Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (29 page)

18

NOT HERE, NOT NOW

Despite our painful separation—Rebekah and I had never been apart for longer than a week since we’d been married—neither of us initially had time to dwell on it.

Rebekah started right in on Bahasa language classes at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute in suburban Virginia. Bahasa would prove to be much easier to learn than Korean, and Rebekah has a facility for languages, but the long classroom hours were no fun in a second trimester. Meanwhile, she had to set up a household for her and Chairman, which meant lugging things up and down the three flights to her apartment on her own. How she got the Christmas tree up there when she was eight months pregnant is still a mystery but a testament to her determination.

Back in Seoul, I was preparing for the longest business trip I’d ever taken. By now I was used to travel. In 2012, I would log 150,000 air miles. Soon, I would have to add pages to my passport. But the trips I took were usually there-and-back jaunts
that involved flying a long way to spend a short amount of time somewhere, like my seventeen-hours-in-Delhi trip. This trip, in September 2012, would be a monster.

I’d fly from Seoul to the Paris motor show and spend several days there. Then to the Middle East launch of Hyundai’s new Santa Fe in Muscat, Oman. After that, I’d head to Hyundai’s Middle East headquarters in Dubai for meetings; then to Istanbul to see Hyundai’s nearby Turkey factory; then to Prague to see Hyundai’s Czech Republic factory; and finally back to Seoul.

Our performance at the Paris motor show was the best I saw at any show during my time at Hyundai. My boss, Mr. Lee, nailed his speech. The first motor show speech I saw him give nearly two years earlier was stiff and hard to understand, with awkward pronunciations and off-syllable emphases. In Paris he was relaxed and conversational. Several months into my own poor attempts to learn his language, I could fully appreciate his growing mastery of mine. An appreciative Parisian media applauded that we rolled the three i30s out in the national colors of blue, white, and red. The tone of the media coverage was highly favorable. There was a feeling that Hyundai had some serious momentum and was raising more than just its market share.

After the Hyundai press conference, I was trying to find a quiet corner of the motor show. I had a call to make.

At the same moment back in Washington, Rebekah was heading into an appointment at her ob-gyn. She was at five months, and her doctor said she should be able to determine our baby’s gender. Washington was five hours behind Paris, so we worked out the time when we could be on the phone together while she was in the doctor’s office. Unable to find anywhere near the Hyundai booth or inside the hall where I could hear well, I skulked out the back of the huge convention hall and found a cafeteria. Waitresses stacked trays noisily, and conversations in French sailed around
me, but it would have to do. I tucked myself into a corner and pressed the phone to my ear.

Rebekah was on the line.

“Okay, I’m on the table,” she said. “They’re putting the goo on my stomach.”

I closed my eyes, picturing the ultrasound transducer sliding over my wife’s bulging lubricated belly.

“We’re getting a picture . . .” Rebekah said.

Then, in the background, I heard the nurse say, “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” Rebekah said. A silence.

“You’re having a girl!”

“We’re having a baby girl!” Rebekah said.

I pressed the phone against my ear, aching for my wife. “We’re having a baby girl!” I repeated, grinning. “A little girl.”

When you’re not a parent, and you ask expectant parents if they want a boy or a girl, and they say, “We don’t care, as long as it’s healthy,” you think: “Bunk.” Because how could you
not
have a preference? But once you’re expecting a child yourself, and the cosmic complexity of the process fully impacts you, and you learn all the terrible things that could go wrong not only with your baby but also with your wife, “Gender of Child” is about number 103 on the list of things you think about.

We were having a girl and that was wonderful. And it was a relief. Naming a boy would have been impossible. If my suggested boy names and Rebekah’s suggested boy names were placed into a Venn diagram, not only would there be no overlap, the two circles wouldn’t even touch. First of all, and completely unfairly, I might add, Rebekah ruled out all the names from the
Star Trek
canon, including the real ones, such as “Tiberius.” On girl names, there was at least some possibility of compromise.

The good news carried me through the remainder of my
business trip. Along the way, I picked up some souvenirs I would eventually give our daughter and tell her, “Daddy got you these presents during a business trip when he found out you were going to be a girl.” In Paris, naturally, I picked up a little Eiffel Tower; in Dubai, a stuffed camel. Prague supplied a small Bohemian crystal globe; Istanbul, a handmade glass bowl.

The separation from Rebekah marked the beginning of an unanticipated divergence in the two major streams of my life. I was doing the best work of my time at Hyundai, but at the same time my personal life was taking a turn for the worse.

On my own in Seoul, the days settled into a pattern: FaceTime with Rebekah in the morning, who was thirteen hours behind me in Washington and just going to bed; work for eleven hours; home to Itaewon; pick up take-out dinner; and then Skype with Rebekah, who had just woken up. Then watch an hour of something on Apple TV and go to bed. Repeat. On Saturdays I’d beg one of our friends to sign me onto the military base as a guest, where I’d drop off dry cleaning, work out at the gym, have lunch at the food court, use the Wi-Fi, get a haircut, and see a movie at the theater. On Sundays I’d go to church in the morning and, in the evening, go to a Bible study group on base. Sometimes, our friends on base would invite me over for a cookout or meal, but the longer I lived in Korea, the fewer friends I had on base. Their tours were ending, as Rebekah’s had, and they were reposting elsewhere. Slowly but surely, the tethers to my American life in Korea were slipping from my hands, one after the next. The alternative would be to take the opportunity to throw myself fully into Korean life. But I couldn’t handle any more raucous, late-night
hoesik
s than the ones I had to attend for work. A trip to the sprawling COEX Mall in downtown Seoul was too crowded and too loud for me. And Rebekah and I’d learned the folly of trying to take a leisurely weekend drive in the countryside. My isolated,
repetitive daily routine was entirely my choice, but it beat the alternative. But we told ourselves we had to make it for only four months, until I could fly to Washington in December.

In October I had to fly to Brazil for the São Paulo motor show. The vice chairman would attend. The trip to Brazil is the longest anybody in Hyundai’s overseas division ever has to make. It’s the farthest you can travel and still stay on the planet: a twelve-hour flight from Seoul either to Los Angeles or Paris, followed immediately by a twelve-hour flight to São Paulo. It was one of those business trips where you’re away for five days but spend only two or three nights in a hotel. It was punishing and stressful.

But it was more than the trip. It had been about six weeks since Rebekah and I had separated. I tried to bury myself in work, but Rebekah and our baby kept intruding into my thoughts during the day. Nights were worse. The bed in my Itaewon apartment—the one we shared at our house on base—was so achingly barren, I slept toward one edge so I would feel the empty bed on only one side. I felt like I had an emotional phantom limb.

I had considered myself lucky in bachelorhood and marriage. When I was single, maybe because I am an only child, maybe because I never longed for marriage, I was not lonely. I’m good at occupying myself and never felt the lack of a partner. I never felt half-full. Then I got married and realized what it was like to be happily coupled with someone. But that feeling had a flip side. I was now separated from my mate. I knew that she was weathering a pregnancy without me, and that made me feel like a bad husband, in addition to a lonely one.

All this was brewing in my mind, along with some volatile brain chemistry, evidently, when I came home the night before the Brazil trip. I had been at the office late, finishing up some work for the trip, and was feeling pressed to pack and try to get some sleep before the flight the next morning. I had a brief Skype
call with Rebekah. She asked if I was okay. I said sure, just distracted.

I pulled out my green suitcase and followed my familiar routine of packing for a long trip. I turned out the lights, climbed into bed, pulled up the covers, and closed my eyes. The door to my bedroom wasn’t quite closed enough. I got up, closed it, and got back into bed. Still not right. I got back up, moved it again. I smoothed the covers. It was quiet. I realized I was clicking my teeth. I felt like I’d had too much caffeine. I’d had a large diet soda with dinner, chalked it up to that, and rolled over, trying to will myself to sleep.

And then I felt it in my feet.

“Oh, no,” I thought. “Not now. Not here.”

I knew what it was as soon as it started and knew I was helpless to stop it. It was a panic attack. It always starts in my feet and rises through my body. The sensation is hard to describe. Imagine the times you’ve had a restless leg, that feeling of involuntary twitchiness. Instead of affecting your whole leg at once, it starts in your foot, then climbs to your knee, then your thigh. If you’re lying down, you must sit up, but as soon as you do, you desperately want to lie down again. You must get outdoors, but the moment you do, it’s unbearable, so you must retreat back inside. It feels safe and comfortable nowhere.

Then the feeling rises up into your torso, waking a kind of jumpiness in your gut and expanding toward your chest. The feeling around your heart is fullness and tightness. Involuntarily, you start breathing from the diaphragm, hoping that will stop its advance at the neck. This is crucial. You’re certain that if this spreading, all-consuming feeling of unease reaches your head, you’ll die, although you rationally know you won’t. This all happens over the course of a few minutes. It’s accompanied by a feeling of growing terror. No one knows until the moments before
death what the end feels like, but during a panic attack you’re sure this is it. It’s the feeling of sliding away from life. Not a dramatic, instant end, like a brain hemorrhage. Instead, a gradual dimming and, with it, the odd need for grim resolution. Let the end come, if only to stop this unbearable feeling.

I suffered my first panic attack in early 1997. I was living in Washington and working at the
Post
. My mother and father were both back in my hometown of Charleston, West Virginia. My mom, then seventy-three, had scheduled cataract surgery a couple months earlier—her first visit to a doctor in probably twenty-five years. She took tests to determine her ability to undergo surgery. They found Mom’s cholesterol was a how-are-you-not-dead 355 and she had system-wide clogged arteries. Her doctors advised immediate bypass surgery. She and I spent the next two months in torturous discussions and fights on the phone and back in Charleston, with me urging her to get the surgery and her putting it off. She raised larger questions, such as “At my age, what’s the point?” and “How much longer do I have, anyway?” It’s not a lot of fun for even an adult child to hear a parent say these things.

As this was going on, my dad experienced chest pain and had gone to the hospital, where they determined the main artery into his heart was 90 percent blocked. He would have bypass surgery the morning after his diagnosis. Unlike Mom, Dad, then sixty-four, grabbed the bypass procedure with both hands and jumped on. Ten days after a quadruple bypass, Dad was home climbing stairs, feeling better than he had in years, and evangelizing for bypass surgery. His example helped Mom, who—despite her fears—agreed to have her own bypass. I prepared to drive from Washington to Charleston for her surgery, and the night before was packing my bags.

That’s when my first panic attack hit. After thirty minutes of suffering symptoms I was dead certain were telling me I was
having a heart attack, I drove myself (not the best idea) to a hospital in suburban Maryland. After a thorough checkup, including an EEG, the doctors determined I was having a panic attack—which, up until about a couple of hours before, I didn’t believe in. They gave me a Valium tablet, told me to go home and sleep, and see my doctor the next day for antianxiety medication.

My doctor concurred and put me on antianxiety meds. Over the years I’ve tried several, with varying degrees of success, and have had only one other full-blown attack. Eventually I settled on a drug called Sertraline.

I’m not going to detour into an exegesis on anxiety. There are plenty of excellent ones out there. No one’s attacks are the same, but they do share some traits. Mine are not as bad or frequent as those suffered by many other folks. I’ve adopted a pretty simple mind-set: Treat the worst and learn to live with the rest. It’s always there, lurking, waiting to climb up from the soles of my feet. Sometimes I can feel it gathering and can will it back down. But it will never go away, I reckon. Even writing these words, I can feel it wanting to stir.

The problem with antianxiety medication is that its effectiveness is unknowable. If you’re on medication and you don’t have panic attacks, you don’t know if the medication is stopping them or simply that you haven’t had one for whatever reason. So, in early 2012, I hadn’t had an attack in more than a decade and I felt like getting a daily medication out of my life. Under the embassy doctor’s care, I dosed off the Sertraline over the course of a month. For months I was fine.

And then, all of a sudden on that October night, I wasn’t.

The biggest fear I had of moving off base was a medical emergency. It was not a fear of Korean health care. It is among the world’s best, with excellent facilities and top-grade personnel. If I managed to get to a Korean hospital, I was certain I’d be well
cared for. My fear was isolation. Let’s say I fell and hit my head in my apartment. Who would find me? How long would it take? Let’s say I thought I was having a panic attack but then sharp pains started shooting down my left arm. I could call 119, Seoul’s version of 911, but was it certain I would get an operator who could speak English? If I did, could I give them directions to my apartment or tell them to take me to the hospital that I knew had some English speakers on staff? Or would I try to stumble out into the street and hail a cab to the hospital? Once I moved off base and began living alone again, I felt like I had no floor beneath me. Rebekah and I never really spoke about it, but we both understood it: for two years, we were hoping and praying that neither of us would get gravely ill or injured.