Category: Expat Life

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Pneumonia

Nebulizing in the Emergency Room at Gangnam Severance Hospital.

A few weeks ago, I was struck with a bout of pneumonia. After several days of fever and burning lungs that antibiotics couldn’t tackle, my girlfriend took me to the Emergency Room at Gangnam Severance Hospital on a Saturday night. They sent me home with a bag of drugs.

But by Sunday noon the fever was back up to 103.2 F (39.5 C). This time my girlfriend couldn’t come to me, but she called an ambulance, and back to the ER I went. I spent the next 28 hours there, and didn’t leave the hospital until the following Sunday. I spent another week at home recovering.

I’ve wanted to write something about what I went through, but I’m finding it difficult. Sickness, like dreams, is mostly interesting to the person experiencing it. Unpleasant as it was, it was nothing more than a few days in the hospital, a few days of feeling rotten and then less rotten. That it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever gone through is maybe evidence of how lucky I’ve been in life. It was horrible, but I’m not sure it was interestingly horrible.

I’m also tired of thinking about it. I want to be well again, and mostly I am, though my lungs are still recovering. Maybe later, when this is fully behind me, I’ll be able to turn my hospitalization into amusing anecdotes. For now, it’s enough to say that it happened and that I’m OK again. And if you’re looking for things to do in Seoul, I don’t recommend pneumonia.

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Settling in Seoul

A year ago, I embarked on an ambitious Year of No Particular Ambition. Two days ago, I made the least ambitious move of my life. Happy birthday to me.

The unambitious move

Until two days ago, the shortest distance I’d ever moved was across the hall in college, into a vacant double on an air shaft. Now I’ve broken that record by moving into an apartment that was actually adjoining my old apartment, one floor down and one apartment over.

I had to move because the owner of my old place was selling. I didn’t want to go anywhere, and I have managed to achieve that goal pretty spectacularly. The new place has one major advantage, which is that instead of balconies — enclosed spaces, but not heated or cooled, and so unusable much of the year — it just has bigger rooms. Outside of that, it’s basically the same as my old place, right down to the interior fixtures.

Copy/paste

I was anxious before the move, and it took my girlfriend a while to figure out why, until she realized I’d never moved in Korea before. “It’s copy/paste,” she explained. “From your old apartment to your new apartment. Copy/paste.”

And so it was. In New York, two or three Israeli guys would show up, box everything up, and dump it in the new apartment. Here in Seoul, a six-person crew showed up and did stuff American movers can’t do, like unplugging things all by themselves. They refolded my clothes and put them in the closet. They hung curtains. They made the bed. The one woman on the crew — inevitably, she had kitchen duty — cleaned the built-in fridge at the new apartment before restocking it with the food from my old fridge. She also tried mightily to replace my knick-knack shelf exactly as it was, until I told her I’d fiddled with the details later. Then she vacuumed and mopped. Korean movers are efficient and sexist. Copy/paste.

The city gas guy showed up like he was supposed to. The Internet guy, scheduled for a window from two to three, sent a message apologizing for running late and then showed up at 2:30. And then it was done. I’d moved.

Unplanning

When I’m frustrated or unhappy, I have a habit of retreating into planning: calculating the cost of retiring in Chiang Mai or looking into Ph.D. programs in Busan. It’s the adult version of taking my toys and going home.

When I was actually planning something big — getting a master’s degree, quitting Google, leaving New York, traveling for a year, moving to Seoul — the endless fidgeting with spreadsheets and details had a sense of purpose. Now that I was finally here, it felt more like a tic.

It took maybe half the Year of No Particular Ambition for me to let go of that tic. As the long, cold winter gave way to spring, I felt a change. My parents came for a visit, which gave me a reason to look closely at what’s best and most interesting about my life here so I could share it with them. Partly so I could take them around more easily, I bought a car — a depreciating investment, money spent on now rather than saved for later.

And I fell in love.

Home

For a very long time, all of my relationships have had expiration dates on them: someone is leaving the country, or I just knew it wasn’t something I wanted for the long term.

Then I met Jihyun. We’re two divorced people in our forties, neither of us masters at sticking with relationships, but we’d each been preparing in our own ways. I’d been practicing the art of not running away. Jihyun had been learning how to love by raising her daughter, who’s about four (and delightful). Our relationship has had its ups and downs, but we’ve managed to keep it together for nearly half a year.

A few weeks ago I was at Jihyun’s place, playing with her daughter while she and her mom whipped up a home-cooked dinner of barbecue and and bean paste stew and side dishes. It was special because it wasn’t. I get startled sometimes, in these ordinary moments, at how comfortable I am here. It feels like home.

For this new year, there’s still no grand plan, but I intend to stick with what I’ve got and deepen the roots.

That’s enough.

That’s plenty.

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Second Seouliversary

Today is my Seouliversary: two years since I arrived in this city to make it my home, and I’m happy to report that all is well. Coming here was not a mistake. Over the past few months, a lot has happened that has made Seoul feel more than ever like the place I belong.

Life with car

I bought a car. I’m now the proud owner of a 2017 Hyundai Avante (what you probably know as an Elantra) with all the bells and whistles. I drive to work and can take trips to the countryside with ease. Getting to a decent grocery is easier. I walk less, but I eat more fruit and get out of the city more often.

Learning to deal with Seoul’s aggressive driving culture — not to mention the local habit of parking butt-in — has been a challenge. Seoul parking garages tend to be terrifyingly narrow, and I dented the car in the first week just trying to get out of the garage at my apartment complex. I was also caught speeding by one of Korea’s ubiquitous cameras, and so I’ve paid my first ticket (about $30).

Buying a car may be no big deal for most of you, but I haven’t really ever owned one as an adult, since I lived in New York. Owning one here is, among other things, a commitment to being here a while, and also to expanding my reach in this country I call home.

Gayageum

Over the spring and summer, I took a gayageum class for foreigners. A gayageum is a twelve-string zither, and I can now pluck out a couple of tunes. We had a performance at the end of the twelve-week course, and since then, I’ve continued on with the same teacher. It’s challenging but fun, another way of connecting to Korean culture and deepening my experience of being here.

Parents

My parents came for a visit in the spring, their first to Asia other than Israel (what continent did you think Israel was on?). Native New Yorkers, they were impressed by the sheer scale and density of Seoul. We packed a lot into two weeks: a baseball game, a shaman ritual, two traditional music performances, a couple of hikes, lots of touring around the heart of Seoul, a number of museums, palaces and temples, shopping on Insadong, antiquing around Dongmyo, and a Shabbos at Chabad of Korea. They had a blast.

I’m glad that I’ve been able to share this important part of my life with them. Now, when I talk about what I’m up to, they can picture it better. They have a sense of what I find so compelling about this place. It was sort of like introducing them to a girlfriend.

Love

Speaking of which, I’ve got a girlfriend, and my parents met her while they were here, which was a little weird because we’d only been dating about a month. But we’re crazy about each other, and my parents could tell, plus she’s awesome and loves jazz, so my parents thought she was great. If you want to get on my dad’s good side, ask him for jazz pianist recommendations, then later tell him you spent all day listening to Red Garland and Art Tatum. If you want to get on my mom’s good side, look at one of her children (or grandchildren) like they’re the best thing in the world.

Anyway, my girlfriend is Korean, we speak more Korean than English, she has an incredible smile, she’s smart and funny and thoughtful, and I feel good whenever I’m with her. We celebrated our 100 days together — kind of a thing here in Korea — at Ryunique, one of the best restaurants in Seoul.

I’m not saying much more about her or us because love is personal — to both people involved — but this is the biggest thing going on in my life right now, and I’m happy, and it’s another way I know, two years in, that I’m in the right place.

 

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To Do Great Work, A Man Must Be Very Idle

I am now halfway through my Year of No Particular Ambition. I’m not sure how well I’m doing at it.

For one thing, I got a promotion last week. I swear it was an accident, but there it is. I’m now at the level of suseok, or principal, which comes after senior and before vice president. Before you get too impressed, I’ll note that one of my Korean textbooks has a joke about a guy who’s boasting about becoming VP, so his wife tells him it’s no big deal, there’s even a VP of prunes down at the grocery, and when the husband calls the grocery to see if she’s for real, the grocer says, “Sure, do you want the VP of packaged prunes or the VP of loose prunes?”

February

I did manage, in my first week of principality, to go down to headquarters in Suwon, attempt to give a presentation to a room full of VPs (not sure if loose prunes was there), and have the whole thing go down in flames in an argument over Pokemon syndrome (don’t ask). It was a surprisingly quick and effective lesson in why it is that so many suseoks are just kind of goofy middle-aged guys who don’t do all that much. Not all of them are like that, but suseok seems to be the level where you can just coast if you want, or if you’ve had the ambition bludgeoned out of you by too many years of corporate politics.

But the thing is, I don’t and I haven’t. For all that this is supposed to be my year of no particular ambition, I’ve been trying to do things at work. I would like to think of them as fundamentally lazy — trying to solve big problems so I can stop spending all damn day solving the same small problems over and over — but I suppose trying to solve big problems is ambitious. But at least I don’t have any clear ambitions of moving up or moving on.

 

The promotion had the salutary effect of knocking me back into the present, following a period of existential crisis that I like to call “February.” Every year, I wonder why the hell I’m working so hard to live somewhere so cold and miserable. The somewhere used to be New York, but same-same. This February I went to America and visited my brother and sister and their spouses and babies and wondered whether I’d made a terrible mistake by not having a spouse and babies. Then I came back to Korea and went to the Olympics and watched people with more (and stupider) ambition than I will ever have do insane things like flipping 60 feet in the air and crashing face-first on ice, or skiing 50 kilometers in two hours and not immediately dying. I wondered if my lack of ambition meant maybe my life was already over, and I spent too much time doing financial math and looking at Thai real estate listings. The promotion reminded me that things are actually pretty good right here and now.

Keeping busy

Recently I saw a woman in the subway wearing a coat that said, “TO DO GREAT WORK A MAN MUST BE VERY IDLE.” I have no ambition to do great work — not this year, anyway — so I suppose I ought to keep busy, if a random article of Korean clothing is to be believed. That’s the whole point of this year of no particular ambition, isn’t it? To be engaged with the here and now. To do stuff without it having to mean something or go somewhere.

Now that the weather is turning, I can start going out again, walking over mountains or what have you. I went to a Purim party. I’m taking a gayageum class, which might sound ambitious, but I have absolutely no intention of ever being very good at it. I’m getting my social life moving again now that stepping outside doesn’t make my face hurt. I’m trying to do a hundred squats a day for a whole month. It’d be nice to find someone to date. And in another six months, I suppose I’ll still be right here, working at Samsung and living in Seoul and maybe noodling around on a gayageum. No big changes, no grand ambitions.

It might not be easy, but if I believe in myself and stay focused, I can achieve nothing in particular. Wish me luck!

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Unleashing Korean Productivity

Once again, Bloomberg has rated Korea as an innovation hub. And once again, Korea’s weakest statistic is productivity per worker, though a jump from 32nd place to 21st is impressive.

So what gives? After more than a year at Samsung, I see two main causes of Korea’s low worker productivity. The first, most obvious cause is long hours. Many Koreans (though, thankfully, not those in my division) feel like they have to get to work before their bosses and leave after, regardless of whether they have anything important to do. They put on a show of being at work for very long hours, but exhausted workers don’t actually produce very much. They’d be more effective if they just went home and slept.

This culture, thankfully, is changing. The president is pushing policies to limit excessively long hours, and companies like Samsung are making changes. In my division at Samsung, it’s now against the rules to work more than 52 hours in a week — still a lot of hours, but it means you can’t put in 12-hour days and then come in on the weekend without a notice getting sent to HR and the CEO. There are twice-a-month events called Smile Day, when you’re encouraged to go home early, and Wednesdays are Family Day, so people are also pushed out the door a little bit. And vacation days are mandatory: if you don’t take them by the end of the year, you’re actually not allowed to come in to work until they’re all gone. None of these reforms is a magic fix, but they’re helping to push the culture away from overwork and toward more efficient time management.

The second cause of low productivity is perhaps harder to pinpoint, and harder to reform, but I think it has much to do with the top-down, authoritarian culture that still rules many companies. Workers put in a lot of effort do get something done, only to be told to do it all again differently. I’ve worked on projects that carried on for months in a state of constant crisis, everything needing to be done immediately even though the release date was still far in the future. Instead of “measure twice, cut once,” it was more like “chop everything to pieces and glue it all back together,” and we did it over and over again. The final result was the sloppy hodge-podge you would expect.

This too is changing, though maybe not as visibly or as quickly. The leader of that project was edged out, and there’s a notable lack of panicked frenzy these days in my division. When workers are given the time and space to think and to do things right, they produce greater value. Just think what we could do if we added that latent worker productivity to the many factors already standing in Korea’s favor!