Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (22 page)

But the Nobel committee acted before all the facts were in. As criminals do, the North simply took advantage of the South’s good intentions. The North reneged on agreements, treating the industrial complex like a political tool and randomly barring South Korean businesses from it from time to time; and a South Korean tourist was even shot to death at the North Korean resort, closing it. Three years after the summit, an investigation showed that Kim Dae-jung only got Kim Jong-il to the negotiating table with a secret payment of $150 million. The Nobel Prize became a farce. By 2010, the South Korean government declared the Sunshine Policy a failure.

Many in the West don’t understand the South Korean government’s occasional impulse to placate the North when clear evidence appears to uniformly repudiate the idea. Western ex-pats living in South Korea don’t understand what appears to be the general indifference to the North Korean gulags and the lack of any desire to challenge the North on its human rights abuses.

Yet, for many in the South, these policies make perfect sense. Despite the Stalinist government, North Korean citizens are still Koreans, and elderly South Koreans still have living relatives in the North whom they haven’t seen since 1953. And, as was explained once to me by a middle-aged Korean friend who’d lived through conservative and liberal presidents, when the South has a liberal government that attempts to reach out to the North, general tensions in the South are lower. Furthermore, he said, it’s good for the economy: if it looks to the outside world like North and South are on the brink of war, or not even on speaking terms, foreign investors will find much friendlier places to put their money.

Here’s how I came to think about it: the North Korean regime
deserves not one more day in power. The nuclear threat to the entire region is real and escalating. It has been a state sponsor of terror. The regime is guilty of the longest-running human rights atrocities in modern history. The South has received criticism for appearing to pander to and appease the North, only to be gulled—or attacked outright—each time. And some wonder why the loudest critics of the North’s gulags come from outside of the South. But after living on the peninsula for more than three years and seeing the many ways people learn to live with this constant threat—a threat faced by no one in the U.S.—I came to believe that I don’t have the right to judge how anyone in the South thinks about or behaves toward the North. Koreans just have to get on with their lives in the same way that a few generations of Russians and Americans did with the threat of global nuclear annihilation hanging over their heads.

THE DICTATOR DIES

I was heading to lunch on Monday, December 19, 2011, around noon when BBC news, which I always had on the TV in my office, announced that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il had died. South Korea immediately went on military alert. At Hyundai, it looked like business as usual. If this had happened in America, people would be up from their desks, forming little knots of conversation all around the office. Not here. Everyone was still at their desks. Maybe they were furiously messaging back and forth, but maybe not. Hyundai had no dealerships in North Korea. I briefly chatted with Ben, my team leader, about Kim’s death, and he thought it was worrisome, as Kim had been—despite his savagery—a known quantity.

That night, when I pulled up to the security checkpoint at the main entrance to the base where we lived to show them my ID,
Henry the guard greeted me with his usual beaming smile and inquiry about my family’s health. Henry—“My name is Henry! You can call me Henry!” he said the first time I met him—was a lovely older Korean man who took his job swiping ID cards and verifying identity quite seriously. “I have a very important job!” he once told me. He was always trying to improve his English by asking Rebekah and me about new words he’d learned. That night I said, “Wow, that was big news about Kim Jong-il, wasn’t it?”

“What news?” Henry asked.

“That he died,” I said. “It was announced today at noon.”

“Really?” he asked, astonished. “I had not heard! Good. I am glad he is dead!”

I was the one who was astonished. How was it possible that eight hours had passed since it was announced on national news that South Korea’s greatest enemy had died and Henry had not heard? Had he missed the news? Had no one thought to tell him? Was it simply not a big deal for South Koreans? I had no answers and drove home, puzzled as ever about the place where I lived, about its priorities, about how information travels (or doesn’t); about this great, shadowy other culture that existed outside the walls of the military base and beyond my realm of comprehension. It was moments like these that made me realize I could live here for forty years, learn the language inside out, and still not understand Korea.

Kim Jong-il was succeeded by one of his sons, Kim Jong-un, who was such a mystery that news agencies could only report at the time that he was in his late twenties or early thirties. The new dictator attended a Swiss boarding school as a youth, where he apparently was obsessed with Michael Jordan, but any hopes that he would be a new-generation, Western-friendly reformer were quickly quashed. Kim wasted no time in consolidating his power
by executing enemies and the perceived disloyal within his inner circles. These eventually took a darkly absurd turn: he executed one senior official by blowing him apart with an antiaircraft gun. Stories even leaked out that Kim executed enemies by feeding them to packs of wild dogs. Fantastical and impossible to verify, such tales nevertheless stoked Kim’s cult of personality within the country and his air of unpredictability to the rest of the world, both of which he doubtless aimed to cultivate.

Kim does all of this to keep control of North Korea’s 1 million-man army. As long as he is successful at this, any sort of people-led internal coup is impossible. People often asked me, “What are the Kims trying to achieve in North Korea? Do they want to attack the South? Use the nuclear threat to extort outside aid?”

Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea and the first of the Kim dynasty, was a revolutionary and may in fact have wanted to create a true Marxist state. He belonged to the Chinese Communist Party and served in the Soviet Red Army. But his son and now his grandson have only one goal in mind: the survival of the regime. When you see all of North Korea’s moves as designed to hold on to power, they start to make grim but logical sense.

One day, though, the Kim regime is destined to fall, one way or the other. When that happens, there will be many beneficiaries, chief of whom are the prisoners of the gulags and the rest of the 25 million imprisoned North Koreans who will finally taste freedom—and a steady diet of healthy food. Hyundai will also benefit. Aside from profligate military spending and disproportionate allocation to make North Korea’s capital Pyongyang into a Potemkin village for propaganda purposes, much of the infrastructure in the rest of North Korea is crumbling or nonexistent. When reunification happens, billions of dollars in South Korean government, private-sector, and foreign construction aid will flow into the North. Korea’s leading maker of big trucks needed for
this kind of construction is Hyundai’s little-thought-of commercial vehicle division, whose day will have finally come. Hyundai also happens to have an entire engineering and construction affiliate—practiced at building nuclear reactors, ports, high-rises, highways, and dams all over the world—that could probably rebuild North Korea on its own.

12

“THIS DOESN’T RATTLE”

It was at the 2011 Detroit Auto Show in America, the auto industry’s taste-making market, that Hyundai had boldly stated that it aspired to become a premium automaker. It set stakes improbably high. Now, nine months later, it was time for Hyundai to make its assault on Europe, where the true targets lay. Hyundai already made cars easily the equal in quality and value of anything the Big Three produced. If we were going to become a true premium brand, it wasn’t adequate to be as good as Ford or Chevy. We had to be as good as Volkswagen, Mercedes, and BMW. We weren’t laughed off the stage in Detroit, but the Germans were a tougher crowd. They guarded the superiority of their cars like Americans guard their freedom: as a birthright and a fundamental component of their national identity.

International motor shows around the world—even the biggest—are usually contained to a connecting series of massive convention center buildings. Frankfurt took it to another level.
The 2011 Frankfurt motor show occupied several connected halls; in addition, outside the halls, each German automaker built its own huge stand-alone pavilion. Audi’s was so big, it had its own two-level track inside, where new Audis zipped around for media members to see. I remember walking around the Frankfurt show that year as Europe’s economy and auto sales were falling to pieces—with 50 percent youth unemployment in Spain, Greece defaulting every other day, and even stalwart, sober Germany struggling—and thinking, “What recession?”

This show was terribly important to Hyundai. We were unveiling an all-new version of our best-selling car in Europe, the i30. The i30 was an economical and agreeable if unspectacular five-door hatchback that Hyundai had sold in Europe for years. The new i30 was something altogether different. It was designed to head-on challenge Europe’s gold standard of affordable cars: the Volkswagen Golf.

Plenty of automotive writers will tell you that the Golf is the world’s best car, pound for pound. Not only do they love its practical aspects, such as its roominess and features, but they also love to drive it. The Golf has an auto enthusiast’s tight suspension, a peppy engine, and just the right touch in steering; in automotive parlance, the car gives great “feedback” from the road surface. Drivers agree. The Golf is perennially Europe’s best-selling car. Nominally, the Hyundai i30 was a competitor to the Golf, occupying the same segment, or size, but that’s where the comparisons stopped. No one hated the i30, but no one considered it a serious rival to the Golf. Globally, Volkswagen itself is a monolith, a fact that would surprise most Americans. VW has by far the largest share of the European car market, accounting for more than one-quarter of all sales, and has pulled even with Toyota as the world’s biggest automaker. What’s holding the German titan back from making Toyota the permanent number two automaker
is the U.S. VW has never given Americans a compelling reason to buy its cars. With only 2 percent of the U.S. market, VW has a far greater chunk of the American mindshare, thanks to its clever ads and agreeable imaging, than actual sales.

But in Europe, VW is a monarch. And if Hyundai was going to carry off this “Modern Premium” brand elevation that the vice chairman had launched earlier in the year in Detroit, Hyundai had to make a dent in the European automotive psyche. In the way that Hyundai had benchmarked the Japanese automakers a decade earlier for quality, we were now benchmarking the Europeans for brand—that alchemic combination of quality, performance, legacy, prestige, and coolness. The i30 would be a key measure of how Hyundai’s upmarket aspirations would play in Europe, another marker along our uphill path to premium. How much work had Hyundai put into the i30 to make sure all the details were dead-solid perfect? This much: a female member of Hyundai’s i30 product team had spent literally months of her life folded into the back of an i30 as it was blasted with water hoses, frozen in subzero temperatures, and roasted in desert-level temperatures. Why? Because the new i30 had a clever gizmo on its rear hatch: when you put the car into reverse, the Hyundai
H
logo pivoted up and a small backup camera extended, like a machine gun from behind the headlight of James Bond’s Aston Martin. This wow-factor feature was actually a complicated electrical-mechanical device that opened and closed to the outside elements, meaning it could not break down, it could not freeze shut, it could not leak, and it could not stick. To make sure none of those things happened—not just the first time a driver put the car into reverse, but ever, during the whole life of the car—a human being had to monitor hundreds of hours of all-weather testing from inside the hatchback, as this young Hyundai woman had.

Hyundai’s press conference at the Frankfurt show would
launch the i30. Although it was September, it was unseasonably hot. Hyundai’s booth was at the end of a long hallway lined by the Italians. You had to walk past the supercars of Ferrari, Maserati, and Lamborghini—and their leather-clad female models, looking like they’d wandered out of a high-end BDSM party—to get to the Hyundai booth. Some three hundred journalists packed into Hyundai’s space to see the i30, raising the temperature to sweltering. Stagehands opened outside doors on either side of the stage in a vain attempt to coax a cross breeze.

Vice Chairman Chung was on hand to give the press conference’s main speech, signaling the new i30’s significance. The show started, the vice chairman walked onstage, hit his mark, opened his mouth, and started talking. And nothing came out. His wireless headset would not work. After an awkward few seconds that seemed to last forever, the head of Hyundai’s European operations, a man with a backup plan, gave the vice chairman a handheld microphone. Mercifully, it worked. My one-take vice chairman was utterly unflustered: he restarted his speech and we were off.

After the presser, journalists streamed around the i30. It was completely redesigned from its predecessor and followed Hyundai’s Fluidic Sculpture styling. Even though it was a five-door hatchback, the i30 was graceful and aggressive at the same time, with a muscular rear haunch propelling the car forward at a dynamic, rakish angle. I still think of it as the most beautiful Hyundai of the first Fluidic Sculpture era.

The i30 started with a platform shared with other Hyundai cars of the same size, but that was it. Everything else was new. The interior and exterior were designed at Hyundai’s European design center in Frankfurt. It was assembled by Europeans at Hyundai’s plant in the Czech Republic. And now it was being sold to Europeans as a plausible alternative to the mighty Golf.