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

license to say it, too, perpetuating the evil.
    At the end of a day’s tour with the journalists, we’d usually go directly to a dinner, always hosted by a senior Hyundai executive. The dinners were often held in the Gangnam district. The sidewalks were full of arm-in-arm salarymen staggering from round two to round three and packs of music fans hoping to catch a glimpse of their K-pop heroes at restaurants and clubs.
    Some nights we’d take the foreign journalists to a Westernrestaurant to boast of how international Seoul was. Other nights we’d take them to an upscale Korean restaurant, with seemingly limitless courses of food; sometimes we’d sit on chairs, other times on the floor. For VIP journalists, we’d often offer after-dinner entertainment. Typically, this was a trio of Korean musicians dressed in hanbok , or the traditional attire. For women, a hanbok looks something like a brightly colored silk, empire-waist dress. For men, it is a tunic with billowy sleeves, loose pants or tights, and a broad-brimmed hat. The musicians plucked at ancient Korean string instruments and kept time on a small drum. In a wonderfully intentioned attempt to make foreign visitors feel at home in Korea, these musicians would often break into instrumental versions of Beatles and ABBA songs. Unfortunately, the incongruous mix of culture, instrument, and tune often caused the journalists to laugh and comment on how bizarre Korea was. After a while I recommended that the traditional Korean musicians play traditional tunes, which we explained in programs given to the journalists. The journalists wanted to feel like they were in someplace foreign and authentic, and this worked out better.
    Despite its electric feel, Gangnam at night meant, for me, the end of a day that began six a.m. and would not end until I pulled into my driveway nine thirty or ten p.m. This was not terribly helpful to a young marriage. Rebekah, keeping U.S. government hours at the embassy, would be home by five thirty p.m. and would have read, cooked, and bonded with Apple TV, watching Friday Night Lights and Bones . Several nights a week she lived a life more appropriate to a single professional woman, which is not what she signed up for when she got married. Often she was asleep when I dragged myself in, bleary-eyed, tie askew, smelling of Korean barbecue. Her forbearance was remarkable.
    I felt pulled between my home life and my work obligations. There were dinners each night during the week for each group ofvisiting journalists, which meant I could stay out until ten p.m. three nights a week if I wanted. I had to figure out which dinners were absolutely critical I attend—typically the ones my bosses attended—and which ones my team leader could handle. On the one hand, if I went to all the dinners, it created tension at home. If I begged out on too many dinners, it created tension with my team.
    Being out of the office for fifteen-hour days two or three days a week was exhausting. But being in the office for normal eleven- or twelve-hour working days could be exhausting, too, as I tried to learn a new culture and the folkways of Korean business; tried to form alliances with other executives; tried to figure out exactly how to relate to my boss, Mr. Lee, who was kind to me but not very talkative; and—for the first time in my life—tried to really understand how to succeed in a business environment.
    It turns out, spending two decades in a newspaper newsroom not only does not prepare you for corporate life—it is probably the worst training for it, this side of a Marxist summer camp.
    Newsrooms are horizontal structures full of, essentially, independent contractors—reporters who usually do their best work alone and not always on the company’s schedule. This is even more so in the era of digital journalism, where journalists pack up and take their audiences with them from one publication to the next. Journalists are either born or bred to be at least