Free Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan by Frank Ahrens Page A

like this. We took plenty of pictures of the visiting journalists to give to them as mementos and to include in the reports to our bosses. In Korea, instead of “cheese,” you instruct photo subjects to “say ‘kimchi!’”
    As exciting as it was to see all this, for the first few months these tours were the toughest part of my job. I was confined with a busload of journalists who asked a lot of questions about Hyundai. And I was expected to have answers and sound confident. I was barely keeping my head above water.
    Hyundai Motor Group was a vast conglomerate with 80,000 employees all over the world, two car brands, multiple affiliate companies, a rich and complicated history often foreign to outsiders, multiple factories and models, a brand philosophy that needed explaining and, because it was so young and new to self-promotion, Hyundai was probably the most unknown of all global auto brands. I didn’t speak for Kia, but I had to provide a sensible explanation of the difference between Hyundai and Kia. I didn’t work for the shipbuilders Hyundai Heavy Industries, but I had to be able to explain the difference between that company and Hyundai Motor. I wasn’t born in Korea, but I had to be able to provide a CliffsNotes version of the country’s history and Confucianism. These were things baked into the DNA of Hyundai employees and Koreans. But I had to learn them, and fast, cramming my head full of facts whenever I was back at my desk or home on my computer.
    It was only my journalism experience that prevented me from looking (too) foolish and embarrassing my new company. Journalists pride themselves on becoming “instant experts” on almost any topic. It’s sort of a joke, because we know we’re not, but it’s also not a joke. Mostly, we are quick studies who can gain a passable knowledge of a new topic pretty quickly and write about it with authority, because that’s what we’re trained to do. I don’t know how many mornings I walked into work at the Post , got assigned a story on a topic I’d never even heard of, and, by the end of the day, had produced a Post -worthy story.
    This is how a lot of journalism gets done.
    After having somehow formed an answer to a question from a journalist on one of the bus trips early in my time at Hyundai, he asked, “How long have you worked here?”
    Sheepishly, I answered, “Um, two weeks.”
    “Two weeks!” he repeated. “It sounds like two years!”
    And this is how a lot of PR gets done.
    These long days with journalists from all over the world allowed me to hone my PR skills in another way: deftly moving on when one of them would say something shockingly racist. It happens more often than you might think. One eye-opening thing about living overseas was the casual, conversation-level bigotry and racism I so frequently encountered. I’d be talking to a journalist from, say, a country in the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, or practically anywhere. This may have been an educated man, possibly schooled in England or the U.S. I’d been enjoying the conversation, learning about his country, sharing a few laughs, and then, out of nowhere, he’d drop a caustic anti-Semitic remark. Or a hateful characterization of another tribe that lived in his country. And, for some reason, he just assumed that I agreed. It would have been, strictly speaking, bad PR to have called him a racist jerk or punched him in the nose. So I learned how to move on. I felt bad letting it slide, but realized it was part of my job. Indeed, my exposure to global journalists educated me on numerous cross-border and inter-ethnic hatreds I’d had no idea existed. When I’d mention this to my Korean colleagues later, some would invariably respond: Americans are so hypocritical. You think the same things, but you just don’t say them. My response to that was: That may be true, but there is a value in not saying a toxic thing, even if you may believe it. Saying it gives others