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Dropping into a recent gathering at an expatriate-oriented wine shop in Seoul, I met an American couple quite different from the countrymen I normally encounter here: not only were they born, raised, and married in Texas, they\u2019d come to Korea together for one year and one year only. The engineer husband\u2019s employer, a certain electronics giant called Samsung, had brought him over from their research-and-development center back in Austin to put in some time at their home base. This left the wife, a schoolteacher, free to spend her days exploring city and country. Halfway into their year here, they reported that they found Korea a much more congenial place than they\u2019d imagined.<\/p>\n
Such short-term expats, those who arrive with a fixed return date and little to no previous experience or knowledge of Korea, typically have questions for those of us with more of an investment in the country. But I find I enjoy hearing their impressions more than conveying my own, since they\u2019ve known the kind of culture shock that, having studied the Korean language and lived in Los Angeles\u2019s Koreatown for years before moving here, I never could have. So did Frank Ahrens, the author of\u00a0Seoul Man<\/em>, a Westerner-in-Korea memoir that my chat with the amiable Texans reminded me I\u2019d missed when first it came out.<\/p>\n
Subtitled\u00a0A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan<\/em>, the book tells of Ahrens\u2019s stint as a public relations director at Hyundai Motors between 2010 and 2013. He took the job after 18 years as a journalist at the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>, a career move prompted both by his Foreign Service-employed wife\u2019s Seoul posting and the bleak future of the newspaper industry evident in the very business stories he\u2019d been reporting. About South Korea they went in knowing, he writes, \u201clittle more than most Americans do: it\u2019s the most wired nation on earth, the kids are ultrahigh academic achievers, and they eat kimchi.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n