalism.
I am still immersed in it by vocation and avocation and I respect many journalists. At the same time, I do not miss journalism. Toward the end of my time in journalism I became tired of writing about other people doing things and I wanted to do something of my own. Journalists are watchers, not participants. That’s as it should be, and I think it suited the only child in me. I grew up observing rather than mixing it up with siblings. I was not a joiner. I put off marriage for so long because I feared things that could not be undone, such as having a child with someone. Marriage and parenthood were the first things I truly dove into completely. It took me a long time at Hyundai to abandon my observer status—which I know many of my colleagues felt and rightfully resented—and try to become a part of the team.

Once I did, I came to enjoy the business atmosphere more than the newsroom atmosphere—which was quite a surprise, because the newsroom atmosphere was the main reason I went into journalism. Businesses can screw up, deceive, and be, at their worst, forces for evil. But at their best, as I saw from the inside, businesses are optimistic and forward-looking and the best ones are filled with optimistic people. Newsrooms, on the other hand, can be pretty negative places, peppered with snarkiness, sarcasm, and a pelts-on-the-belt, “afflict the comfortable” mind-set. An old editor of mine liked to crack, “We don’t write stories about the planes that land safely.” That gets big laughs in a newsroom, but I am now less interested in dark humor and am much more open to positive, feel-good narratives and stories of uplifting experiences.

I am over negativity. I have lived long enough to see that negativity and pessimism cause repeating loops of misery. And while believing in and practicing optimism in no way assures good things will happen to you, your chances of recovery markedly improve when inevitable misfortune strikes. If you tell me that optimism is not a realistic way to live, trust me, you don’t have
to tell a Christian that we live in a fallen world. I probably think it’s worse than you do. After all, God sent the world a savior and the world crucified Him. Logically, Christians should be the most realistic, Hobbesian people you know. Yet, to simply yield to a nihilism that asks “What’s the point?” not only dishonors the life God gave us, it makes us miserable for the period we’re privileged to walk the earth and it does nothing to bring anyone else to God.

On a more worldly level, I found I developed a taste for hopping on a plane in Seoul, disembarking in Muscat or some other exotic-sounding point on the globe, and speaking to an audience of journalists for those few moments when I was the voice of a major global automaker. That can be intoxicating, and the danger of pride must continually be checked. I learned I liked the car industry, especially working with designers and engineers, and still miss it. There was much Rebekah and I liked about living outside the U.S.—no one would be more surprised than me to learn that about myself—and I wonder if Annabelle will ask us why we lived in these cool places when she was too young to remember it. We’d love to do another turn overseas for the sake of the girls when they get older. I know we’d have a blast.

I returned to the States more impressed than ever by our flawed but potent principles of multiculturalism, tolerance, rule of law, inclusiveness, human rights, gender equality, and the embracing of risk. Here’s something I came to love about America: when you fly into Dulles airport in Washington from overseas and head to Immigration, you see two lines, one for American citizens and one for noncitizens. If you took away the signs, I would dare you to identify which line was which.

Even though I found the Korean culture tough to live in as a foreigner and tough to penetrate, I made good Korean friends, and many showed great empathy for my fish-out-of-water troubles. Where I initially recoiled at the drinking dinner as merely
a drunken bacchanal, I have come to understand it is a glue to Korean society and culture: the salaryman’s life can be miserable, but it is a shared misery, and the
hoesik
makes it tolerable. And sometimes, just sometimes, I get a little nostalgic for sitting shoulder-to-shoulder around a sizzling grill full of beef in the middle of a table, sparks flying,
soju
flowing, while smoke and laughter fill the room. Just in that moment there is an undeniable warmth to the experience, the
jeong
permeates, and a
waygookin
can feel like just a little less of an outsider. I even ended up with my own go-to
noraebang
song, which is “Dancing Queen,” because it’s just funny to see a big American guy singing ABBA.

I have battle scars from my time in Korea, but each one tells a story and each one makes me stronger and a little more interesting, I think. On one of my last days at Hyundai, Ben, my team leader, said he believed my three-plus years at Hyundai were “like medicine.” We often resist it, it doesn’t always taste good, but it makes us better. There may be no better way I could phrase it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The first person to believe in my writing was my late mother, Betty Lee Ahrens. The second was my twelfth-grade English teacher, Bonnie Maddox, who wrote on the final class paper I gave her, “Reconsider engineering. It will stifle you.” That was charitable. More accurately, she should have written, “Reconsider engineering. It is too hard for you.” The third person, and the one who had the most impact on the writer I became, is Gene Weingarten, who, before he became the first person to win two Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing, was known as the man who discovered Dave Barry.

In 1992, I was a nobody freelancer who pitched the
Washington Post
a story about a criminal Hare Krishna leader and his strange compound in West Virginia. “Perfect Weingarten story,” someone must have said. Gene bought the story, edited it, and put it in the
Post
, still one of the highlights of my life. Gene was an activist editor, a man of great endurance, who each week somehow managed to manhandle a 4,000-word narrative feature into the
Post
’s Sunday Style section. Not every writer could stand up to Gene’s muscular editing, but if you could, you’d be a better writer for it. Gene said every story should be about the meaning of life. That’s not particularly helpful to the majority of journalists, who cover things like county zoning procedures in suburban bureaus, but I got his point. Within those prosaic beats, you could find
stories that are in fact about the meaning of life. These are the toughest and most frustrating to write, but also the most rewarding. Gene gave me the tools to tell them.

Gene was part of the great
Miami Herald
migration of writers to the
Post
in the 1990s, and I feel privileged to have spent a time in their orbit and count them as friends. All of them—Joel Achenbach, Marc Fisher, Lynn Medford, Steve Reiss (sorry for all the semicolons, Dr. No!), and others—improved my writing either by instruction, example, or tough editing. Another, David Von Drehle, shared his tips for writing a book in one’s spare time, and it was invaluable. Dave Barry contributed nothing to this book but I did break his glasses in a backyard football game once, so that’s something.

Thanks go to former Washington Post Company CEO Don Graham for building a paper that held institutions accountable—and allowed tough reporting on itself—and for creating the kind of oxygen-rich newsroom atmosphere that allowed writers like those above, and even me, to flourish. I hope Jeff Bezos is doing the same. I must thank my two executive editors at the
Post
, Len Downie and Marcus Brauchli, for their support.

While I’m thanking journalists, I need to thank PR pros. The best are not liars, obfuscators, or shallow mouthpieces. They are deeply knowledgeable representatives of their companies and organizations and they respect a journalist trying to do his or her job. In my career at the
Post
, I encountered a few whom I’m indebted to—more than one prevented me from committing major mistakes in print and harming myself and my paper—and they provided outstanding role models for my current profession. I think of the late, great Barbara Brogliatti and her colleague, Scott Rowe, at Warner Bros.; John Spelich, formerly of Ali Baba and Disney; Scott Grogin, formerly of Fox Networks; and Amy Weiss of Weiss Public Affairs.

At Hyundai, I must first thank Vice Chairman Chung Eui-sun for hiring me, promoting me, and backing me. I hope very soon the world motoring media will get to know him, because they will be impressed. Also at Hyundai, I want to thank my global PR team, especially Ben, Antonio, and Ike. I also want to thank my good Korean friend who read the manuscript and worked hard to keep me from embarrassing myself too much. I am forever in your debt.

Here, a word about character identification: all characters in this book are real. Each character identified by first and last name is that person and can be found in an online search. For others, I have created pseudonyms to protect them from workplace and cultural backlash and because they are not public figures. There is one composite character, Jinho, who is a combination of two individuals who share traits and befriended me in similar ways. I created the composite for literary expediency.

BGR Group was the prime worldly actor in getting my family back together, and the founders—Haley Barbour, Lanny Griffith, and Ed Rogers—and my boss, Jeff Birnbaum, have my gratitude.

The first person to envision and believe in this book was my agent, Howard Yoon, of Ross Yoon in Washington, D.C. He took a rambling pile of pages and turned it into a sellable pitch. This book would not exist without my editor, Hollis Heimbouch, of HarperCollins, who turned the manuscript into a book. I knew as soon as I met her that I would like Hollis, because she shares her first name with a character in William Gibson books that I love.

I want to acknowledge the authors who came before me who added depth to my experience. No one who writes about Korea can do so without consulting two foundational texts: Don Oberdorfer and Robert Carlin’s
The Two Koreas
and Michael Breen’s
The Koreans
. If you’re moving to Korea, read Mike’s book the first
week you’re there. You’ll thank me. Other books proved invaluable to making me smarter on both Koreas: Barbara Demick’s
Nothing to Envy
, Suki Kim’s
Without You, There Is No Us
, Bruce Cumings’s
Korea’s Place in the Sun
, Richard M. Steers’s
Made in Korea
, Euny Hong’s
The Birth of Korean Cool
, Daniel Tudor’s
Korea: The Impossible Country
, Larry Diamond and Byung-Kook Kim’s
Consolidating Democracy in South Korea
, Nicholas Eberstadt’s
The End of North Korea
, Chol-hwan Kang and Pierre Rigoulot’s
The Aquariums of Pyongyang
, and Blaine Harden’s
Escape from Camp 14
. Tim Clissold’s
Mr. China
and
Chinese Rules
helped me understand China, and early-twentieth-century British naval officer and historian George Alexander Ballard provided an unexpected nugget on Admiral Yi in
The
Influence of the Sea on the Political History of Japan
.

No one was more important to the creation of this book than my wife, Rebekah, who was the first reader and whose opinion I trust more than anyone’s. Not only did she help shape the book and clean up mistakes on U.S. diplomacy and East Asian politics and policy, but she also supported its writing by handling a toddler when I vanished into my study, and by going to sleep alone while I typed into the night. Finally, I must thank God for His provision and His great love and mercy. I hope I have honored it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FRANK AHRENS
was a reporter at the
Washington Post
for eighteen years before joining Hyundai Motor Company for more than three years, eventually becoming a vice president. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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