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

of Seoul voted in as mayor a nonpolitician, a lifelong social activist who had been imprisoned for four months for protesting the iron rule of, ironically, Park Geun-hye’s strongman father. Instead ofpreaching longer hours, harder work, higher targets, more diligence, Mayor Park Won-soon had radical ideas about creating a “sharing economy” and talked about quality of life, work-life balance, and institutionalizing siestas for his government workers.
    At the same moment Korea was wrestling with this midlife crisis, jarring—and deadly—upheaval was coming on all sides of the peninsula’s geography, in Japan, China, and North Korea. This reinforced Korea’s self-image as a small country sandwiched between large, powerful, and aggressive ones, ones that often controlled Korea’s fate.
    As if to illustrate this point, one month after we arrived in Seoul in 2010, North Korea attacked. The South Korean navy was holding live-fire exercises near a small South Korean island called Yeonpyeong, which sits just inside the South’s side of the two countries’ western maritime border. The North considered the exercises a military provocation and opened fire, shelling Yeonpyeong. The South retaliated, and although the exchange lasted only two hours, four South Koreans—two marines and two civilians—were killed. Yeonpyeong is only about seventy miles from Seoul; it was the closest Rebekah or I had ever been to military action. The day of the shelling, before we knew what was happening, I could see South Korean fighter jets scrambling over Hyundai headquarters. The sound is distinctive—closer to the ground and faster than a commercial jet—and it was a chilling reminder that Seoul is only thirty miles south of the border with North Korea, well within the range of that nation’s weaponry. The North’s attack was over before we heard about it in Seoul, but it became a bracing reminder that the country to the north was a hostile and unpredictable Stalinist police state with 1 million soldiers and a nuclear capability that was still technically at war with the country that was now our home.
    ME: THE PLANETS ALIGN
    When I started at the Washington Post in 1992, the paper had more than 800,000 daily readers. I watched that number fall below 800,000, then 700,000, then 600,000. At the same time, the Post and other big newspapers were building terrific online sites, but their ad revenue remained, at best, a fraction of newspaper ad revenue. In the early 2000s, the Post newsroom had its first-ever “voluntary early retirement,” or buyout. Then another. And another. A newsroom that had nearly 1,000 journalists at its peak in the early 1990s was closing in on half that by 2008.
    I was a business reporter and part of my beat was covering the media industry and the Washington Post Company. I read the Post ’s earnings reports. I watched ad revenue shrink and shrink some more. The cratering was general across the U.S. newspaper industry. This was bad news for my life plan. I had stumbled through a mechanical engineering degree at West Virginia University and, faced with the prospect of spending a career as a mediocre, unhappy engineer, looked for a way out. I found it when I wandered over to the student newspaper with an offer to take pictures, as I’d done for my high school yearbook. I realized instantly I loved the newsroom atmosphere, even if it was only a student newsroom in a ramshackle old white house in danger of coming down on itself at any moment. I stopped taking pictures and started writing. I loved the feeling of being in the know, and the agonizing thrill of writing. After that, all I ever wanted out of life was to be a journalist, and a journalist at the Washington Post , home of the industry’s best writers. But, after several years in my dream job, I had to admit that it looked like my beloved industry wasn’t coming back. I started looking for a Plan B and, squarely in middle age, it had better be sooner rather