Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (25 page)

At the time, I could not believe Seoul elected this guy. He was so un-Korean. I figured he’d run up a big deficit with lots of free-ride government programs and get tossed out in the next Seoul mayoral election, replaced by another upright, conservative mayor who had worn ties since childhood. I figured the people of Seoul would come to realize their infatuation with Mayor Park was little more than a midlife-crisis fling.

15

ALMOST, NOT QUITE ENGLISH

Early one morning I was sitting in my office at Hyundai, enjoying the quaint daily habit of reading the physical copies of the
Korea Herald
, the Asian edition of the
Wall Street Journal
, and the
Financial Times
. Of course, I already knew the night before if any of these papers had news about Hyundai. But as a former newspaperman I still enjoyed the serendipity of cruising through a newspaper and seeing stories I would never run across on the news pushes I had set up to send alerts about Hyundai and the auto industry.

I certainly never would have seen what I saw that cold winter morning.

Leafing through the Asian
Wall Street Journal
, which is tabloid-size, I came across a full-page ad for Hyundai. Unless a company’s ad is addressing an issue or expecting to make some news, PR departments rarely see their own company’s ads before they appear in print or on TV. Big, global image campaigns,
sure, because PR will probably write a press release about them. But anything below that bar, probably not. That’s standard in business. PR often feels like it’s late to the table—that important public-perception decisions have been made by other departments and are faits accompli by the time they reach PR, which is tasked to release the information and defend it to the media.

I was delighted to see a nice ad for Hyundai in the
Journal
. It was an ad touting the Hyundai Tucson SUV’s high residual value, often a key buying consideration. Delighted, that is, until I read the headline, which stretched across the page:

Years doesn’t diminish the value of a Hyundai.

“Oh, no,” I said.

My eyes darted to the right of the
Journal
, where the
Financial Times
lay, suddenly menacingly, on my conference table. It’s a broadsheet paper, meaning it’s twice as big as the
Journal
. I trepidatiously opened it, and leafed through the pages, and . . . oh, no.

There was the same full-page Hyundai ad, only twice as big. The headline also was twice as big:

Years doesn’t diminish the value of a Hyundai.

All the work the company had been doing, trying to persuade car buyers that Hyundai was striving toward a new, better image—that we were raising our quality in everything we did—had just taken a hit in print. Over the previous year, the company
had made some big strides along the uphill path toward becoming a premium brand: the Detroit Auto Show, the Winterkorn Incident. This bungled newspaper ad was a stumble over an exposed root. Fixing this problem may not have been part of Hyundai’s plan to become a premium brand, but it was part of mine.

Overreaction? Maybe. I plead guilty as a former newspaper reporter and editor who spent twenty years of his life trying to make English clear and correct. Fixing incorrect written English is nothing short of a cause with me. It affects me physically. For instance, because they make me laugh, I always catch misplaced modifiers.

This headline wasn’t making me laugh; it was making me sick. Not just because of my personal peccadilloes but because, as a major global automaker, this sort of thing should not happen.

The way English is produced at Korean companies—and this is probably true of most non-English-speaking companies around the world—typically follows a system: the content is written in the native tongue, in this case Korean. Then it is sent out to a local translation agency. These agencies, at least in Seoul, have widely varying competence. Although many of them employ native English speakers, some are native English speakers from the U.S., some native-English speakers from Australia, some native English speakers from Canada, and so on. You can see the problem. Or these translation agencies employ Koreans who are, in theory, bilingual, fluent in Korean and English. But there are two problems here: first, which English are they fluent in, American or British? Second, Korean grammar is different from English grammar. For instance, in Korean, the verb comes toward the end of the sentence, unlike in English. That’s why Korean translated into English invariably is in the passive, not active, voice, which creates deadly run-on prose. The passive voice always takes too long to get to the point. This is one of the elements of “Konglish,” or Korean English.

After the translation agencies return the content to the company translated into a kind of English, the originating teams at Hyundai would publish it in the form of a product brochure, or ad, or text on a film, or a corporate website. The alternative is that the copy is written in-house, in English, by a bilingual Korean. But unless that person reads and writes native-level English, again, you often get Konglish. In addition, there was no one filter through which all English generated by Hyundai headquarters must pass, so that meant there was no one standard of English. Aside from the fact that we were publishing incorrect English, we were publishing English written in many voices.

Because Koreans are schooled in English from childhood, many Koreans think they have a good command of English. Instead, what they have is “test English,” which is taught generally by Koreans, not native English speakers, and is geared for achievement on the national college entrance exam, not for daily use with native speakers. As Eduardo once told me, “Sir, it may be hard for us to speak and write Western English, but we can diagram the hell out of a sentence.” Thus, Konglish may be unclear or baroque to English speakers, and the Koreans are at a loss to understand why.

A couple examples that I ran across during my time editing copy at Hyundai:

I am confident to say that the greatest dedication you have made would be a stepping-stone for the exceptional total brand experience before and after sales as well as during the ownership of Hyundai car.

And:

Recognizing such desperate efforts for quality improvement, many customers are turning to Hyundai.

I am not including these examples to get easy laughs or take cheap shots. It is only to illustrate how hard it is for nonnative speakers to understand exactly what native-standard English looks like. The translation labyrinth aside, the larger issue was that Koreans were trying to write publication-level text in a language that was not their own. It’s difficult for anyone to work in a foreign language. You try writing marketing copy in Korean. Because I had never learned a foreign language, I had no gauge of how difficult this was. A Korean trying to learn English is not like an English speaker trying to learn Spanish. At least English and Spanish share the same alphabet and sounds. It’s more like an English speaker trying to learn Chinese and execute it at business-level proficiency. Good luck with that.

Add to this the issue of tone between cultures: references that one culture will instantly get will be unfamiliar to the other. Touchstone emotions vary widely. Representations of deeply held love and sentiment in the East, for instance, may seem childlike and saccharine to Western consumers. Worse, even though East and West may more or less understand the definition of a word, all the rest of that word’s freight—connotation, context, racial signifiers, and so on—can easily get lost in translation. For example, in the summer of 2012, Korean Air opened a new route to Kenya. In ads for the service, Korean Air wrote: “Fly to Nairobi with Korean Air and enjoy the grand Africa savanna, the safari tour, and the indigenous people full of primitive energy.” Turned into a subject of Twitter mockery, Korean Air quickly apologized. Some good-natured Kenyans took it in stride, one Tweeting, “Thinking of lion hunting today and maybe some elephant baiting to deal with my #PrimitiveEnergy.”

The offense goes both ways. I was lecturing to an MBA class at Seoul’s Yonsei University once and wanted to outline Hyundai’s family ownership. I grabbed the first colored marker I saw
and began writing the names of prominent family members on the whiteboard. I turned around to make a point to the class and saw one Korean student had his hand up.

“Yes?” I said.

“Why did you write their names in red?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” I thought. The minute he asked the question, I realized: in Korea, and in some other Asian countries, using red ink to write a name indicates death. I apologized profusely, explaining my faux pas to the Western students in the class, then erased all the red names, rewrote them in black, and moved on.

I became acutely aware of how hard it is to operate—especially in a business environment—in another language when I fully realized my burden on my Korean team members, who were forced to communicate with me in English. At one point I asked one of my junior team members, who spoke okay English, wrote it better, and was always trying to improve, “When you have to write to me in English, is it 50 percent or 500 percent harder than Korean for you?” He didn’t even pause before answering: “Five hundred percent, sir.”

Part of my job was to edit the official English correspondence of my higher-ups, write speeches for them, and generally deal with English generated by my bosses—and I was pleased to do that. But as it dawned on me that there were dozens of teams at headquarters generating English for external consumption, I realized neither I nor my team could edit it all, nor should we. We needed a dedicated English editor.

I alerted my team leader about the incorrect headlines on the Hyundai ads in the Asian
Wall Street Journal
and
Financial Times
ads, and he told me he would inform the team responsible for the ad. I asked: “And then what?” “It’s not our team’s responsibility,” I was told.

This was true, but it irked me. If I see a person about to get
run over by a bus, I’m not going to say, “Well, that’s another team’s responsibility.” I’m going to try to get them out of the way of the bus. There is a saying throughout the big Korean
chaebol
that actually translates across most corporate cultures: “No one ever got fired for not doing something.” Risk taking is rarely rewarded at big companies, and an employee is best thought of and rewarded by working diligently for their team and helping to meet their team’s goals. The hiring of an English editor introduced all sorts of variables and risk into the system that could result in negative outcomes for those responsible. Furthermore, as the English editor would interact with a number of teams from both inside and outside my team’s division, it raised numerous reporting problems.

In hindsight, I have come to understand the reluctance to hiring a silo breaker. For all the outside criticism of silos within companies, some siloing must exist, otherwise every team would experience mission creep, goals could not be defined, no one would take responsibility, and nothing would get done.

But I was too new to corporate life and too aggrieved to let anything like the bureaucratic process get in the way of doing what I knew was right.

To me, it made perfect sense that we hire an English editor and that that person should be a member of my team, because we produced most of the English at Hyundai; because our team was often asked informally to correct English from other departments and could not handle all the requests; and because I was the only native English-speaking executive at the entire headquarters, and it made sense that I should supervise the English editor.

My team leader and senior team leadership were opposed. They had several reasons, all of them valid. But none won the argument that an English editor was not needed.

If I could have done it over, knowing what I know now, I
would still have pushed stridently for the English editor, but I would have done it differently. I would have created a short but persuasive report, with examples of incorrect English produced by various teams at headquarters; then I would have cited examples of our competitors getting their English right; then I would have cited an expert estimating the loss in brand value Hyundai was suffering due to its flawed corporate English skills. I would have presented it to my boss and we would have discussed which team the English editor should be assigned to. Then, if it was decided the English editor should indeed be on my team, I would have worked with my team leader (he would no longer oppose the position, because our boss had agreed to it) on exactly the way the English editor would be integrated into our team and what their duties would and would not be, and the rest of the team would have been briefed accordingly.

This would have taken a couple months to accomplish. Instead, it took several months of arguing with my team leader before I finally went around him and showed some examples of bad English to my boss. He agreed it was a problem that needed to be fixed, and sent me off to HR to get them to create a position.

With some time and distance, I can see that my team members who were opposed to the idea were not just opposed to the idea itself; they were opposed to
the way I was presenting the idea
. By this time I realized I was living in a high-context culture—that how I said and did something was just as important as what I said and did. I guess I just thought I was too far down the road toward getting what we needed and there was no point in turning back.

I plowed ahead, got the slot approved by HR, and began the interview process. I settled on one finalist and had her brought in for an interview.

Her Western name was Aurelia, and I had seen her résumé: she was the daughter of a Korean diplomat and had attended high
school and college in the U.S. She had had internships at major U.S. broadcasters. She was a young woman; I could tell from the headshot on her résumé.

When I met Aurelia in the Hyundai interview room, she was dressed appropriately for a Korean interview: featureless charcoal-gray suit, white shirt buttoned up, no noticeable jewelry. She was nearly shaking with nerves.