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

win Rebekah. In my telling of the story, it usually is. But it was not. It was an immediate and brutally honest bit of emotional self-preservation in response to getting dumped.
    And yet, it had led to this point where Rebekah wanted to come back.
    There was the proof, in digital type on the screen of the phone in my hand. An open invitation to the thing I wanted most.
    Naturally, I waited several hours before I replied.
    But reply I did. I remember being outrageously happy when tapping out that text.
    And so we began dating. The first thing you notice about Rebekah is that she’s beautiful. Soon after, you discover she has a great wit and sound comedic timing. Must have come from her theater work in college. She gives off a Jennifer Aniston–esque vibe. Even more remarkable is her resilience in not only adapting to but excelling in tough circumstances. A preacher’s family is not a rich one and you seek bargains everywhere. For a time Rebekah’s family car was a cheaply acquired 1970s station wagon whose previous job was serving as a hearse. It sounds Gothic to you and me, but she happily recalls sleeping with her two siblings in the vehicle’s casket-length rear on long road trips—sans any sort of restraining devices, of course. As a young woman, Rebekah worked her way through college, three jobs at a time. She worked retail and at a law firm during the day and did her homework while running a country club front desk at nights, fending off the boozy male club members slouching on her counter, trying to impress her. She had the drive to win a scholarship to study in Beirut and the chops to get into a graduate program in Paris.
    Of the many things I admire about Rebekah is her directness in knowing what she wants. I tend to be a muller, fully examining a situation, turning it over and over, trying to get my head completely around it before I take action. Rebekah says during this time I’m in my “shell.” Ultimately, I pop out and we move forward. Maybe not as fast as she’d like, but eventually.
    Rebekah gets a quicker read on situations than I do and knows what she wants. Sometimes this produces friction in our union: Rebekah wonders why I won’t move forward. I worry that we’re not as expert on a situation as we think we are.
    After a couple months of dating, over dinner, Rebekah told me she wanted to be married and have a family. As we moved forward, she said, if I felt that was not the future I wanted, I needed to let her know so she could move on.
    Rebekah clearly did not want to be married to anybody just to be married; she’d had that chance before and skipped it. She didn’t know if I was the right guy, but she let me know—rightfully—that I owed her the decency of telling her if I didn’t want the same thing she did.
    I felt like a relationship cop had just read my Miranda rights.
    It was the best thing that could have happened to me. If Rebekah hadn’t put her foot down, I would most likely have done as I’d done before: hit a cruising altitude in the relationship where I was fine dating exclusively and long-term without any particular goal in mind. Rebekah would’ve rightly got sick of the inaction and we’d have just . . . drifted apart, what I’d allowed to happen so many times before.
    I saw the wisdom of Rebekah’s argument and realized nothing truly worth having in life comes easily or without some kind of leap. Aside from being attracted to each other, enjoying spending time together, and being in love, we shared the most fundamental of connections: our faith. We are both Christians and knew thismeant we would be in accord—or at least start from the same point—on the most crucial of topics that either make or break marriages, from worldview to money to raising children. Every Christian has a testimony and mine is this: I received Christ my freshman year of college, read the Bible assiduously, attended church, and tried to live right. But within a couple years my innate