Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan Read Online Free PDF Page A

the only American at Hyundai headquarters, full stop. Of the few thousand employees who worked there, fewer than a dozen were non-Koreans. So I already stood out. At six foot two, white, and XL size, even more so.
    But, as much as it felt that way at the moment, I was not alone. When I arrived in Korea and at Hyundai, all three of us—the country, the company, and I—were heading into uncharted territory: our midlife crises.
    These were not the hedonistic, leave-your-wife-and-get-a-Corvette midlife crises. These were the kind where you realize you’ve spent your entire adult life pushing, climbing, and striving toward something and then, in your forties, pulling up like a distance runner taking a break, putting your hands on your hips, and taking a look around. Evaluating where you are and comparing it to where you thought you’d be. Who you are and comparing it to who you thought you’d be. In the worst cases,wondering, “Is this all there is?” In the best cases, trying to figure out your second act.
    In 2010, Hyundai Motor was forty-three years old, having been established in 1967. I was forty-six, having been established in 1963. And although South Korea became its own nation in 1948, the late forties and fifties were a terrible, directionless time for the fledgling country, which took the worse end of a brutal three-year war waged by North Korea and afterward staggered through two inept administrations, corruption, internecine squabbling, and abject poverty. Modern South Korea, the beginning of what we see today, did not start until military strongman Park Chung-hee’s coup in 1961 put the nation on its path to prosperity and modernity. In this respect, in 2010, South Korea was only forty-nine years old.
    We were all trying to engineer the next stage of our lives. The stakes were high.
    Hyundai could keep chugging along, cranking out very good if unremarkable cheap cars. Or it could try something radical and untested and aspire to become something much more than what it was and what people expected it to be. If Hyundai faltered, its moment might not come again. Soon it could be bypassed by waves of Chinese economy cars and might never rise above the level of being the Brand That’s Almost As Good As Toyota.
    Korea could rest on its laurels, congratulating itself for how far it had come so quickly—maybe the fastest industrialized development in history—and enjoy the fact that Samsung, Hyundai, and LG Electronics had become global brands. But the country knew that if it started coasting, it faced the prospect of becoming another Japan: zero population growth coupled with a swelling over–sixty-five population weighing down a stagnant economy overly dependent on national champion conglomerates that may be past their prime. Korea’s leaders understood that just doingmore of what got Korea to where it was in 2010 was not enough if the country was going to write the next chapter of its remarkable growth story. Korea had to become something else besides what it was.
    If I washed out as a PR executive in a foreign company, we’d still have Rebekah’s Foreign Service job, free housing for two years, and a grand adventure. But I didn’t want to wash out. I had only fifteen to twenty prime earning years left and was heading a family for the first time. If I could succeed at this job, I could set us on solid financial footing for years to come in a way I never could on a journalist’s salary. More important, I was starting a family late in life. Most middle-aged family men had already made their radical change from bachelorhood to husband and father in their twenties and thirties. I was a forty-six-year-old first-time newlywed. Like an old stag deer, I had long settled into my life patterns, wearing footpaths around Washington, between friends, and within the Post . Now, for the first time in my adult life, I had to pay attention to someone else’s opinion of me. And start a new career. And do it in a foreign