Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan by Frank Ahrens Page B
Authors: Frank Ahrens
Tags: General, Biography & Autobiography, Business & Economics, Business, International, Industries, Automobile Industry
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strangers meet and strike up friendships or other relationships. He explained that most Koreans make their friends for life in school; Korean colleagues I knew even attended grade-school reunions. Sometimes Koreans made friends early on in their workplace, he said, but not always.
“But how do you make friends as an adult?” I asked him.
“We don’t, sir,” he said.
This was also Lily’s first party. We let her mix with the guests for a little while, but it made some people uncomfortable. So we parked Lily in a bedroom. Which was fine until we heard a scratching sound. We went to the bedroom and found Lily chewing at the door, trying to get out where the people were.
Ike, my KATUSA team member, loved dogs and volunteered to stay in the bedroom with Lily and occupy her while everyone else enjoyed the party.
He stayed with her for more than an hour until Ben, my team leader, determined the team had put in a dutifully long enough appearance, and they all left. I came to understand: the Korean sitting alone in the bedroom with the wild dog had more fun than any other Korean at the party.
5
DETROIT: SHOWTIME
It was a bitingly cold early morning in Detroit in January 2011. The wind drove wispy snow devils across the empty suburban parking lot outside my hotel as the gray sky brightened. I watched the icy show for a bit, silently repeating parts of a speech in my head, and then got back to dressing for the day. On the television in my room, a reporter was speaking from the floor of the Cobo Center, the vast convention hall in downtown Detroit. Already, a flurry of activity had commenced behind and around the reporter as workers finished setting up for the biggest, most important motor show in America.
This was the stage Hyundai chose to launch its transformation from auto industry joke only ten years earlier to premium brand. It would happen today, in a speech by Hyundai’s vice chairman, son of the chairman and grandson of Hyundai’s founder. In many ways Detroit was the first big step on Hyundai’s uphill climb. Success or failure here would be the first signpost inthe company’s quest to change the way people thought about it. The environment could not have been more unforgiving and the stakes could not have been higher. The dream was that Hyundai’s less expensive cars would rival those of Volkswagen and that its most expensive cars would compete against BMW, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz. This was a daredevil stunt and would be hard to pull off—like, say, a caveman discovering fire on a Monday and inventing the wheel on the following Thursday.
But it was no more audacious an achievement than what Hyundai, and Korea, had already pulled off.
After an armistice was signed in 1953, ending the fighting in the Korean War, South Korea was one of the poorest nations on earth. Indeed, until 1974, Stalinist North Korea, propped up by the communist regimes of China and the Soviet Union, was a richer country, impossible as that seems now. Just as bad, South Korea was a political mess as the people starved and the nation languished.
In 1961, Major General Park Chung-hee, director general of army operations, had seen enough and took power in a military coup. He ruled as dictator until he was assassinated by his own head of intelligence in 1979. (It’s easy to forget that democracy didn’t come to South Korea until 1987.) Chung was the builder of modern Korea and opinion is still deeply divided about him. On the one hand, Korea’s prosperity today is largely owing to the policies he put in place. On the other hand, Park was a dictator who rewrote the constitution to declare himself president for life and tortured political opponents. Pretty much all you need to know about the character of Park Chung-hee can be learned from this amazing story: in 1974 he was giving a speech in Seoul when a Japanese-born North Korean sympathizer burst into the hall firing a gun, trying to kill the president. He missed Park but shot Park’s
“But how do you make friends as an adult?” I asked him.
“We don’t, sir,” he said.
This was also Lily’s first party. We let her mix with the guests for a little while, but it made some people uncomfortable. So we parked Lily in a bedroom. Which was fine until we heard a scratching sound. We went to the bedroom and found Lily chewing at the door, trying to get out where the people were.
Ike, my KATUSA team member, loved dogs and volunteered to stay in the bedroom with Lily and occupy her while everyone else enjoyed the party.
He stayed with her for more than an hour until Ben, my team leader, determined the team had put in a dutifully long enough appearance, and they all left. I came to understand: the Korean sitting alone in the bedroom with the wild dog had more fun than any other Korean at the party.
5
DETROIT: SHOWTIME
It was a bitingly cold early morning in Detroit in January 2011. The wind drove wispy snow devils across the empty suburban parking lot outside my hotel as the gray sky brightened. I watched the icy show for a bit, silently repeating parts of a speech in my head, and then got back to dressing for the day. On the television in my room, a reporter was speaking from the floor of the Cobo Center, the vast convention hall in downtown Detroit. Already, a flurry of activity had commenced behind and around the reporter as workers finished setting up for the biggest, most important motor show in America.
This was the stage Hyundai chose to launch its transformation from auto industry joke only ten years earlier to premium brand. It would happen today, in a speech by Hyundai’s vice chairman, son of the chairman and grandson of Hyundai’s founder. In many ways Detroit was the first big step on Hyundai’s uphill climb. Success or failure here would be the first signpost inthe company’s quest to change the way people thought about it. The environment could not have been more unforgiving and the stakes could not have been higher. The dream was that Hyundai’s less expensive cars would rival those of Volkswagen and that its most expensive cars would compete against BMW, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz. This was a daredevil stunt and would be hard to pull off—like, say, a caveman discovering fire on a Monday and inventing the wheel on the following Thursday.
But it was no more audacious an achievement than what Hyundai, and Korea, had already pulled off.
After an armistice was signed in 1953, ending the fighting in the Korean War, South Korea was one of the poorest nations on earth. Indeed, until 1974, Stalinist North Korea, propped up by the communist regimes of China and the Soviet Union, was a richer country, impossible as that seems now. Just as bad, South Korea was a political mess as the people starved and the nation languished.
In 1961, Major General Park Chung-hee, director general of army operations, had seen enough and took power in a military coup. He ruled as dictator until he was assassinated by his own head of intelligence in 1979. (It’s easy to forget that democracy didn’t come to South Korea until 1987.) Chung was the builder of modern Korea and opinion is still deeply divided about him. On the one hand, Korea’s prosperity today is largely owing to the policies he put in place. On the other hand, Park was a dictator who rewrote the constitution to declare himself president for life and tortured political opponents. Pretty much all you need to know about the character of Park Chung-hee can be learned from this amazing story: in 1974 he was giving a speech in Seoul when a Japanese-born North Korean sympathizer burst into the hall firing a gun, trying to kill the president. He missed Park but shot Park’s
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