©2 0 0 7 D A V I D E . C A R L S O N .

A L L R I G H T S R E S E R V E D

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 T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Forward: TBD

Preface: TBD

Section I: Go East Young Man (Leaving Chicago to Korea)

Locations: Chicago, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, Moline, IL

Chapter 1: The Call 1

– Chicago 1995

Chapter 2: Seduced by Paloma Picasso 5

– Hong Kong 1995

Chapter 3: Seoul Searching 11

Flashback – New York 1956

Chapter 4: Are We There Yet? 16

– Seoul 1995

Chapter 5: Leo Burnett Is Dead 18

– Seoul 1995

Chapter 6: The World’s Second Oldest Profession 29

– Seoul 1995

Flashback Chapter 7: Welcome Home Doris 35

– Moline, IL 1959

Chapter 8: So What Exactly Is A Foreigner? 37

– Korea 1995

Chapter 9: Confucian = Confusion 39

– Korea 1995

Chapter 10: So What King Of Foreigner Was I To Be 41

– Korea 1995

Chapter 11: A Mid-Wife Crisis 46

– Chicago, IL 1995

Flashback Chapter 12: Baby We’re In This Together 62

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 – Moline, IL 1995

Chapter 13: Lucky People 65

– Whitehall, MI 1995

Flashback Chapter 14: A Little Bit O’Heaven 71

– Davenport, IA 1963

Chapter 15: Go East Young Man 72

– Chicago, IL 1995

Marketing Overview 76

Comparative/Competitive Titles 77

Author Bio 81

T H E C A L L

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Chicago, April 1995: I’m sitting in my office on the 26th floor of the Leo Burnett building

watching the sailboats go by when the telephone rings; “What do you know about Korea?”,

Michael Conrad asks. “Nothing”, I said – and that’s how I got the job.

– WWE –

The things that happen after a conversation like that are as unpredictable as the conversation

itself. Michael, our global creative director, had never called me before. Consider a life in the

corporate cornfields of Illinois and contrast that with any image of Korea you might have. If

you can say Kimchi and Hyundai you’re better off than most. To this day Korea remains a

strange and isolated land – and in 1995 was even more so. Efforts to explain and unmask the

country by foreigners have been largely rebuffed by the Koreans themselves. Of all the Asian

countries outside of Japan, Korea is the only one not to have been a direct subject of European

colonization. That dubious honor, more popularly known as Imperialism, was accomplished by

the Japanese in 1910 and lasted until end of WWII – thus cementing Korea’s timidity with

foreign culture and rendering it somewhat psychologically understandable. Referred to by

mariners in the 1800s as the Hermit Kingdom, Korea has come a long way in the last hundred

years or so, but what I was about to find in 1995 would not have been so much different than

what any explorer or missionary might have found a hundred years before: A Hermit Kingdom

– a peninsular culture, devoid of surrounding countries on three sides, content to be on their

own without foreign intervention – and maybe one reason not a single member of our

company’s senior management had ever been there before. I was about to become an argonaut – an

advertising argonaut.

– WWE –

A mix of Midwestern mysticism and surreality pervaded the floor reserved for senior

management at Leo Burnett in Chicago. Imagine the rows of big, stuffy old portraits of

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founders you might find in a brokerage or legal firm replaced by small black and white triptics

of our chubby, bald and decidedly unattractive founder, smoking a cigarette – ash dropping to

his lapels, carrying an overstuffed presentation bag or working in his garden on a farm in rural

Illinois . The personality cult, formed around this funny looking little man named Leo Burnett,

is legendary to staff, branded by the company as Burnetters – but to actually have been in the

belly of the beast on a mission of global importance, 25 years after the old boy’s death, was

well, bizarre. Oh sure, the Burnett agency was a 12 billion dollar global corporation with 85

offices around the globe, but Leo himself had been a simple man, not given to the trappings of

wealth, privilege or global travel – so the spare environs in this shrine to the founder stood in

stark contrast to the offices of the new kings of commerce who had come to inherit Leo’s

empire on this particular floor. And of course, I knew many of the people there but as a mere

Vice President in a company of 2300, I was a peon – and this was big stuff. There were at least

two levels of management between my level and theirs. Me and the big boys didn’t exactly

stand around the water cooler and chew the shit on Monday mornings.

I had been on the corporate floor only a few times, once for my initial interview and a

few other times for major presentations in the board room, but on this particular day I was left

to find my own way to Michael Conrad’s office, a man I had met maybe once in my six years

at the company. It was certainly not my morning run to the pisser.

To say that Michael was smooth would be an understatement. Michael was a charming

meticulous working class German who, having sold a majority stake in his agency in Berlin,

had arrived in Chicago to a position of corporate nobility that had probably eluded most of his

contemporaries in the old country. Before there was a dot-com bubble there was an advertising

agency bubble, growing bigger and bigger, and Michael had sold out to a global behemoth, my

global behemoth, in the 80s – just before industry bubble popping had become a routine form

of American business life. And Michael was global – something none of the ham-fisted

Chicago boys, not even the Northwestern grads, could ever approximate – and something the

company desperately needed. Michael knew this implicitly.

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 In his lilting German accent, he showed me clever samples of his personal work from

Germany and played on my creative consciousness and love of a simple idea, eloquently

executed. I had, in fact, been one of the most awarded creative directors at the company and

my work for Nintendo, Sony and Miller Beer had contributed to the company being named

Agency of the Year along with other similarly prestigious honors in the early 90s – so

Michael’s making creativity the meat of the package was no miscalculation. He told me that

my job was to raise the creative standards of the local branch, to make the product better – and

I took the bait like a lamb to the slaughter. That Korea would be my canvas just made it all that

much more interesting.

– WWE –

To research Korea at the Chicago Institute of Art you get pottery – little bits of Koryo Dynasty

Celadon that simply tell you how beautiful it was for royals to pour water or more inspiring

spirits, but historically worthless in terms of cultural communication. As an art history student,

the art museum had always been my home. What one couldn’t learn in text, I believed you

could learn in pictures – but no pictures presented themselves. Whilst the Institute in Chicago

may still be the leading museum in the world outside of Paris for French Impressionism, it runs

painfully shy of oriental exhibits, as many American collections do. But the lack of paintings

seems to be more of a Korean phenomena. Even today, Leeum, the Samsung museum of fine

art in Seoul, boasts a startling lack of painted historical works – despite an entire building filled

with exquisitely lit pottery – mostly post 18th century paper work from the Jeosun dynasty, and

little in the way that one has become accustomed to seeing the Europeans and even Japanese

and Chinese depict their cultures. Whether this is due to destruction from the war, pillaging

under the Japanese occupation, or simple lack of preference on behalf of the Koreans

themselves is a matter for art historians to ponder. I was a man on a business mission and I

needed more than pottery shards to begin to get a handle on what I would be up against.

The Business Bookstore in Chicago was a slightly better find but ever so slightly better

– remember, that Amazon.com did not publicly open it’s website until July of that year. Dealing strictly

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in business it was full of some of the world’s finest tomes on the subject, including global and

business psychology. My search for Korea turned up just two books that day: Introduction to

Korean History and Culture, still available and regarded at the time as an acceptable primer,

and A Guide to Doing Business In Korea, written by an insurance man with many outdated

stories and cultural mis-leadings – not so helpful then – useless now and well out of print.

To this day, despite a plethora of titles on Amazon, there remain a very small number of

good and accurate books on Korea. Troubled Tiger by Mark Clifford 1 remains the definitive

volume on Korea’s business culture and rise to economic prominence, and Michael Breen’s

The Koreans 2 gives a balanced and warmly reflected account of a society in transition. Should

you desire an objective perspective on Korea’s social and economic advances, both of these

books come highly recommended and are published both in English and Korean.

There were also a few travel books but no installment by

China Japan
one of my favorite travel guides, the Let’s Go series, authored
India & Nepal

Thailand
Vietnam
by Harvard University students on holiday. In 1995, Korea
Southeast Asia

was not a prime destination for Harvard students and

Australia
New Zealand apparently has not yet become one. Despite the society’s

remarkable and singular advances as a nation over the last 60

From the Harvard University “ Let’s Go”
travel series. Go ahead, find Korea? years, the country is conspicuously absent from the Let’s Go

series’ otherwise comprehensive coverage of Asia. Note to Harvard Business School students:

Korea, the 10th wealthiest nation on earth, is now a member of the WTO and the OECD, has

seen their president, Kim Dae Jung, win the Nobel Peace Prize and currently presents Ban Ki

Moon as Secretary General to the United Nations – that’s South Korea, by the way, if you need

directions.
1
Troubled Tiger by Mark L. Clifford – Publisher: M. E. Sharpe, 1998
This well-written book presents Korea's commercial history since 1961, building on historical, social, cultural, and economic factors.
Recommended primarily for pexecutives and government officials, scholars and students of business and social sciences will also find it
useful.
2

The Koreans by Michael Breen – Publisher: OrionBusiness, 1999

This book provides an interesting and informative perspective and plenty of documentation on what contemporary Koreans are like, describing
their future as well as the past. The author has lived in Seoul for over 20 years and worked as a journalist and business consultant.
7
 S E D U C E D B Y P A L O M A P I C A S S O

Dropping dramatically below skyscraper height and guiding itself along the harbor, just meters

above the fleeting junks that routinely crossed the harbor, our flight was one of the last to land

at Hong Kong’s old Kai Tak airport. From the opening credits of a James Bond film with

Roger Moore in the role, this was one of the most famous and exhilarating approaches in the

world – a Hong Kong no one sees today landing at British architect Norman Foster’s stylish

Chep Lap Kok airport, and being shuttled to the city on a quiet high-speed train.

Our Hong Kong was one of expat exotica and oriental mystique. We were being sent

there on our way to Korea to meet the regional managing director of Burnett. Nancy, my wife

of ten years, and I were booked into the Regent Hotel, voted “Best Hotel in the World” in

1995, on Causeway bay in Kowloon looking towards the architectural mélange that was and

continues to be Hong Kong – but 18 hours in flight, even in first class, can take the luxury out

of almost anywhere. We dutifully settled into our suite, overlooking the harbor, only to fall

asleep moments later – comforted by the fact that there were English speaking people at the

helm should the opium wars crank up again.

Upon waking we had the lure of HK at our beck and call. I went out for a run along the

winding streets of Lan Qui Fong while my wife found that particular lure to be completely and

totally resistible. Leaving the grounds of the world’s finest hotel one was immediately

confronted by as close to the antipode as one could get – a labyrinth of small winding streets

packed with vegetable vendors and I didn’t know what for sale – everything – God knows,

everything. Trash piled up on curbs and ladies throwing wastewater from third storey windows

to the surprise of only American joggers and absolutely no one else – a million misunderstood

odors seeping through my pores and a cacophony of exotic language that spoke clearly, audibly

and without translation.

“You have no fucking idea where you are or what you are doing”, they said.
8
 “Amazing”, I could understand Chinese perfectly.

Returning to the hotel I comforted Nancy by arranging a late-day massage for the two

of us in the hotel club. Then it was off to the waterfront to see what two people who had never

been to this city before could see.

Boarding one of the ubiquitous Star Ferries that routinely crossed the bay, we were

about to experience what National Geographic Traveler magazine picks today as one of the top

50 travel experiences of a lifetime. The ferries, along with the city’s cable car system, are two

of the only surviving relics of Hong Kong’s gloriously international past, not unlike the cable

cars of San Francisco. Built originally in 1917, each ferry featured an open-air double-decker

design with wooden chairs and sliding-open wooden windows. They creak, they smoke and

chug along at a decidedly non-modern pace, as you become a part of the past for the 10

minutes they take to bring you back to the future. The quaint old terminals were demolished in

2006 to make way for a new architectural masterpiece, a highway, and the upper decks of the

ferries are now air-conditioned. Better to have seen Hong Kong like Bond. James Bond.

Downtown HK was a mere blueprint of what it has become today, a modern pleasant

walking city with overhead pedestrian crossings, bustling city parks and a stellar collection of

architecture. The HSBC headquarters, the Hong Kong Financial Center, I.M. Pei’s shimmering

Bank of Hong Kong, the multifaceted Lupo buildings and hundreds of other architectural

experiments testify to the British tendency to assert their empirical style along with the HK

local’s continuing process of delineation from the Mainland. A visit to the Hong Kong museum

indicates that the city was not always the international gem it has become. Prior to the People’s

Revolution in 1949, Hong Kong was considered a low-class backwater and Shanghai had been

the International trading post of choice, hosting banks and trading headquarters of most

European countries including Germany, France, The Netherlands and England, but as

Communist control of Shanghai took away foreign company’s real estate rights and living

areas, Hong Kong became increasingly important to the maintenance and growth of European

trade and commerce. Today, even in post-hand over times, the “One Country-Two Systems”
9
approach allows Hong Kong to maintain the British systems that worked: public transportation,

waste removal, water supply, electric and education whilst integrating Chinese police, fire and

increasing government control of political operations. A quick look at Hong Kong, Shanghai

and Beijing today will show even the casual tourist that the Chinese government sees it’s

fortunes on the mainland and wishes Hong Kong’s dominance as an International Finance and

business center to become a relic of the past as Beijing prepares for the 2008 Olympics and

Shanghai lays claim to two of the tallest buildings in the world.

But our Hong Kong of 1995 was still two years away from handover. As we left the

Ferry terminal and proceeded across the overhead walkways past the designer boutiques to the

city center we dropped down and quickly found a street of food sellers with ladies skinning

live chickens and vendors hawking smiling pig’s heads mounted on sticks. Now this was the

Hong Kong I had come to see. Reasonably less enthused was my wife. She refused a trip down

the food street and exhibited a strong dislike for smells and visuals not to her liking or

understanding. “Boy was she gonna love Korea”, I think now.

Back at the Regent hotel a trip to the masseuse would prove more sensually pleasing for

us both and a dip in the harbor view pool provided the necessary distance from city life

unpleasant and the vagaries of unfamiliar locales.

My remembrance of the massage remains one of the most pleasant of my entire time in

Asia. Shoes removed at the door we were ushered in soft slippers individually to our 5- star

nirvanas for the following 90 minutes. Soothing music, aromatic smells and bubbling Japanese

style hot tubs beckoned and somewhere during the facial massage I found my place in the

world of jet-lagged complacency – and fell asleep.

Awakened gently by the staff and pointed in the direction of the door, I met a much

happier wife at the exit as we proceeded, trancelike, to our room.

Our next stop was the planned dinner with our regional director, Jeff Fergus, and his

wife. Jeff was a mid-forties British executive having worked with Burnett, or as the British say,

Burnett’s, for over ten years. It was immediately obvious that we were on his turf and he spared
10
no expense explaining this to us. His Hong-Kong-ness was overbearing and rather than trying

to make us feel any sense of comfort proceeded to revel in how much he knew about things –

embarrassingly exposing how little we didn’t. His wife, a mid-thirties former secretary of his,

seemed positively enthralled with the idea of how cheaply one could procure Paloma Picasso

designer handbag copies in Asia and reiterated this advantage to my wife throughout the dinner

– It would turn out to be the strongest selling point of the entire evening. Imagine that –

Picasso copies in Hong Kong. Fuck me.

I do remember eating a crustacean of some sort but taste and preparation I couldn’t tell

you a thing about. I can say it was not one of the better dinners I have had, owing to the

handicap of being prepared on one of the word’s most impressive vistas – a towering two

storeys of glass over a glistening harbor of quant junk lights, shimmering modern architecture

and well-healed patrons can have a sobering effect on the culinary sensibilities of any chef. We

marveled at the scenery anyway and knew that any restaurant in Korea would be hard-pressed

to hold a candle to this one under any circumstance.

As I recall, Fergus knew precious little about Korea as a country, despite his wife being

a handbag encyclopedia . What he did know was that the Korean operation had been

problematic from the start in 1992 and that relations with our joint venture partner were

strained at best. But I wouldn’t know that for another few months. Certainly, he knew a lot

more about Korea than he ventured to expose at that point but preferred to focus on the good

things and use the meeting as a recruiting exercise. His job was to maintain and grow the

revenues of our largest clients: McDonald’s, Kellogg’s, Procter and Gamble and Philip Morris,

and that’s all he was paid to care about.

He touted the 4 seasons as a major benefit and resorted to telling us that Korea had

American TV, courtesy of the American Forces Korea Network. But, in truth Korea was a

business backwater at that time, and he had very, very little to sell. Tales of failed venture

partnerships were rampant and efforts by multinational companies to permeate the market

holds of Korean family businesses, called chaebols, had fallen on detrimental results. In 1995
11
sales of foreign cigarettes in Korea stood at less than 2% of the market, RJ Reynolds had

pulled out, and foreign investment as a concept was viewed by Koreans with contempt – and

our main client, my main client-to-be, was Philip Morris. They make Marlboros.

Honestly, the best thing the company could do at that time was keep the truth as far

away as possible if they had any hopes of landing this new recruit and his lovely wife.

Korea was, from my corporation’s viewpoint, a prickly thorn in the side of an otherwise

healthy corporate culture – or healthy as far as I could have seen.

Why couldn’t these fucking people manage their business like so many others around

the world? Why did every daily step of corporate grindstone work have to turn into a battle for

the Korean motherland? What assholes. Why was the quality of their commercial product so

far below that of even less fortunate countries?

“And why in any stretch of nonsensical corporate imagination would they appoint a guy

with absolutely no international experience to the number 2 post in a 28 million dollar local

organization?”, I found myself, asking myself.

The answer to the last question was not so difficult. Given a country where the only

previous American experience had been a three-year blood-fest and that American business

experience had been less than pleasant over the following 40 years, a good manager looking to

fill this position might not want someone with Korean experience at all. In fact, he would want

quite the opposite. The more one knew about Korea, the less willing one would be to take the job.

I, one the other hand, had no previous bad experience with the country and could view

it as a stepping stone to more responsibility should I have even a modicum of success. I wasn’t

on this junket for the money, I was on it just like another rung on a long corporate ladder,

somewhere past the middle.

My only real concern at the time was my wife. A difficult career decision awaited her

upon my appointment to my new post. Should she leave the comfort and professional growth

she had come to experience in the world of Chicago public relations to become an expat wife

in Seoul? Should she leave a country more and more accustomed to treating women in a fair
12
professional manner to live in a country where women were expected to serve tea and provide

eye candy to all the male employees? My two books and conversations with people about the

business environment in Korea had given me at least enough information to know that the big

challenge in this plan would be my wife. Should she follow her husband to places unknown

with no certain guarantee that she would ever work professionally again? Plenty of women did,

but would this be the right decision for her? And would she be compelled to make this decision

at a time when her professional standing in Chicago was just becoming secure?

These questions would answer themselves over the next few months. But for me, this

was a no-brainer – there would be nothing for her in Korea, except me, and I was about to be

an extremely busy man. What went on in that girl’s head over the next few months I cannot tell

you. Her husband was being given a big promotion and that would spell the end of her career.

What a person does with information like that is purely personal – that I can tell you with

absolute certainty.

Our dinner in Hong Kong ended unceremoniously. We bid the Fergus’ goodbye and

were never to see them as a couple again. Jeff Fergus had fulfilled his duty to recruit me and

kept his mouth shut about the tsunami we were about to enter. Paloma was just the kicker.

S E O U L S E A R C H I N G

The Guild of the Infant Saviour on East 86th Street in New York in 1956 was approximately

6885 miles and exactly thirty-nine years away from Seoul, Korea in 1995. Dean Martin & Jerry

Lewis would play their last comedy show together at the Copacabana just a few blocks away

that year and Elvis, singing Hound Dog, would electrify the Ed Sullivan show in the same city

just a few months later. But things were reasonably less grand at the Guild of the Infant

Saviour, a home for unwed Catholic mothers just a few blocks south of Gracie Mansion on the

East River and adjacent to what was then Misericordia Hospital at 531 East 86th.

“He cried immediately, was cyanotic, resuscitated, then cried repeatedly”, said the

medical report. The practice of slapping a baby’s butt after birth, was originally a device to
13
kick-start heart valves and breathing apparatus as the infant made the transition from the fluid

to the airborne world (translation: resuscitated). Cyanotic babies, or blue babies as they were

called, are blue in skin colour because blood is not yet

circulating to the lungs which will produce oxygen – so

a little slap on the ass not only makes them gasp but

gives them an early taste of what life has to offer even

before it begins to offer much at all – like finding out

there is no Santa Claus before you even know who

Santa Claus is.

The relatives in New Jersey had been told that Doris Mae had gone off to New York to

secretarial college but probably everyone knew the real story. The preponderance of Catholics

keeping up a good face would be mirrored by peoples in the far east many years later, but what

an interesting precursor to a life of continually wondering where reality met the fantasy this

new young man was about to live. Doris Mae Everitt gave birth to Shawn Michael Everitt on

June 22nd , 1956 and immediately surrendered him for adoption. She would marry the father,

Carl Henry Olson, just six weeks later and bear him another child but would never see her first

son again. For Catholics, image was everything. For little Shawn this would be just the

beginning of a life of continual reinventions – for he was not about to stay little Shawn for

much longer.

The diagnosis stated the child had no trouble eating but did not gain weight in

accordance with his caloric intake. Tests were performed and it was decided that an adrenal

insufficiency was the culprit. The kid simply needed more juice.

After 7 weeks in New York, he was transferred to St. Francis Hospital in Trenton, New

Jersey and put on medication to correct the deficiency. Babies with a better shot at making

sizable collection plate drops later in life probably got to stay on the Upper East Side – but this

kid’s chances were less than average.

Over the course of the next seven months the same tests and procedures were replicated
14
three times until a suitably fat and happy child could be properly offered up for adoption.

One must wonder how many passing doctors, nuns, nurses and night watchmen, the

child came into contact with over his many months at St. Frank’s. What were the procedures

for dispensing hugs and kisses? Tablet or capsule form? Did the teddy bears wear little black

leather jackets? And what about communication training? Was he being trained to only speak

Joisey or were the Queen’s English, and other accents being given appropriate instruction

time? Brass knuckles or plastic rattles? This kid was coming into a tough world.

– WWE –

As we mature into adults our childhood memories remain but become stored in our

brains in a way that we are unable to consciously access them. Sometimes a motion, a shape or

even a smell can trigger emotions and feelings from very early on. This was the case with the

New York Store, located oddly, on 5th Avenue in Moline, Illinois in the early 1960s. Around the

ages of 7 and 8 I began to have a series of dreams that focused specifically on architectural and

physical environments. Striving to put reality to these fantastic images I came upon the New

York Store in downtown, Moline. The New York Store occupied a fading, foreboding black

façade that was a microcosm of everything implied by it’s namesake. In one dream I stare,

childlike up through the European style windows to spy a chandelier and a grand winding

staircase towering over a Steinway, atop a checkerboard, marble floor. In another I am

transported behind the store to an alley where I see plainly that the grandeur of the New York

Store is more like that of a Hollywood set, with paint-chipped concrete blocks and a rusty fire

escape hanging over decidedly New York-like smelling piles of garbage. Ahh, the New York of

old. I visited New York last in 2002 and, save for Ground Zero, it was a lot more like

Disneyland – all spit-shined and polished to the nth degree – a tourist paradise but a real New

Yorker’s nightmare. Damn Bloomberg and Guliani. They’ve screwed up a perfectly good dream.

But the New York Store in my dreams was not the New York Store of 5th Avenue in

Moline, Illinois. Primarily the windows were wrong. The windows in my dream were ornate in

the sense that they were large and undulating and full of panes amongst the wood framing that

15
refracted light ever so differently depending on their angles. The windows on the actual

department store were just flat panes of glass suitable for the mannequin dioramas that lived

behind them. No, these windows were special, like the windows on the stern of a Spanish

galleon at the captain’s quarters. I had certainly never seen windows like these – not in Moline,

Illinois anyway.

My first trip to New York as an adult came in 1984 when I was 28. Working for an

advertising agency in Dallas, Texas, I was asked to accompany my immediate supervisor to a

recording session on a sort of training mission. As I remember, the supervisor had little use for

me on the trip and I was allowed to leave the session early. That meant I had the whole of an

afternoon to be a tourist and took to it as voraciously as one far ago displaced New Yorker

could have. I saw the Statue of Liberty, from Battery Park only, the Empire State Building, the

façade and lobby only, and Central Park, the zoo and Wolman Rink only – and the

Guggenheim, the whole damn thing – quickly. At the end of the day, on the way down

Broadway the taxi hung a right on West 44th (yes, you could do that in those days) on the way

to the Lincoln Tunnel for my flight out of Newark when my jaw dropped and I slammed into

near paralysis. I had just seen a ghost. “Stop, stop, stop”, I screamed at the driver. Gathering

my bags and pushing $20s through the pay-slot, I tumbled out onto the sidewalk in front of 37 West 44th.

It was the building from my dream – exactly the building from my dream as a child. I

hadn’t thought of it in many, many years.

There could be no mistaking this one. The ornate design. The nautical galleon windows.

The sheer grace and individuality of the thing. Bags over my shoulder I strode towards the

building to read the brass plaque next to the entrance.

The “New York Yacht Club” it proclaimed – The New York Yacht Club. Fuck all.

Born on June 22nd and transferred to Trenton, New Jersey just weeks later, did Shawn

Michael Everitt, a functional orphan at the time, have a chance to glimpse this building from

the window of a passing vehicle on his way to the Lincoln Tunnel? For just a second or for a

longer time? How fanciful it might have compared to the institutional/medical surroundings of
16
Catholic infant care in the 1950s. It’s doubtful that Shawn had even seen the inside of a church

at that point.

It’s common practice for adoptive parents to tell their adopted children that maybe they

were the offspring of wealthy or famous families. And it’s a fantasy not without merit, because

in those days no one was allowed to know the truth – so why not make the kid a prince instead

of a pauper? The fantasy offered more hope than reality.

On April 7th, 1957 a repaired Shawn Michael Everitt passed under the waters of

Baptism in a Catholic ceremony and emerged as David Edward Carlson, the son of Raymond

& Doris Carlson (yes, another Doris), who would later move him far away, to the land of the

Illini Indian, Moline Illinois.

As it turns out, my birth father, Carl Olson had been an avid sailor and even owned a

marina at one time in his life – Doris Mae, my birth mother, went on to marry a US champion

water-skier, Bruce Parker, divorcing Carl after four years. My adoptive father, Ray, had just

finished a Korean War tour on the US Destroyer Dashiel and at least understood sailing from a

military perspective. But at no time, to my knowledge, did any of them ever take me to the

New York Yacht Club. That part was only in a dream – “Where’s my sextant? Where’s my

compass?” – wasn’t it?

– WWE –

In other news from 1956, a Joint Resolution of the U.S. Congress was signed by

President Eisenhower, authorizing "In God We Trust" as the U.S. national motto, and the first

television airing of the film, The Wizard of Oz, garnered a then staggering 46 million viewers.

Martin & Lewis were dead. Elvis was born and the Man Behind The Curtain and the

U.S. Congress were headed for the perfect storm. David now had a new name and a steerage-

class ticket for the fantasy/reality voyage of the century.

A R E W E T H E R E Y E T ?

17
As our 747 rumbled into Korean airspace and descended on the night city of Seoul what I saw

were crosses. Hundred and hundreds of neon crosses – and bowling pins – giant bowling pins

lit from the inside and perched atop buildings dotting the skyline. This odd marriage of crosses

and bowling pins led me to just one conclusion: Seoul, Korea was God’s bowling alley and

anyone who ever loved to hurl three-fingered heavy spherical plastic down a wooden corridor

whilst chanting the Lord’s Prayer would be right at home here. This was bowling heaven – a

whole lot more Elvis than James Bond.

Otherwise, the flight to Seoul was anticlimactic. Any study of Asian capitals wouldn’t

put Seoul, Korea on a top tourist list. There are no natural monuments to speak of, no

mountains, rivers or beautiful things of note and the Koreans had done little to embellish what

God gave them as a country. I had done my research and did not expect anything as exotic as

Hong Kong, Tokyo or Singapore but this was worse than landing in Moscow, except for the

bowling.

Kimpo airport in Seoul had all the charm of a Soviet fashion show in January. Olive

drab guards and dilapidated customs booths proved that this was certainly no Hong Kong and

our passage into this third world would be accompanied by a psychological strip-search, grey

face painting and a couple of babushkas just to help us blend. Dour stuff. Surly service

glowered in abundance as we passed through grey over grey over grey grimality. Fucking

horrible is a much better description. But wait, Korea was a Democracy! Forget that. I branded

it a socialist democracy from this point forward and was not to be proven wrong for quite some

time – more about Confucianism, collectivism and Korean government later.

Take a pampered housecat out of her warm and cozy environs, fly her halfway around

the globe, and then watch the hair stand up on her back when faced with this shit. This was my

wife and her visions of continuing life in a gorgeous pre-war Franco-rococo Chicago apartment

on Lincoln Park West, with top-hatted doorman ready every hour, going up in smoke. She

18
hated smoking.

Seoul turned out to be every bit so predictably pedestrian and worse. The taxi ride from

the airport offered little in terms of cultural understanding or wonderment, save for the long

trip down “Wedding Street”, a street with hundreds of wedding boutiques lining both sides and

going on seemingly for miles. Visions of Sun Young Moon’s Unitarian church’s mass

weddings, held in Seoul stadiums, took the place of peaceful unions of western theatrical

perfection. Downtown Seoul offered nothing more than mid-rise glass office buildings

clustered around a diminutive mountain named “Nam San”, (South Mountain) boasting one of

the world’s less impressive tourist “towers”, a spiky needle sort of affair with an observation

deck and a cheesy revolving restaurant. If there were cliché and old cliché, this was decrepit

cliché. The temples and national monuments, today crisply and cleanly lit for all to see, were

not to be discovered through the night of 1995.

The Seoul Hilton reinforced the city’s general feel of urban sameness with a lobby of

generic hotel furniture and paintings hung only to match the carpets and sofas. Inside, rooms

with sliding egg-crate style doors tried in vane to infuse some Korean-esse to the décor but the

whole place in general owed more to the planning of untalented hotel designers than any local

influence. It was Moscow all right. They just didn’t speak Russian.

A crack at using the telephone proved that not much was going to be done in any

language outside Korean and my brief jog the next morning down the street told me that

international newspapers, cigarettes or breakfast snacks would just not be available once

outside the hotel proper. “Welcome to Korea. Please spend your money and leave quickly”,

was the message.

Monday morning the agency sent a car to pick us up at the hotel. It was the agency

President’s car and an ageing model of uncertain Korean variety, painted black and sporting a

well-worn leather interior. It did however have electric windows. What we didn’t know was
19
that this was nice. The driver spoke impeccable English and inquired immediately about

whether he would need to escort us everywhere all week. We responded we didn’t know and

trundled off to our morning appointment.

L E O B U R N E T T I S D E A D

Leo Burnett died in 1971, but in Chicago extreme efforts had been made to embalm his legacy

in expensive woods, wall coverings and cultish devotion, almost to the point of preserving

Lennin, Kim Il Sung or Ho Chi Minh. No, there was no actual body anywhere but every small

vestige of his persona had been enshrined in some way: His photo, his signature as a company

logo, and his internally famous retirement speech, “When To Take My Name Off the Door”

framed like an epitaph and posted in every lobby on every floor of the 50 storey headquarters.

Korea had quite a different way of eulogizing the man. Having ascended to what we

expected to be a lobby on the eighth floor of an ageing office tower we were greeted by two

cheap, plastic signs in a hollow hole hosting both elevator and toilet doors – one, pointing left

for a bank and the other, pointing right for our company – but no one sat in attendance and the

poor abandoned government style desk, accompanied only by a four spindled rolling-swivel

chair, missing a wheel, told us that dust had been the only recently welcomed guest.

Oblivious to all of this, people passed us at lightening speed traveling to what seemed

to be incredibly important appointments. The speed of these people amazed us – their

efficiency yet to be determined. No one and I mean no one, made any attempt to find out who

we were or what we might be doing there. We made our way to the right, in the direction of

the office that seemed to be ours. Once inside we were greeted with more blank stares. People

darted about from computer to computer in a world of flurry we were obviously not allowed to
20
disturb.

A few uncomfortable minutes later we were finally greeted by a friendly Scottish gent

named David Miller, the outgoing Managing Director. David ushered us into his office with

extreme graciousness, considering the grimness of most of the surroundings. He offered us

coffee and, after what seemed an interminable bit of time, it arrived in little paper Solo cups, as

he began his introduction of the agency.

The agency, as it were, was not much of an agency at all, at least not the Leo Burnett

agency. It was more the property of the Korean Joint Venture partner, a Mr. Sen Yon Kim and a

sideline to his core business, an entity called SenYon Communications. As Chairman he

controlled 50% of this branch office but held all voting rights as his younger, trophy-wife and

other members of his organization strongly outnumbered the Leo Burnett side of the equation –

but the tide was turning, David asserted. With my addition and the addition of a British

Account Service Director, control of day-to-day operations would be handled primarily under

the guidance of a Korean President who had been moved from SenYon’s payroll to that of Leo

Burnett Chicago, the parent company, arguably. Now a triumvirate of foreign-controlled and

paid managers would see the operations through, guided by Fergus, the regional director in

Hong Kong, whom my wife and I had just met. Maybe not so oddly, Fergus had forgotten to

mention what a shithole this place was – not to mention a political quagmire.

David then introduced us to key members of the staff, providing healthy stories of

everyday company life to illustrate our new surroundings. A forty-ish, older than I, woman

named Mrs. Woo was introduced as my chief of staff and a younger lady named Nakhee put

forward as my best English-speaking employee. The proliferation of battered computing

equipment was nothing short of astounding and everyone seemed to be beating their particular

machine into a capitalistic pulp – but there was no mistaking the equipment, however loved,

was of antique pedigree and would soon need to be replaced. I queried about the origin of some

21
of the Macintosh computers and had been told that they had been shipped from the Singapore

office – one could not buy a new Macintosh computer in Korea in 1995. Of all 15 employees in

my department only two could operate computers and of the two computers available one was

definitely a candidate for inclusion in a museum of computing science – and here we were just

three years before the start of the Korean Internet revolution.

– wWe –

Computers took awhile to make it into mainstream advertising environments, even in

the developed world. The graphical user interface (GUI), the adaptation of typography to a

desktop, and the addition of color and pictures to ones daily computing life were becoming

common to Macintosh owners in the early 90’s but for those companies, to which computing

had always been a back room mystery, these things proved elusive until the introduction of

Windows 95. I remember the joke going like this: “Windows 95? Mac 87!” But that’s about the

way it hit corporate America. At a cost of thousands of dollars per employee, companies didn’t

see the logic in equipping each and every employee with what they perceived to be a very

expensive typewriter. In 1995 my company-issued IBM Selectric still hummed alongside my

personal Macintosh Powerbook, for days that the network wouldn’t allow me to print from the

laptop. With my typewritten scripts, I’d go down to our pool secretary and put them into her

word processing inbox. Hours later, there would be a manuscript ready for my corrections and

quite possibly a corrected version ready for me to pick up in the morning. These were the

workings of one of the world’s largest communications companies in 1995. I recall a comment

from our corporate IT Director at the time:

The Leo Burnett company had become famous for distributing free apples at every

reception desk in every branch around the world – 85 offices. It was once said that the Leo

Burnett Company was the world’s largest consumer of apples next to McDonald’s on a daily

basis. Based on this bit of company folklore, the IT Director proudly exclaimed, in frustration

22
to an employee demanding computer support, that “The only apples that belonged at Burnett

were the ones given away at reception!” And so went the slog of technology at Leo Burnett.

During my time in Korea it was relayed to me that Burnett Chicago had a shot at the

Microsoft advertising account. Having created icons for some of the most prominent brands in

history, Marlboro, Kellogg’s, McDonald’s and the Keebler Brands to name a few, it seemed

only natural that Burnett would desire the Microsoft name in their stables, not to mention the

billings. As the story goes, Bill Gates visited the agency and was treated to a pitch owing to the

spirit of P.T. Barnum. Creative teams showed storyboards, sang songs and put on a show

extraordinaire, in keeping with the finest Burnett traditions. After the pitch Mr. Gates was

reportedly treated to the customary agency tour, replete with aisle upon aisle of pristine offices

looking more like those of a Japanese bank than an American creative powerhouse. At the end

of his tour I was told he exclaimed, “Excellent presentation gentlemen, but as I see it, you don’t

use computers and that would make it impossible for you to understand my business.”

Burnett would struggle in the years after that, loosing client upon client, all for different

reasons, but the message was clear: this was a company tied to the images of the Marlboro

Man and the Keebler Elves struggling to come to grips with a vision and technology that was

much more Mario and Pokemon.

– WWE –

But computers would be the least of my problems at Leo Burnett Korea. The week

proceeded with fabulous lunches and dinners at top-notch restaurants, all under the careful

guidance of David Miller and our newly appointed Korean President, Hugh Kwon.

Mr. Kwon was an American executive’s dream – conservatively dressed and well

spoken, he was quick with a smile and a master at delivering the light-hearted quip when

necessary. The boys in Chicago loved him. What was less evident was what he actually knew

about the advertising business – and that tuned out to be not much at all. Mr. Kwon, for all of

23
his personal charm, was a well-placed puppet president by the local JV partner. His job was to

be Sen Yon Kim’s eyes and ears on this beady-eyed foreign corporation.

Interestingly Sen Yon had been one of Korea’s most vocal opponents to the opening of

the advertising business to foreign participation in the late 1980s, but the first to sign on as a

JV partner (required by law until 1996) once the floodgates opened. This dichotomy would

prove to be the tip of a corporate iceberg in the early stages of global warming.

Our dinner with David Miller and his wife would stand in stark contrast to the dinner a

few days later with Mr. Kwon and his wife. Approaching the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Seoul, one

was not immediately aware of the commanding presence it holds over the Han River and

Seoul’s Gangnam district. Only once inside was one able to be enveloped by a lobby of

impressive visual dominance over the sprawling skyline to the south. A sheet of glass, not

unlike the one at the Regent in Hong Kong, presided over a dazzling array of lights, bridges,

twinkle-light festooned tour boats, and Jumbo-tron TVs hung from nearly every tall building.

The only thing missing in Seoul was spectacular architecture. Governed for years by landing

approach height restrictions from the old Kimpo airport, Seoul’s southern skyline owed more

to unimaginative mid-rise apartment blocks than anything else, but at night, with the building

forms obscured, the mélange of lighting was enough to impress. It said, “This place just might

become something.”

The Paris Grill at the Grand Hyatt is the hotel’s signature restaurant, a continental affair

with steaks, lobsters and the Korean influenced house special, garlic mashed potatoes. For all

the crap we had seen so far this was at least making my wife happy. David and Janet were nice,

friendly but most of all, honest. David was very straight up about the emerging status of the

country and the company, and related probably the most important management lesson of my

entire career in Asia.

He said to me, “The thing you’ve got to remember is that your best English speakers

are not necessarily your best employees.”

This turned out to be not just be an oriental pearl of wisdom but a guiding principal of
24
my business life in Asia – don’t let language get in the way of business – but it’s not something

very easy for Americans to understand. For all the carping we seem to do about Mexican

immigrants not speaking English few realize or understand that, save for The UK and

Australia, most countries are multi-lingual to a great extent and reasonably permissive of more

than one language to guide their business, social and political aspirations. Even the Koreans are

coming around to this – with the English language teaching business being a wildly lucrative

industry. The Hermit Kingdom has at least come to realize that being a hermit is not

particularly profitable when 70% of your GDP is derived from selling stuff to foreign

countries.

Dinner with Mr. Kwon and his wife was a diametrically solemn affair. Paraded into a

small collection of Korean out-buildings with mud walls and thatched roofs, we settled down,

on the floor of course, to a meal of exquisite oddity and theatrical quaintness. For me, sitting

on the floor was no big deal, having grown up spending plenty of floor time watching TV, but

for ladies, accustomed to wearing skirts and crossing their legs demurely on sofas, the question

of exactly how to place oneself down gracefully and comfortably became quite a quandary –

and I must admit, damn funny to watch. For her part, Nancy carried herself astonishingly well

and even seemed to enjoy the meal. Mrs. Kwon was a whole other story. For a 55 year old man

of Mr. Kwon’s generation, bringing his wife to a business dinner was just something not done

by Korean tradition – the preferred alternative being a bunch of old men sitting on the floor,

smoking cigarettes, drinking soju, and munching on the cornucopia of Korean side dishes

served before plunging their faces into heated stone bowls of soup and schlurping themselves

to kimchi chigae3 heaven. Poor Mrs. Kwon was just woefully out of her element and to make

matters worse spoke no English at all. All she could do was occupy the place designated for her

by culture thousands of years ago and follow her husband’s lead. This may well have been the

point at which my wife started to consider her own position in life and begin to define who she

was and what she really wanted to do with the whole thing.

3
Kimchi chigae is a traditional Korean soup using kimchi as the primary ingredient
25
 The parts of marriage that require the maintenance of joint checking accounts, sharing

bathroom privileges and buying mutually acceptable real estate pale in comparison to handling

chopsticks whilst sitting on the floor before a mute representation of what she would be

expected to become in this new, to us at least, and respectively arcane culture. Women’s

liberation was years away from Korea and that fact only highlighted by the ladies hovering

over our table, snipping the freshly barbequed meat with scissors and discretely refilling our

glasses after every sip or two.

The evening ended with a traditional show of fan dancing and Korean folk opera called

Pansori in a larger building of the complex. To say the place was but a Disney-esque

representation of Korean culture would be kind. Even I, with my limited knowledge of the

country, could tell that this was just a place where Koreans took foreigners for a cursory and

terribly inaccurate sampling of the country’s cuisine and entertainment preferences. In

retrospect it was pandering, but in all fairness to Mr. Kwan, all he was trained to do in

situations like this. He certainly would have never taken a Korean to dinner as a recruitment

exercise. This was plainly more uncomfortable for he and his wife than it was for us.

– WWE –

When a husband and his wife go on a tour like this, the company calls it a “look-see” tour. You

look and you see, supposedly, but essentially it’s a working week and there is business to be

done. No company wants to pay for your vacation and they make sure you are busy with

appointments most of the time. My responsibility was to sit in various meetings regarding

aspects of our business – Nancy’s job was to accompany Mr. Kwan’s secretary on real estate

hunting junkets.

If there was one thing the two of us had mastered in terms of marriage it was real estate

management. At precisely this time we were also involved in the purchase of a summer home,

opposite Chicago on the eastern coast of Lake Michigan. It was a lovely old cottage of 100

years and a certified money-pit, owing to years of neglect on an eroding hillside, but the

benefits of buying at the right price in 95 far outweighed the work it would take to bring it up

26
to acceptable second-home status in the future. The home stood on a little peninsula between

Lake Michigan and a small inland sailing lake called White Lake in Whitehall Michigan. A

gated community of 75 or so century-old cottages, the Sylvan Beach Resort was about to

become our home away from home, at least in America. We had considered buying a condo in

Chicago but with prices on the rise had concluded that paying a few hundred grand for the lake

house in Michigan and keeping our small one-bedroom apartment on Lincoln Park West was a

much better deal than paying near half a mil for an econo-box – both financially and

charismatically. This way at least all our hard earned mortgage money would be going towards

a form of enjoyment and weekend pleasure, as opposed to a nondescript hamster habitat in the

city. Having yet another residence in Seoul was not exactly in the original plan.

But Nancy, had been my partner in one previous home purchase in Texas, knew her

way around the housing market and was a trusted surveyor and negotiator. No one was going to

get around her. She was my wolf in sheep’s clothing – my secret weapon.

Stalag 13? 14? 15? The characters from the TV show Hogan’s Heroes would have been

more than at home in the apartments shown to my wife in that week but trying to convince a

woman that she should give up doormen, a grand piano in the lobby and a park across the street

in Chicago was a virtually impossible sell when all the buildings she was shown were adorned

with 10 foot high painted numbers on the side as address markers.

The state of the Korean housing market in those years owed much to their urban

planning of the late 60s and 70s. Faced with an unforeseen migration of farmers to the city in

the decades after the war, the government actually performed near miracles by encouraging and

subsidizing the building of block upon block of tenement style buildings to house the workers.

One could drive for miles down the Han river in Seoul and see nothing but mid-rise housing

blocks of poured concrete with ever escalating numbers on the building sides – so what

represented itself to Koreans as being upscale, safe and secure seemed a reprehensible

communication to Americans who have only seen this building style used in public housing

projects. There was no way my wife was going to be moved from the Belden Stratford on
27
North Lincoln Park West to what she perceived to be the Korean equivalent of Cabrini Green4.

Not in a million years – let alone in one.

But for her part she was uniformly polite, graceful and friendly with the staff. She

attended her rounds with professionalism and reported to me in the evening the results of her

surveys. In not so cryptic a language she summarized the week’s viewings:

“You’re not going to like them”, she reported, which was really her way of saying that

she didn’t like them.

I visited a couple just to do a double check and it was obvious that the company was

not considering this seriously enough. I had taken the time to find out where other expats were

living and visited those neighborhoods. It was like night and day. My Koreans would need

some education into what, at least these Americans, would deem to be acceptable housing.

– WWE –

We busied about our week and by the end were able to get in some sightseeing time.

The highlights on one day would be a climb up little Nam San, the mountain with the soviet

style space needle, and Kyung Buk Palace, the ancient residence of Korean Kings. Not a

particularly ambitious day but enough of a run at an otherwise impenetrable city.

The hike up Nam San raised an interesting question: What were everyday Koreans

really like? One of the books I had read on Korea had said that white women, blonds

especially, would be subject to stares and catcalls from the men should they venture about

publicly. Additionally it cautioned against these women wearing sunglasses, the idea being that

women such as this – movie icons like Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell – would be regarded

as loose women, devoid of moral stature – whores by cultural definition. And that just makes

the whole remembrance all the more bizarre, because my wife decided to wear her sunglasses

anyway – to protect her eyes from of course, the sun. In reality, Nancy was one of the most

conservative women one could have met.

4
Cabrini-Green is a Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) public housing development on Chicago's North Side. At its height, Cabrini-
Green was home to 15,000 people, living in mid- and high-rise apartment buildings. Over the years, gang violence and neglect created terrible
conditions, and the name "Cabrini-Green" became synonymous with the problems associated with public housing in the United States.
28
 But Koreans at the time were a culturally sheltered lot and not particularly interested in

the truth or social exploration of any kind. Better to take the stereotype as it presented itself.

That way they could have something dicey to discuss with their friends later in the day.

“Wow, we saw a blond, white woman with sunglasses!” , they could say.

And that’s exactly what happened. Not two feet inside the public park that was Nam

San we were bombarded with stares and attentions of the disengaged variety. No one would

look at us directly but the action behind our backs was nothing short of the locals witnessing a

foreign invasion – and wondering what to do about it. They just couldn’t take their eyes off her

with me in tow. Were we rock stars or criminals? Movie stars or gangsters?

“Didn’t that woman know what wearing sunglasses meant?”, they seemed to say. It was

just fucking odd.

I have often come to describe my many forays into Korean culture to have been like

that. Whenever I would walk into a small shop, whether in the country or a non-foreign part of

the city, the staff would do one of two things: freeze or run. But I never knew which. I guess it

all depends on whether they thought I was a rock star or a criminal.

That day my wife was a rock star – or a porn star at least in their eyes.

After Nam San and a trip to the horrible space needle thing we took a cable car back

down to the base. I ate some stewed bugs, served in another Solo cup by a street vendor, and

was later told that only children ate those. I didn’t care. It was at least my attempt at cultural

immersion. The wife wouldn’t touch them.

We spent the afternoon at the palace and it was charming. A similar architectural style

to what one might see at the Forbidden City in Beijing but on a much smaller scale. In the

museum there was a 4000 year-old woman complete with mummified skin and vestiges of

clothing still intact. She had been unearthed in Mongolia but bore tattoos that suggested to the

Koreans that she was an early, early ancestor of the Han people. Over the years Koreans never

failed to impress upon me that theirs was a 4000 year old culture – but this is an arguable

historical claim at best. For thousands of years it may have been true that a finite number of
29
tribes lived on the peninsula, but they were by no means united as a culture much less a

country until the last few hundred years – more like a bunch of cats in a bag fighting over

limited amounts of arable land. Successions of dynasties left not insignificant innovations in

terms of literature, ceramics, the celestial sciences, architecture and even movable typography,

but there is little to suggest these tribes ever acted as a single body in any form of national

defense, offence or unity for 4000 years. Rather today, watching Korean politicians throw

chairs and punches at each other in the National Assembly can most likely be traced back to

old provincial lines and rivalries that have yet to die over these thousands of years.

T H E W O R L D ’ S S E C O N D O L D E S T P R O F E S S I O N

By the week’s end I was beginning to feel that we were only getting the “tour of the Soviet

Union” view of the city. Shuttled everywhere in a company car and guided by someone at all

times, things had become claustrophobic. I needed to get out on my own and ply the city from

the only sensible vantage point a new visitor can: I needed to get to a bar.

Interestingly, bars are places in cities all over the world where walls come down. A

conversation, even with a stranger, in a bar reveals more about a place than reams of

considered research and professional presentation. In a bar people have much less to hide than

they do in a boardroom or a contract.

I called the agency and made an appointment with Chang. Chang was a Kyopo, an

overseas Korean from L.A., and possibly the only guy I had been able to identify as someone

who would know what was hip and cool, and give me a straight story to boot. We agreed to

meet after six in the disco in the basement of my hotel. Tired from a week of meetings in a

strange land, my wife was more than happy to stay in the room and have a sleep.

Pharaoh’s discothèque was million dollars of more phantasy than any Korean had ever

seen up to that point and was celebrating it’s inaugural week in the Hilton Hotel. It was a

gaudily garish affair of Sphinx heads and Egyptian motifs that could only bring memories of

Steve Martin singing King Tut on Saturday Night Live in the late 70s. Hilarious. What it
30
wasn’t was Studio 54 or any of the Limelight clubs that dotted the US in the 90s and had

become the epitome of cool. I had no idea what to make of the place. Although married and not

exactly a kid at the time, I had kept a keen eye on youth culture, as was part of my job, and

could tell you that this sort of thing would have only been laughed at in America – but there in

Asia it worked and that was just one more thing I would have to understand.

When Chang arrived we carved ourselves a few seats at the bar and began to get down

to the nitty-gritty as only boys can do. As a Kyopo, Chang was not exactly loved by the Korean

nationals who ran the agency and was regarded much more as a necessary evil. North

American, native English speaking, employees were necessary for international accounts. But

things weren’t all bad for him either. He was the head of our Philip Morris business, well paid

and had a car allowance. Additionally, as Koreans were expected to provide their clients a fair

amount of entertainment, he had a healthy expense account. He told me about previous

managerial shifts at the agency and indicated his happiness with the new arrangement. Chang

and I were going to get along fine.

As the night wore on we collected more and more new friends at the bar – both

foreigners and Koreans who were interested in speaking English, but all men. As opposed to a

bar in a western country, women did not sit at the bar but rather preferred to congregate in

groups at various tables and booths situated around the club. And when it came to dancing one

must remember that this was the first western style disco in Seoul – the girls simply didn’t

know what to do. Oh, they had probably been watching MTV for a year or so but in 1995

Koreans had only been allowed to travel outside their own country since 1985, so most

probably not a one of these ladies had ever seen a disco, let alone danced in one. They were

timid and shy dancers – not trained at all for the cutting of rugs, let alone pulsating, underlit

plexiglass.

Chang, being the thirtysomething single he was, proceeded to strike up conversations

with some of the girls and went off on his regular Friday night routine. I stayed at the bar and

conversed with a young Korean man who told me he was a business owner. Involved in the
31
fashion industry in some capacity, he said his factory was nearby and offered me a tour. This to

me was very interesting. I very much wanted to see what a regular guy did for a living. Here I

was ensconced in a very protected corporate environment all week and was now getting to

meet and interact with someone of true local variety. We exited Pharaoh’s disco and headed for

the parking garage.

All Korean cars were nondescript to me in a way that foreshadowed the relative

sameness of much of the country. The same cars, the same colours, the same suits, the same

apartments – these were the hallmarks of a collectivist society. There is an old Korean proverb

that says, “The nail that sticks up, gets hammered down”. This philosophy would be ingrained

over and over in any great number of ways over time. And I was not quite yet out of the primer

course.

Imagine a factory in anyway you can and what you might come up with is a steel

building on the outskirts of anywhere USA. Imagine one in Seoul, Korea in 1995 and what

you’ll come up with is nothing – because your idea of a factory and theirs were completely

different. In Seoul, Korea a man on the street with a foot-pedaled sewing machine can be a

factory. And what I was about to find was not so out of line with that. Climbing the wobbly

wooden stairs of a falling-apart old structure in Seoul’s famous Nam Dae Mun market district

we were more and more enveloped by the sound of sewing machines as we approached a

sliding steel door. Once inside the din was deafening. Ten older women were busy making

Coach, Channel and Gucci handbags of all shapes and sizes. No actual leather to be found here,

the air was pungent with the smell of freshly cut and stamped vinyl in the cacophony that was

this factory of sorts. I could only imagine if Paloma Picasso were made in a slightly nicer joint.

What sense would that have made?

I don’t recall if I made the inquiry or if the gentlemen suggested that we make our way

to the Oh-Pal-Pal district of Seoul after the factory tour. Oh-Pal-Pal is Korean language for the

numbers 588, with “Oh” translating as the number five and “Pal” meaning eight. 588 is the bus

number one takes to arrive at Korea’s most famous red-light district and maybe, not
32
surprisingly, it really is decorated with red lights, or red neon as it were.

Although the concept and nature of the business were not new to me, the presentation

certainly was. A u-shaped street with police guards on both entrance and exit, this held almost

equal amounts of curiosity and trepidation. It was explained to me that the function of the

police was to make sure the patrons were not overly inebriated or in a fighting mood, like a

sign at an amusement park that says, “You must be this tall to get on this ride”.

We were judged to be tall enough, although there was a fair amount of questioning in

Korean from the police over my presence. While areas like this were common in Seoul what

were less common were foreigners. It was explained to me that foreigners were not always

welcome, not because of any discrimination per se but because of the threat of AIDS. Whether

AIDS entered the country through the American military or through other means will forever

be a mystery but it is known that the disease did not have its beginnings in Korea, so the idea

of guarding against it through foreign import is well founded.

Driving down the small city block was how one’s selection was made. No one walks.

This was a drive through sex mart with all its wares on display behind plate glass windows,

presented on tall stools, and decorated with all the charm of a vintage video game. We circled

the block twice assessing the shops that were *foreigner friendly and marveling at the

seemingly endless selection of attractive ladies. For a man with his wife napping back at a five-

star hotel, this might seem to have been kid-in-a-candy-shop stuff but I don’t recall feeling that

way at all. More like fish in a barrel stuff – much too easy. To me the surreality of it all was the

reality of it all – the kind of thing that throws one’s moral compass into a tailspin. Drive-by

fucking – marshaled by police and brightly lit for all to see, yet still technically illegal. This

was the Korea I had come to see – my little handful of dirt under the rock my ship had been

cast upon.

The price explained was $60 and I had taken care to have removed that amount from

my wallet and stashed the wallet under the seat of the car before entering our chosen shop. I

had no idea what to expect inside but there was no need to take chances.
33
 My girl was just cute as a button and tiny as well. As she glided off her stool to escort

me behind the staged selling area, I gave my money to a substantially sized Korean man in

fatigues crouched next to an automatic rifle propped up against the wall in the anteroom. This

communication could not have been more clear or less titillating. There was to be no bullshit.

We arrived at a very small room with only space for a tiny sink and a little single bed.

The room was decorated in Mickey Mouse and all manner of stuffed animals, not unlike that of

a teenage girl. I was instructed to remove my clothing, all of it, and to wash myself, my private

self, in the small sink with soap and water. The light remained bright as she removed her

clothing and propped herself up, spread eagle, with some cartoon themed pillows against the

headboard and motioned me to come to her. A deftly applied condom proved she was no

stranger to the job and I was immediately encouraged to get down to business. I had never had

sex with a girl this tiny. Her ovations of , “big, big”, were the only English words I recall. And

no, I’m not kidding. If this were just a business, she had perfected the art of customer

satisfaction to a “T”, even if she was overstating. All customers want to be kings.

As the process was scripted to take exactly twenty minutes, I was deposited back to the

front of the shop where I met my Korean friend. A quick smile between the two of us and we

were off. To decide whether the world’s oldest profession is prostitution or advertising may

well be a chicken and egg scenario. Avoiding making that distinction, I prefer an old quote

from Bill Cosby – “Advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on”.

To be in the world’s second oldest profession in a country that had perfected its oldest

to shopping mall efficiency was not going to be an issue for me. It was my wife who would

have the issue.

– W WE –

A meeting the following day with David Miller back at the agency wrapped up our look-see

tour. We were shown a floor plan of a new office in a new building that promised to clean the

place up a bit and I was given assurances that a proper budget for computers would be arrived

at before my return. We bid the Koreans farewell and boarded our plane from Seoul to

34
Chicago. The only thing the two cities seem to have had in common was the bowling – it certainly

wasn’t the sex.

W E L C O M E H O M E D O R I S

Doris Morris and Vivian Caputo were the best of friends – two giddy and gregarious girls

graduating from St. Mary’s High School in Jersey City they had their whole lives ahead of

them. What a better way to spend that time in the early 50s than searching for the perfect men –

and on a train trestle somewhere on the way to Bayone, they could find hundreds of perfect

knights in white suits – hundreds of sailors on their way out to sea.

For Doris and Vivian this was nirvana. Doris Morris, the daughter of a Jersey City bus

driver would flirt with the sailor boys hanging out the windows of their train as it inched its

way toward the base, but only gave her address and number to one: one Raymond Carlson

from Duluth, Minnesota – a tall and quiet man with a future in electronics yet to be found.

Over the next few years they would send a shoebox worth of letters to each other, go

roller-skating during his time ashore and build a romance that would lead to marriage as the

Korean war came to a close.

Over the next few years Ray finished technical college as an electrical engineer and

they shared a desire to start a family. Would medical science have seen them to a different

outcome in more modern times? That’s hard to say but for Ray and Doris a natural born child

was not in the cards. After a series of foster children to adapt to the idea of kids, they were

given custody of one Shawn Michael in 1957, just nine months after his birth in New York

City. Judging from a building he saw once in his dreams, it would have seemed he was

destined to be a sailor too – or at the very least, the son of another one.

– WWE –

Vernochen’s Junction. I am absolutely sure the place was called that. But I can’t for the life of

me find it on the Internet today. I remember it so because it had and old locomotive and

35
wooden sidewalks – a kind of Wild West roadside attraction that was Doris Carlson’s first

glimpse of the state of Illinois in 1959 – and it was not the kind of place that would make a

Jersey girl very happy – in fact, it made her cry. Think Petticoat Junction.

The new two-toned 57 Chevy Impala, still driving back and forth down a New Jersey

suburban street in the 8mm film of Ray’s, must have cut quite a swath across Pennsylvania,

through Ohio, Indiana and eventually Illinois – the goldfish bowl sloshing merrily on the

floorboards of the passenger side until the goldfish finally gave up the ghost. What an optimist

Doris must have been to think a goldfish, a Jersey girl could get along in this Wild Midwest

they were about to find. The three year-old kid in the backseat was another story.

But Moline, Illinois was to turn out to be ever so slightly better, as a booming blue-

collar manufacturer of farm equipment on the Mississippi River – the home of JI Case,

International Harvester and the John Deere Company, as well as Ray’s new firm, the

Montgomery Elevator Company: a maker of people elevators and not the grain variety. It

certainly could have looked no worse than Jersey City in 1959, albeit quite a bit smaller.

– WWE –

1959 also saw the United States grow from 48 to 50 with the additions of Alaska and Hawaii,

while the Marx Brothers aired their final episode on national TV. The music died when a plane

carrying Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper crashed in Iowa, just a few hundred

miles from Moline, Illinois but was born again as The Grammys gave their first awards and

Motown Records inhaled to life in Detroit. Born also were the Barbie Doll, The Twilight Zone,

the US recognized government of Fidel Castro in Cuba and Frank Lloyd Wright’s controversial

Guggenheim museum in New York. Fantasy and reality were definitely going their separate

ways.

– WWE –

36
I would be asked in Korea much later, how it felt to be a foreigner in a strange land and my

response was simply this: When you’re adopted and have traveled by car from Jersey to Illinois

at the age of three, you’re already a foreigner – doing it one more time was no big deal.

S O W H A T E X A C T L Y I S A “ F O R E I G N E R ” ?

Defined by Webster’s a foreigner is, 1: a person from or owing allegiance to a foreign country

or, 2: one not native to a place or community. A S T R A N G E R .

Researching the word “stranger” brings up a more interesting set of descriptions:

1a: of, relating to, or characteristic of another country : F OREIGN b : not native to or naturally

belonging in a place : of external origin, kind, or character

2a: not before known, heard, or seen : U N FA M I L I A R b : exciting wonder or awe :

E X T R A O R D I N A RY

3a: discouraging familiarities : R E S E RV E D , D I S TA N T b : I L L AT E A S E

4: UNACCUSTOMED 2 <she was strange to his ways>

5: having the quantum characteristic of strangeness <strange quark> <strange particle>

synonyms: S T R A N G E , S I N G U L A R , U N I Q U E , P E C U L I A R , E C C E N T R I C , E R R AT I C , O D D , Q U E E R ,

Q U A I N T , O U T L A N D I S H , meaning departing from what is ordinary, usual, or to be expected.5

The Korean dictionary defines foreigner as such:

1: 외국인, 외인, 이방인; 《구어》 타관 사람, 침입자.

F O R E I G N E R 언어·풍속·습관 따위의 차이를 강조하는 말. A L I E N 거주하는 나라와는 다른

국적을 가지고 있으면서 모국에의 충성을 맹세함을 강조하는 말. S T R A N G E R 언어·습관

에 아직 익숙하지 않음을 강조하는 말.

2: 외국의 산물, 외국 제품, 외래품; 외래 동[식]물.

5
Merriam Webster, USA
37
 3: 〈해사〉 외국선(船).

4: (~s) 〈증권〉 외국 증권.

do a foreigner 《속어》 (취업자·실업 수당 수급자가) 멋대로 부업을 하다.6

One look at all those descriptions and it’s easy to tell why people from other countries

can be misperceived or misunderstood. Strange, outlandish, eccentric and odd - queer, erratic,

and peculiar – these are certainly not the words we want to describe the person who’s coming

in to manage your company. So maybe there’s a basic problem in using the word foreigner to

describe people from other countries – but in Korea you will be a foreigner, like it or not.

Many of my expatriate friends have experienced the initial shock of being labeled

foreigner and they tend not to like it, but Koreans, being from a homogeneous country with a

Confucian value system, where everyone has a place in the hierarchy of the group, don’t see

anything wrong with it. To Koreans it simply means that that person is not part of the group.

And that is exactly the point. The first thing one needs to learn in moving from a

western to an eastern culture is not who you are, but who you are not.

C O N F U C I A N = C O N F U S I O N

For a westerner, understanding the basics of Confucian philosophy is a

near requirement for getting anything done at all in Eastern environs. A

reading of Riding the Waves of Culture by Fons Trompenars and

Charles Hampden-Turner7 is a good start for anyone embarking on an

expat career but focuses on the global and not specifically Asian

cultural differences. For much of Asia one need look no further than Confucius (551 BCE –

479 BCE). Confucius was a social philosopher whose teachings deeply influenced Chinese,

6
YBM Si-Sa, Korea
7
Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 2 edition (December 1, 1997) Language: English. ISBN-10: 0786311258
38
Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese thought throughout their respective histories. To be clear,

Confucianism is a philosophy and not a religion or political delineation. It is a philosophy that

is primarily concerned with social order and correctness. It is not, however, a caste system,

since it does not lock people into an occupation at birth but more an idea of what occupations

are important to society and how they should be regarded.

1. Shi were the first order of society. This classification includes scholars, government
administrators and religious leaders. Their job is to coordinate projects, lead people, keep
records and transmit knowledge, but more importantly to keep the three pillars of Confucian
philosophy intact: Filial piety, respect for one’s parents and ancestors. Humaneness, care and
concern for other humans and Ritual Consciousness, the art of doing things according to
prescribed tradition in the deepest sense.

2. Nong were the farmers. Confucianism placed a great value on the production of food,
because "mei you nongren, mei you chi de dongxi", "No one to farm? Nothing to eat." This can
be seen today in Korea’s farm subsidies that pay up to eight times the market rate to rice
farmers, even though the country has dramatically shifted to an economy based on ships, steel,
cars and electronics, and imports more rice than they can grow themselves.
3. Gong translates as "work", although the meaning is closer to "craft". The gongren,
the workers, produced all the tools and implements other people needed to do their jobs. But
when it came down to it, a bowl of rice was more important than a hammer, so craftspeople
were not as highly regarded as farmers.
4. Shang were business people and merchants. Merchants were considered to be only
one step above the lowest of society because they didn’t actually make anything, but they had
money, which gave them power and allowed their children to study to become scholars.

What’s even more interesting though, is who was left off the list: entertainers, creative
people, even soldiers didn’t make the cut. In ancient China, soldiers were considered classless,
an embarrassment, a sign of weakness – quite different from Western social orders – and of
course Westerners. To understand this one must also understand that the cultures that aspired to
Confucian ideals were homogeneous ones, almost 100% comprised of their own people. Oh,
you will certainly find pockets of Chinese in Vietnam and Koreans in China and Japan and
Japanese elsewhere in Asia, but these people could at least be counted upon to uphold
Confucian ideals, if not encouraged to inter-marry, even to this day.
A white man on a ship, horse or an airplane is not expected to be an apostle of these
39
beliefs and therefore remains outside the group, dictated by ancient social order.
The other aspect of Confucian logic that confounds many newcomers is the concept of
the five primary relationships. These relationships find themselves transpired into the powerful
Asian conglomerates we see today such as Samsung, Sony and virtually all Asian companies.
They can best be summed up under what we Westerners understand as The Golden Rule:

“Do unto others as you would have done unto you” 8 – the concept of reciprocity.

But the Confucian twist on this universally admired virtue is its grounding in the codes
of filial piety and the family – Parent and child, minister and ruler, husband and wife, older
and younger brother and finally, friend and friend are the five primary relationships and the
order in which their importance carries into daily life.
Notice that three are family based and all but the last indicate a differentiated status, the
second person is always bound to the first – and although employer/employee is not
specifically spelled out, it commonly translates as parent/child in a business environment – yet
another close familial association that a foreigner will rarely be invited to join.
Since the ancient Analects of Confucius, the concepts of Neo-Confucianism and New
Confucianism have been bandied about by generations of academics and neo-philosophers but
suffice to say that dissecting those derivations would be complete bullshit and a waste of time
to a foreign businessperson.
What I was about to learn very quickly was that, short of marriage, and years of
servitude to earn familial acceptance, the foreigner will forever remain a foreigner, and outside
the social order, in all Confucian societies. This brings confusion to many, but the faster
learned, the better.
– WWE –

Today the absence of what we call, knowledge industries or information technologies, leaves a
huge gap in the old Confucian ideal. Obedience to tradition and collectivism had worked very
well for countries to industrialize quickly, as Japan and South Korea did in the 60s and 70s, but
the information and service industries that were beginning to drive these economies required
skills very different from Confucian tradition: skills like flexibility, style, entrepreneurship and
imagination.
I was going in at a pivotal point – the apex of the transition from industrialization to the
information age – and it was my job to bring these new schools of thought into a quickly
developing economy, but not a single person at my company, even in the US, knew that. They
8
Sources of Chinese Tradition, Wm, Theodore de Bary, ed (New York, Columbia University Press, 1960), Analects XV:23
40
were still busy with hammers and chisels, cutting budgets.

S O W H A T K I N D O F F O R E I G N E R W A S I T O B E ?

To illustrate just how much the Internet has impacted our lives in just the past few years,

understand that figures are not available on foreign immigration to Korea from 1995. Oh, I’m

sure they exist somewhere, but just not in any English accessible database. Rather, let’s take a

look at figures from around 2002. Although the numbers may have changed since 95, I suspect

the ratios are still the same and should give a good idea what I was getting into as far as

culture.

According to the Korean Ministry of Justice statistics: “The number of foreigners in

Korea surpassed 500,000 in fall 2000, including 154,000 Chinese; 87,000 US; 40,000

Japanese; and 25,000 Taiwanese. The Justice Ministry reported there were 172,501 illegal

foreigners in Korea in 2000, up from 135,300 in 1999; half were Chinese, followed by eight

percent Bangladeshi, seven percent Mongolian, and seven percent each Filipino and Thai.”9

Unless you were an illegal, or Chinese or Japanese, chances are that you would have

been an American, Canadian or European. In 2000, the Justice ministry didn’t report specific

figures for Canadians or Europeans, but that is presumably because they didn’t reside in Korea

in numbers significant enough to report.

I was once asked by a Korean how it felt to be living in “America’s backyard”? I found

that as strange an expression then, as I do today, but there was a certain amount of truth to it.

Compared to the rest of the world, where British and other multinationals held sway, and still

do, over most international business, Korea was a bit of an American oasis – owing mostly to

the presence of 45,000 soldiers and military contractors – like the green toy soldiers I played

with in my own backyard as a child, only full-size.

That left 37,000 Americans in other businesses, legally allowed to work in Korea. If
9
© 2003, Korea Herald
41
 there were roughly 550,000 guest workers in Korea, that would have been 1.2% of the entire

population of 47 million, but since 172,000 of those were considered illegal let’s just say

that .93% of the foreign working population was legal. Of that, only .08% would be American,

less than 1/10th of 1%.

If you were looking for someone that was “one in a million” in Korea, 47 Koreans

would have fit that bill; however, to have been an American in the Korean population, one

would have been “one in 370 billion”. A minority for sure. A Brit, Canadian or other Westerner

would have been even more rare.

In 2003 the American Chamber of Commerce in Korea listed just over 2000 members

and the EU Chamber counted around 1000. These people were higher-level management sorts

and diplomats, but that’s only 3000 out of more than half a million foreign nationals. An

unofficial count, because nothing official was reported, of foreign business personnel in Korea

estimated that fewer than 50,000 business people

Foreign Population in Korea 2002
resided in Korea, not counting those involved in
Illegal

Chinese education, with the website EFL-LAW.com

American

estimating that only 5000 – 8000 teachers were

Other

Japanese
in the country at the time. All told, we were

Taiwanese
hovering at just less than 60 thousand total
0

00

00

00
0

0
00
0

00

00

00

00

foreign residents in management, government or

,00

,00

0,0

0,0

0,0
,0

,0

0,

0,

0,
60
20

40

80

10

14

18
12

16

20

education. A very small number indeed but a powerful number as well. Because virtually all of

these people held college degrees and if not already in the top ranks of an organization, were

on the path to be there in the not so distant future. Even people who initially came to Korea to

teach English often ended up in corporate positions due to their Korean experience.

In regard to the expatriates living in Korea, I was once asked by a Korean colleague,

“We understand that the British send their best and brightest, who do the Americans send?”
42
 Knowing that the British civil service had instilled a sense of pride and adventure in

their citizens since colonial times and that America likes to keep its best and brightest at home,

I replied, “Well, I suspect we send our misunderstood”.

A self-deprecating comment for sure, but not totally off the mark. I had no idea why I

had been chosen for the job, and once in Asia was to find only one other American within our

18 offices in the region, and be the only US passport holder in the ad business in Korea.

– WWE –

The phrase “The sun never sets on the British Empire” 10 refers to the extent of Britain’s

colonial land holdings during the Age of Imperialism. At its height in the 1930s, the British

Empire spanned nearly a third of the world’s land including properties in Asia, Latin America,

the Middle East, Australia and Africa.

During this colonial period Britons sent civil servants to virtually every corner of the

globe and gave them ample incentive to do so. To this day a British citizen does not pay any

tax in England if he or she does not live in England – therefore, working in another country,

especially one with a lower tax rate, can be financially very rewarding. Conversely, America

now gleefully participates in double taxation – exactly what we revolted against the British for

– with every dollar over $80,000 per year being taxed by both your host country and the good

old US of A. Not exactly an incentive to work overseas.

Not all British

possessions are
listed in the image,
only representative
ones for each of the
24 time zones of
the Earth

10
Under the pseudonym Christopher North, writer John Wilson composed a serious of articles for a column called “Noctes

Ambrosianae” (1822-35) for Blackwood’s Magazine. In one article, he wrote, “His Majesty’s dominions, on which the sun never
sets.” Changed to the more common, “the sun never sets on the British Empire ” by an anonymous student in the 1930’s.

43
 Today there are over 60 million people living in Great Britain 11 and nearly 47 million

hold a valid passport, 12 about 78% of the entire country.

Comparatively, only 21% of Americans hold a valid passport.13 Consider also that

America has never been a colonial power and controls very little around the globe in terms of

territories save for Guam, American Samoa, The Marrianas, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

Now considering that there are more than 280 million people in America today, that still

adds up to more than 60 million with a passport, but I use this great discrepancy in passport

percentage numbers between the UK and the US to make a very clear point: Britons are much

more inclined to globetrotting than are Americans and they do so with great success.

To see how much you know about Americans and their knowledge of foreign countries

decide whether the following statement is true or false?

TRUE OR FALSE?
“With most international American companies running their overseas operations from the US, only 2
weeks holiday per year for the average American executive, and geography no longer a required subject
in schools, this goes a long way towards explaining why international understanding is not one of the US
business professional's stronger suits.”
True. Despite 3 weeks' holiday per year for more senior managers, but the absence of the concept of a “Gap Year” it is
difficult to explore the world with such limited down time.

Because America is a culture full of many ethnic groups, Asians sometimes misperceive that

we know a lot about other cultures when in truth, almost the exact opposite is true. America,

not unlike Korea, is essentially an island of one landmass save for Alaska and Hawaii. Even

though Canada lies to the north and Mexico to the south the United States is almost completely

isolated from both of those countries. Most Americans rarely travel to Canada and to Mexico

only for beach style holidays in places like Cancun or Puerto Vajarta. A European backpack trip

during university or a tour in one of the armed services may be all the very few traveling

Americans see of other countries.

11
British Council © 2003. The United Kingdom's international organisation for educational opportunities and cultural relations.
Registered in England as a charity.
12
April 2002, The British Parliament. www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld199900/
13
2002, Jaffe Associates.com. A wonderful site containing little known tidbits about American business culture
44
 – WWE –

Short of electing Ron Paul, the dark-horse populist candidate for president in 2008, it’s

doubtful that America’s taste in candidates will ever veer towards people of my background –

you know, red-light visiting, expatriate, advertising sorts, (Did I mention I’ve also smoked

marijuana more than once?), but should I ever venture a run, there’s one plank I would insist on

in my platform: That every American of Selective Service age be required to spend at least two

years abroad in either a military, or humanitarian capacity – or, at the very least, certainly

those accepted to university – our future leaders.

I know, I hear a few million asses being laughed off right now. “What the hell is he

thinking?”, you’re thinking. And I am required, not by any law, but by sheer sense of national

duty, to tell you what I’m thinking. I’m thinking that America has spent far too much national

capital on letting our military be our international face and not near enough letting our real

faces be our face. It’s time to get out of the house and take a walk around the globe.

Right now we’re a terribly misunderstood super-power with almost no national plan for

growing good will in a world where the European Union has already surpassed us in market

size and Asia looms as the world’s next greatest and most profitable middle class.

Too much politics for you? Well, that can wait. All I can tell you right now is that the

world I was about to find in Korea was like a good cold slap in the face to this American and I

couldn’t wait to get back to Chicago to tell the big boys about it.

A M I D - W I F E C R I S I S

45
The signs of spring in Chicago are like spirits waking from the dead. Defiant little blades of

grass poking up from snow patches still left under trees and behind northern walls. The dump

trucks and backhoes replacing the sandy beaches on Lake Michigan that every winter washes

away, ivy growing green again on the brick outfield walls of Wrigley Field. There’s nothing

subtle about it.

One of the joys of landing at O’Hare was the sweep over the Gold Coast skyline as we

circled back for the landing approach. Nancy and I could see our apartment building from that

vantage point – not exactly Hong Kong but after a week of way too curious exotica, a real tonic

for chopstick weary hands, language twisted tongues and pollution burned eyes. Say what you

want about smog in America – you haven’t seen shit until you’ve been to Asia.

Silence rode with us home in the cab from the airport, followed us past the doorman, up

the elevator and into apartment 802 at the Belden Stratford, a small but charmingly appointed

one bedroom on the west side of the building. One of the ways we were able to afford living on

one of the tone-iest streets in the city was to have had the good sense to have rented on the

back of a building facing Lake Michigan. As I remember a real estate agent saying to me upon

my arrival in 1989, “The lake looks great during the day but it’s a black hole at night, so since

you’re always working in the daytime, why pay for a lake view?” Damn good advice, I

thought.

Things were now a bona-fide fucking mess. The real issues far dwarfed a night in Oh

Pal Pal. The real issues were deep, complicated and dividing on a multiplicity of fronts – mine,

ours, Nancy’s, the Company’s and the Korean’s. These issues joined silence and climbed into

bed with my wife and I that night for a cold summer’s nap.

– WWE –

Although married ten years, Nancy and I had known each other for almost eighteen by

46
then. We had both graduated from Southern Illinois University in the same program with the

same degree in Graphic Design and started our professional careers in that same year – 1979.

I had moved to Dallas, Texas and she had gone to work for a small television station in

Missouri, but we kept in touch through a Christmas card annually. After three years our careers

had taken on very different trajectories. I had worked through two entry level positions at

inconsequential companies and found myself at what ADWEEK Magazine had named as “One

of the Top Ten Creative Agencies in the United States”, The Richards Group, in Dallas. People

used to wonder how I was able to have done that and all I can tell you is that I was driven –

driven to do the best work I possibly could and I worked my ass off at it. I received my first

award from the New York Art Directors Club that year and had sent a copy to my mom to show

her that her son had finally made it in New York – from Dallas of all places.

Nancy was on a different track. She had taken a job not far from our university town at

a country TV station and was their graphic designer, the person who decides what graphic to

use when you’re reporting cow epidemics or tornado damage. Her work was as good as it

could have been expected to be, considering what she had to work with. Very different worlds

we had.

One day I was called by the head of our university design department and asked if I

could make it back to Southern Illinois to teach for a few weeks. A professor had taken ill and

the school needed to finish a spring course with substitute instructors. I arranged a leave of

absence from Richards and was soon on my way back to my alma mater, but this time as the

most accomplished graduate of our class – a budding rock star in the world of advertising and

design. What this meant of course, aside from the obvious buzz of being a prof instead of a

student at a very young age, was that I would be able to see my college sweetheart once again,

and I had become more single than I wanted to be. It was high time to get hitched, as they say

in Texas.

47
 The two of us had begun as lovers in our Junior year but the vagaries of college dating

had taken us in different directions with different people through graduation. My return was

much more of a professional statement than it was a romantic reunion but, truth be told, I was

still smitten with her. Through a couple of girlfriends, after our romance, I had always held

onto her image as “the one” and this trip would help me answer the question of whether or not

that was to become the case. Nancy was and remains in my memory as quietly striking,

unselfconsciously beautiful, graceful, honest and yet, conflicted. Conflicted with the

conservative manor she had adopted and her attraction to rogues and rock stars like I was in the

day. And I knew I was a rock star, going back to impress my old college love with the fact that

I was now successful and on my way to a sterling career. Who knows what she saw coming.

That cute little fraternity boy was now a pro.

I finished my short stint at the University, courted her throughout, and ended the trip

with an invitation for her to visit Dallas and consider moving. She took me up on that and

arrived in Dallas a few months later. She had one interview at ten o’clock in the morning on a

Monday at Channel 8 in Dallas and called me before noon to say that she had been offered the

job. And that was it. From the 82nd market in the United States to the 8th , all in the course of a

few hours. She moved a month later into her own apartment, not far from mine, and the

romance was on again. Big-time.

I proposed in six months and we were married the following year. Over the next ten

years we would move from Dallas to Washington DC and from there to Chicago, not all

without incident, but by 95 we seemed a well seasoned couple who had handled a variety of

“DINK” (Double Income No Kids) transitions and fashioned a good working and romantic

partnership. What the Leo Burnett Company was about to throw us was certainly complicated,

but not something I didn’t think we could handle. We were still in love and love would conquer

all. That’s the kind of belief one needs when things get complicated.

48
 – WWE –

A workday arrived too soon and I kissed Nancy goodbye on my way to the office. I

promised her I would get all the details down on the transfer and that her needs would be

attended to as well as mine. If these people wanted to get us to Korea they were going to have

to make it very attractive both financially and professionally for the two of us. The company

was not in the best negotiating position and I suspect they knew that. What seems comical now,

in terms of their negotiating strategy was just positively baffling at the time. At any number of

junctures throughout meetings with disassociated people about my new position I had to pinch

myself and ask, “Did that person just say what I thought they said?” Trouble was, they had said

exactly what I had thought they said. You ask yourself, “What were they thinking?”, and the

answer was that, they weren’t thinking.

Michael Conrad was not in the office when I returned. He was off on another world

junket to prod the fortunes of the agency, which, as it turned out, would be his MO throughout

my tenure in Korea. I was to see Michael again only once or twice but never for a conversation

of any magnitude or substance. It had been explained to me that he was not part of the

management chain for me, but only a source of guidance and inspiration.

I would start my search for the management chain in the office of one Bud Ujhelyi, the

business manager for Creative employees. Fair or not, Bud was commonly known as the

hatchet man. He was the assistant to the CEO and never seen in meetings of any sort until there

were heads to be chopped. People routinely ran from ringing telephones when the keypad

display featured his extension. Everyone knew Bud’s extension. It was like “666”, although

I’m sure it was not that exactly. But on that day, I already knew the reason for the call and it

was clear that I was not on the chopping block, so a visit to Bud’s office was more like a

chance to impress the grim reaper and stay off death row for awhile longer.

Death row, unfortunately, had become a common term at Burnett in the early/mid

49
nineties – starting in 1993 with an unprecedented layoff of more than 2% of its US employees

in the mid-staff ranks. The company followed that performance in 94 with other purgings,

bringing the total to more than 10% over two years. Hell, we were Agency of the Year just a

few years previous. What was happening? This was gut-wrenching stuff for a company that

had prided itself on providing lifetime employment to loyal staffers and had earned a perennial

spot on the “100 Best Companies to Work For in America” list for as long as the list had

existed. For two years gallows humour had become the water cooler talk of the day.

Lunchtimes would pass and I would return to my floor to see yet another pile of boxes

outside the offices of people I only knew in passing. One day, while on a trip around the floor

for a conversation, I passed an abandoned office with a darkly rendered sample of then

contemporary corporate graffiti. An art director, I assume, had taken the liberty of white taping,

police style, the outline of a dead body on a desktop amidst the open cabinets and ransacked

remains of the room. The sun-setting elongated shadows just made it all that more poignant.

Another spring day saw me crossing one of the mechanical bridges that span the

winding Chicago river in front of the Burnett building. I stopped midway to witness the

Chicago Fire Department retrieving something from the river. As I looked over the railing,

what I thought I saw was a statue in a plastic bag, being hauled onto the deck of the fire tug. “A

statue in a bag?”, I thought. Fuck, statues don’t come in bags. Jeezuz, this was a body. “Yeah,

they come popping up in the springtime”, said a fellow staffer next to me. “Maybe it’s one of

ours”, he added.

I was one of the lucky ones. I had work that was winning awards and was generally

regarded as one of the edgier thinkers on staff. My stuff got the agency positive press and was

good for new business. One of my campaigns was used as a case study at Northwestern’s

Kellogg school of management for marketing MBAs.

Bud Ujhelyi greeted me with a warm smile and a handshake. “Siddown, David” , he
50
said, “Whadja think of Korea?”

“Interesting”, I responded. We proceeded to talk about the job and covered a wide

breadth. Michael Conrad had told me that the contract was only a two year duration but that he

felt the job would take much longer – three or four by his estimation. Bud concurred. The

television product from the Seoul office was about a notch above your average wedding video

but not much better. This wasn’t a fine-tuning job. It was a complete overhaul.

Bud then proceeded to close all the other available doors I thought might be open. He

basically said there was no work for me in Chicago. Lay-offs restructuring and the like had

disbanded some of my former groups and things had been smelling like fish at 35 West Wacker

for quite some time. At mid-management level it’s virtually impossible to see what the

problems really are in a large privately held corporation. You don’t get to see any

comprehensive reports or big numbers. There is no annual report. You’re at the mercy of

whatever you are told by whoever is directly above you – and you can’t believe any of the shit

they feed you at the annual meeting. That’s a corporate cheerleading exercise. But one number

from the annual meeting stuck in my head: with global billings of around 12 billion, more than

half of that was now being sourced from our overseas affiliates. And that number had been

growing steadily for years. If things in the states were waning and overseas markets were

growing, this could be a win/win for both of us.

One of my big questions of course was my management reporting structure. It was

explained that three people would be in charge of my evaluation and task delivery. A guy

named Rob Nolan in Chicago, Jeff Fergus in Hong Kong and Hugh Kwon in Korea – a tripod

of superiors spread halfway around the globe. Rob was a good guy and had been a bit of a

godfather to me at the company but he had absolutely no part in international management.

Confounding. Fergus was an unknown and Hugh Kwon in Korea was about to be out of his

league. Also explained was the fact that I would remain an employee of the Chicago office

51
with an “assignment” to Korea. I would be paid by the home office to a Chicago bank account,

twice a month, but the Seoul office would reimburse my monthly salary back to Chicago with

yearly bonus, profit sharing and insurance remaining in Chicago’s hands. Structurally it was a

good deal aside from the management triangle. It guaranteed that I would still have a job with

corporate after Korea was finished.

Having made it abundantly clear that my future lay in Korea, Bud gave me another

warm handshake and directed me to others involved in the process – a man named Don

Richards, who I had no idea what his job was, and the in-house attorney who would give me

the contract.

Don Richards was an abundantly nice man – a handsome 50ish black man, well

educated, and odd as hell in what continues to be white man’s business. The advertising

business as a whole is not particularly known for being an equal opportunity employer and

while maybe more diversified now, certainly was not yet in 1995. At Burnett the mailroom was

full of black guys but you could die of thirst looking for people of colour on the way up the

corporate ladder. But Don was on the floor with all the board members and that spoke volumes.

His job, as I recall, was just to spin the ball a bit. He knew nothing of the Korea office and

stuck to selling the “concept” of our international division. His pitch was well received. Here, I

thought was an opportunity to add “international” to my resume, a term that was receiving

increasing importance in an ever-shrinking US market and have a clear and supported role in

the turnaround of one of our company’s true ugly ducklings.

The attorney was a whole other story. A primpish North-side Chicago gal she had all

the charm of a sorority girl on spring break. I honestly don’t recall her name but her pitch was

nothing short of glowing – glowing in the manor of stinking shit about things she didn’t know

fuck all about. Oh, the expat life as she recounted it. Sunsets on the Champs-Élysées. Wines at

quaint corner cafes and an exotic circle of European friends pervaded her life in Paris with her

52
husband, also an attorney with an international law firm. I can still smell the champagne

soaked carpet of her description as it was being rolled up after the American Chamber of

Commerce Ball on the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower. I had been to Paris in 1990 and

while much more of a backpacker than an executive at the time, certainly knew a few of the

finer moments of that great city. I had stayed in the shadows of Tour Eiffel and busied my trip

with cooking school, trips to the Louvre, Musée Rodin and Musée d'Orsay. My father used to

say that I had “champagne taste” on a “beer budget” but my budget had come a long way from

college and I had the wife to prove it.

“Have you ever been to Korea?”, I asked the attorney. “Hong Kong?”, “Anywhere in

Asia at all?” Her “no’s” were just sheepish in an unknowledgeable sort of way.

“Honey”, I recall thinking, “Seoul, Korea ain’t no fucking Parée!”

Hell, she wouldn’t have understood it if I had said it in exactly that way so I tried my

best to describe to her just how different from Paris it really was, but I knew all my counter-

claims were falling on deaf ears. Her memory of Paris truly was blinding.

Her first point on presentation of the “contract” was that it was not to be considered a

contract at all. Rather it was entitled a “work agreement”, the legal parlance being that it could

not be held to the same legal standards as an actual contract – meaning that they could fuck

around at will with doing certain things and not doing others as specified, and that I couldn’t

hold them to any of it, including duration. It was merely a spelling out of the specifics of pay

and anticipated timings of things. Pay was subject to equalization of currencies between the

two countries and that was beneficial to me, to the tune of about 30% on at least the money we

elected to keep in the United States. Tax equalization was another perceived benefit, but I was

about to learn that that particular “benefit” was much more beneficial to them that it was to me.

The fuzziest part of the whole thing came in the form of housing and transportation being

communicated and compensated as “comparable” to our current standard of living in the

53
United States. No figures were mentioned nor projected, and I didn’t have any idea what that

stuff should cost – not yet anyway.

The more she explained the specifics of the agreement the more confused I became.

Initially I thought it was machine-gunned full of holes but needed to talk with my attorney

before I could get a real grip on what I was sitting on.

Tell people you’re being transferred to Korea and “Cool!” or “Congratulations!” aren’t

exactly the first words out of their mouths. My most balanced and knowledgeable confidant on

the negotiation would turn out to be my financial planner and stockbroker, Dominick.

Dominick and I had worked together since 1990 and he had made us a lot of money. His advice

was always sound and conservative but with a clear understanding of my profession and goals

and passions. We bought AOL on its IPO and he was open to many of the small tech and odd

penny stocks I learned of through my work with Nintendo and Sony. The rest of the day would

be spent with my attorney and on the phone with Dominick to deliver sketches of the giant

squid we were dealing with. So far, from Michael Conrad in the beginning, through the trip and

back to the goofy attorney girl, there had been eight people involved in the recruitment

exercise. Was this an elaborate “divide and conquer” strategy or were they just truly fucked up?

Nancy would be my most trusted and involved confidant of the whole deal. It was now

time to go home and tell her what we had. Christ – I was about to become the ninth person in a

selling deal that made a car dealer’s triple-team strategy look positively tame.

– WWE –

What was in the agreement, not contract, was a tangled mess for a simply raised middle-class

girl from Southern Illinois, but she was no dummy. Nancy had grown up the second daughter

of a university professor and his wife, the head nurse at the university health service, but that

simplicity and grounding in academia wouldn’t help mask what was obviously not in the

54
agreement. There was nothing in it for her. Not a goddamn thing. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

Period.

So I didn’t even try to pitch it to her. After dinner our pastime in Chicago was to take a

few mile walk along the lake. Lincoln Park was positively charming from the formal gardens

outside the arboretum to the little lake above Fullerton and on through the pedestrian underpass

of Lakeshore Drive towards the public golf course on the banks of Lake Michigan above

Diversey. It was a healthy walk and picturesque to boot.

This was our table for discussion. One of the things Nancy had seen to on our look-see

tour was to look and see if there was any work for her. She had met with representatives of

both Hill & Knowlton and Burson Marsteller, the world’s two largest public relations firms.

The answer to her question was unquestionably “no”. Females were not in any sort of demand

in Korea, especially white, blond, sunglass wearing, graphic designers with no language skills

at all. She had been told this in no uncertain terms by those with whom she had met.

And so the question of what she would do raised its ugly head. “Boo!”

In all fairness to her, she had already followed me around the United States and I can’t

say that her career was always the benefactor of that. By this point in our respective positions, I

was making nearly four times her salary and was always the stable job in the family. After the

TV station in Dallas she worked at a series of less than satisfying studios and freelance gigs.

The kind of success I was enjoying was certainly eluding her, but then again, she never really

wanted to do what I was doing – jetting all over making TV commercials and dealing with

almost always high-pressure situations. She was more than comfortable staying on the purely

two-dimensional visual side of things and staying out of anything that smelled even remotely

political. But somewhere, and I believe this as a fact, there was something inside of her that

said, “This just isn’t fair”. Part professional, part personal and probably part latent 70s feminist,

she had an older sister, who enjoyed almost a diametrically opposite relationship with her
55
husband – her sister being a publicly successful and awarded state teacher of the year – and a

mind that questioned why Nancy put in the same kind of hours as David but got different

results.

Being Mrs. Me could not have been as easy job but it wasn’t an altogether bad one

either. My efforts were paying for a very nice apartment in Chicago, a lake house to come in

Michigan and now an outpost in Korea. Our domestic financial agreement was that we split the

rent in Chicago but the Michigan house, car and all furnishings, insurances, utilities, meals and

investments came out of my paycheck. Her paycheck was then left for Bloomingdale’s trips

and investments of her own. Basically, financially, she could have whatever she wanted. It

really was not a bad gig – but that was when she could work as she pleased.

The house and car parts of the agreement for Korea were just going to need to wait until

I got back over there and began to work in earnest, but Nancy’s part of the deal needed to be

solved right there in Chicago. She and I agreed that we would make that the crux of our

counter-offer to the company and if we couldn’t work out a mutually acceptable deal, that I

wouldn’t be interested. The gamble there was that I could have soon been out of a job.

But it was a well-placed bet. The company didn’t have a back-up plan. I had at least

taken the trip, no one else had. I was their man.

The jogging path along Lake Michigan had a series of exercise stations for sit-ups,

shin-ups and stretches of many varieties. I worked each one doubly hard on that particular day.

I needed to be in fighting form for my next round with the eight blocking dummies that

awaited my return to the Leo Burnett Company the next day. What fun I was having. While

bodies were being thrown from the 50 storey headquarters down on West Wacker Drive I was

in the catbird seat. Honestly, in the advertising business, it just didn’t get any better, or more

surreal than this. I was, to use a McDonald’s slogan yet to be written, “Lovin it!”. Or, to quote

Hunter S. Thompson, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
56
 – WWE –

The second meeting with Bud Ujhelyi was reasonably cooler than the first.

“So all’s good with the contract, Dave?”, he asked.

“Well, not exactly Bud”, I responded. “There’s quite a few things – ”

“Nah, generally Dave, generally – ”

“Generally Bud? Generally, I don’t think you want to hire a guy who would sign a contract like

this – I mean – ”

“What’s wrong?”

“ – Bud, if I brought a contract like this back from a client for us to sign, you’d shoot me. We’d

all get screwed.”

“Ok, point taken. So what’s the biggest issue?”, he asks.

“My wife. The big issue is my wife. There’s nothing for her. She can’t work in Korea

and you’re asking that she give up her job here. I mean, it’s gonna cost us forty grand a year

and I end up with a very unhappy wife in a very strange land with no friends, Bud – it’s a huge

issue. Huge.”

Silence. He looks at his desk for a moment, thinking.

“David, I suppose we could work out something where she works for us”, he offers.

“Bud. Do you want your wife workin’ right there”, I said as I pointed out the door to his

secretary’s station. Nancy working for us meant that I would be her boss.

“No.” A quick moment. “No, I don’t suppose I do”, he responded.

57
 A few papers shuffled and Bud regained his footing. “David”, he says. “This is a

common issue in international assignments, so the company has put together a program. It’s

called the Spousal Career Readjustment Program.”

I listened as Bud explained the details of the “program” talking about her options to go

back to school, or have children and well – there actually were no other options after that.

Korea was higher than the Great Wall of China of China when it came to women working and

even higher still when one considered her career.

“How much”. I asked. “How much will the company give her?”

“25 grand, Dave – twenty five grand”

“25 grand, Bud?” – “You want me to go home and tell my wife we’re buying her career out” –

15 years of work – “for twenty five grand?”

“Shit, Bud. You go home and sell that one. Go ahead.” I hung my head and rocked it back and

forth a few times.

We tabled that point for then and went on to the others. Neither of us could do a number

on house and car and it seemed the only reasonable thing that they needed to wait until I was

on the ground. A few other points covered and a bit of ground gained until I arrived at

“working hours”. In Korea it was the custom for the company to maintain office hours for half

a day on Saturdays. This was actually better than most Korean companies at the time, that

worked a full six-day week, but still, more required time from me.

During this entire process I had been very careful not to ask for more money – wary of

that turf and not wanting to be perceived as a profiteer over a company that was obviously

trimming back in harder times. But the deal was verging on being well un-sellable to Nancy

and I needed to go home with something/anything that would soften a bunch of potential bad

58
news. I broached the extra work and no extra pay issue and was told, quite quickly, that any

salary issues would have to go through the Regional President, a Mr. Jim Oates. That was

interesting. Bud had the authority to negotiate all these other things, but not salary. The

meeting ended with perfunctory smiles but not particularly comfortable ones.

– WWE –

My walk home from the Loop everyday to our home was one of my treasured fringe

benefits from my time at Burnett. Averaging roughly four miles, starting on Wacker Drive and

proceeding past the Sun Times, the Wrigley building, The Tribune Tower and proceeding up

Michigan Avenue for one of the world’s classic window shopping tours, the walk gave me the

time to wash the business out of my system and prepare for a nice time at home with minimal

shoptalk. But that day would be different. We were having shoptalk for dinner. The towers of

Michigan Avenue wound down past the Hancock building, starting with the classic Drake

Hotel and reducing themselves a century or so in storeys and time, through the brownstones of

the Gold Coast where Lincoln Park abruptly breaks the architectural mélange just north of the

Cardinal’s mansion. I relished this walk, even in times of snow and cold.

I always took a slightly different route, varying my return so that I might see a different

tree or paint on someone’s house. Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion was on the way and I

imagined a hundred stories about the people who lived in the other structures before I hit the

park. Spring season starts here on a few dusty public diamonds every year and the walkways

and statues to city forefathers guide one towards the zoo, with elephant noises, and eventually

to the formal gardens, the Arboretum and the Belden Stratford, directly across the street.

On this way home and on this day, I decided to give my wife the gift of one more

pleasant dinner, candles and such, and the opportunity to choose the best thing to do, for both

of us. Not, that I couldn’t decide, but I needed to let her know that she had the power. I already

had an idea of how to make it work.

59
 – WWE –

“Bud. Here’s the deal. We’ll take the twenty five grand, and the company gives us six roundtrip

plane tickets to commute this thing over the next six months. Once we sort out the market,

we’ll find her a job”, I said the next day.

“Fine, now go see Jimmy Oates and get this thing wrapped up”, he chirped.

Jim Oates was a big old block of a man. A veteran of the Philip Morris business he was

then President of our Asia Pacific division, 18 offices representing 20% of our global network.

Did Jim have any idea who I was at all? Well, he certainly did on this day because he behaved

like nobody had ever given them this much shit over a posting. But the shit was well deserved.

They hadn’t offered me any compensation for what was then considered a “hardship posting”,

a term meaning that expatriate employees would have a hard time in a difficult environment.

As the Koreas were and still are technically in a state of war, it was considered a war zone as

well.

But Jim was a closer, he just wanted this deal done – small potatoes for him. A mid-

year raise of 5% was offered and I didn’t push it. At least it was something. And it’s generally

good to see the other guy squirm a bit. That tells you you’re not leaving money on the table.

And I had seemingly made all parties happy. Nancy kept her job, the agency got what

they wanted and the Koreans got something they didn’t want, but didn’t have any choice over

either. Me.

And my happiness? I can’t imagine that anyone was even considering that at the time.

Nancy made one final plea that night – that I reconsider and go back to the company to

see if there was anything – anything else that I could do to stay in Chicago.

“Dear”, I told her, “When the company says they ‘want you to take a look at our Korea

60
operation’ , they don’t mean ‘take a look’”, referring to our look-see trip, “They mean you’re

going to fucking Korea.”

Plan “B” had been made abundantly clear as a job washing windows in a shrinking 50-

storey corporation or selling Leo’s beloved apples on the street. There was no plan “B”.

“We made the deal, honey – now we gotta’ do the deal. Let’s go to bed.”

B A B Y , W E ’ R E I N T H I S T O G E T H E R

Parked before the clunky Buicks and Fords on a gravel suburban Illinois street, the shiny black

61 Corvair Monza was like a little spoon of caviar atop your standard deli lox & bagel – quite

the garnish for this Mid-western party. The Chevy Corvair, made famous firstly by Ralph

Nader’s exposition of its safety issues, and secondly by its “sub sandwich” design, had made

its way from New Jersey at the hands of Chelsi Moretti, Doris’ former boss and mentor at the

Lenox China factory. Chelsi was also her son’s Godfather and had made his way cross-country

for this special family event.

Deposited by the Buicks and Fords, a stream of fashionable young housewives in June

Cleaver dresses paraded into the Carlson’s new ranch home, each carrying a ribbon bound box

of congratulatory content as David watched in anticipation. Dressed in his Sunday best of navy

blue shorts, jacket and tie with Catholic-black shoes and ankle socks, he stared at the pebbles

of the front doorstep, head in hands. Each patting him on the head and saying “Hi David!”, one

by one the ladies let the aluminum screen door slam behind them as they entered the house.

Inside a near carnival was underway. Curly coloured streamers loping from ceiling corners to

the center of the room, Ferrante & Teicher on the stereo, cakes, tea and swishy dresses spiraled

around the event of the day – David’s new baby sister, Bonnie.
61
 He didn’t get it. Five years as the number-one son and all of a sudden this monkey-

looking crying bundle was stealing all the attention. The world was going to be a very different

place from now on.

Chelsi came out to the porch and sat down next to David. “Hey buddy, you’re a big

brother now”, he said, “cheer up”. But “cheery” wasn’t exactly in David’s lexicon yet. He still

didn’t get.

One day, a few weeks before, he had gone to the kitchen with a very important question

for his mother. “Mom”, he asked, “Mrs. Adams is getting very fat. Why is she getting so fat?

Mom, understood the question immediately. She turned around, wiped her hands and

took David out to the living room. As they sat on the sofa she explained that Mrs. Adams, the

neighbor next door, was going to have a baby, and that’s why she was getting so big. “It’s not

fat”, she explained, “Mrs. Adams has a little baby inside her and that takes up a lot of space –

she just looks fat”.

“But we’re going to have a baby, and you’re not getting fat”, he retorted.

The concept of adoption is a hard one to grasp for a five year old and as much as Doris

had explained the idea of where David’s new baby sister was coming from, this was her

realization that it was going to be even more of a challenge.

David had remembered the trip to Catholic Social Services in Peoria, a classic old

sandstone hospital with high ceilings, marble floors and heavy wooden benches in the lobby.

He was asked to sit on one of the benches while his mother and father went into the office to

sign the papers with Mrs. Davies, the social worker who paid regular visits to their home to

check on their first adoption.

Feet dangling above the floor he watched doctors and nurses in white as they carried

62
out their business. But what was their business? This was where people came to get babies?

Actually, he thought all people got their babies here until Mrs. Adams got fat.

The Carlsons came out of the office to await the arrival of their new daughter. As a

nurse came down the marble stairs carrying a little bundle, she slipped and sent the baby

flying. In slow motion David watched as the baby traveled to the hard marble floor – and then

a second – and then “waaaaaaaahhhhhh!” She was okay. Interesting, he thought. You can drop

a baby on it’s head and it’s still okay. Interesting indeed.

The idea that nobody gave the baby a shower during the baby shower didn’t make a

great deal of sense but it was quite the party. Gifts were opened while the guest of honor

seemed to sleep through most of the festivities.

Chelsi and David went back to the porch with their cake and punch. From this point on he

realized that things were going to be very different – but different in a different way. Now he

had responsibility. Now he was a big brother. The hand tinted black and white photograph,

made at the local portrait studio, with his new baby sister on his lap wouldn’t tell the whole

story but it was a good start.

L U C K Y P E O P L E

Like a musket ball from a slingshot, the RX7 fired down Lakeshore Drive to the Dan Ryan

connecting with Interstate 90 on the way to Gary Indiana. The trip to Michigan from Chicago

was like going through hell and back and being born again on the other side.

From the urban paradise of the North Shore, through the loop, and elevated over the

seedier south side, past Comisky Park, rows of public housing and then flattening out through a

series of low water marsh ponds – silhouettes of men fishing with long poles in the cesspools

63
of industrial waste – the highway provided a release not available through drugs, alcohol and

rarely sex. The washing of city cares would soon be replaced by cool lake breezes and

undulating sand dunes in the long shadows of a daylight savings time sunset.

Gary Indiana, however, on the furthest tip of Lake Michigan, was the armpit of

America, marked only by billboards for a Trump riverboat casino and a brown state highway

sign at the exit for Michael Jackson’s boyhood home, like a national monument – the last place

on earth one wanted to have a flat tire. But the Mazda RX7 had been outfitted for the trip with

Pirelli tires, a racing tuned suspension and 50% more horsepower than it had had out of the

factory. It also sported a state of the art sound system and had become our home on the road for

weekend trips to the tourist themed “Water Wonderland” state.

But the 20-minute surrounds that encompassed Gary always put Nancy a little bit on

edge. Towering hulks of burnt-out steel mills, skeletal carcasses of vehicles on the roadside and

not an exit for miles told a driver that this was God’s little bit of hell. But somewhere past

Gary, around Michigan City, which is actually still in Indiana, Nancy would fall asleep for the

few hours needed until we reached our traditional rest stop.

This was music time. The salesman at the audio shop had sold me on the idea that the

car, and my car in particular, was the perfect concert hall environment and he and I together

had spent over five thousand dollars to accomplish what I considered audio perfection. Each

week, for over a month I would visit the shop and switch out a condenser or a speaker to

improve the sound. The bass was my main obsession – that it be clean, fast and tight – so an

added 100 watts and a subwoofer was crowded into the small luggage area behind the two

seats in the car. This left quite a bit less space for luggage but god was the sound incredible.

Note to car audio enthusiasts: Donald Fagen, of Steely Dan fame has probably two of the best

test records for audio systems in his first two solo releases. Forget hip-hop and Timbaland

mixed dance stuff – this is pure, exquisitely played, jazz pop rock with an emphasis on

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technical perfection, from the playing to recording, mixing and mastering. It tells a system

what time it is.

With one rest and gas stop, the time from Chicago to Whitehall, Michigan was around

three and a half hours, but I could cut that to under three with stealthy speeding and the right

CDs around the known radar traps of the state police. Our weekend trips to Michigan had come

at my insistence to realize a childhood dream.

As a kid, my father had taken us on a summer vacation to the FloraDale resort in Silver

Lake Michigan. The dunes and peace at Silver Lake had lived in my memory for years and

now that I was living within hours of these incredible natural wonders, I wanted to make them

part of our future as well. There was also the idea that we were getting into our forties and

would soon be facing the biological clock on the question of kids of our own. Now that I was

in a position to afford it, I wanted to make the acquisition of a summer home a reality – for us

both and for our children to come.

The notion to buy a lake house was mine entirely. For years I had dragged Nancy from

her city apartment around the lake to the weekend haunts of Chicago’s second home crowd.

From Michigan City to Grand Haven, Holland, Muskeegon and all the little hamlets in

between, the lake was a treasure trove of hidden charms and architectural oddities. It was

Chicago’s version of The Hamptons. Millionaires, billionaires, celebrities, personalities and

local residents had all taken their slice of the lakefront and while we were none of the above, a

quick survey of housing prices had told us that a couple of hundred thousand could get us a

pretty cool old house on the lake instead of a hovel in the city – and we could certainly afford

that. Probably against her better judgment, my wife accompanied me dutifully on all these

weekend jaunts, staying at everything from posh B&Bs to Route 66 style resorts and

rummaging through flea markets, eating at corner cafes and learning the lay of the land. In time

we had met any great number of country real estate agents and seen all manner of lake property

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from toyishly miniature Victorian fantasies of the late 19th century to more Frank Lloyd Wright

inspired 60s cottages of Prarie-style minimalism.

But White Lake was the gem for us. For all the ginger-breadish hamlets growing up the

lake from Chicago, White Lake was just over the dreaded three hour driving limit where new

development ceased and was like taking a trip back a hundred years. The oldest contiguous

yacht club in the United States lived there, and does still, not far away from the world’s largest

weathervane, and the lake was distinctly the province of sailors, as opposed to motor-boaters,

owing to it’s channel out to the larger lake Michigan.

White Lake is a four mile long lake with the town of Whitehall to the east and the

channel to the big lake on the west. Just south of the channel lies Sylvan Beach, a more than

century-old community of private homes situated on a small dune that divides the two lakes.

The first time we visited Sylvan, Nancy looked out the window of the car with the

smaller lake on the right, sailboats in the sunset, and a clubhouse, tennis courts and homey

cottages nestled amidst the two hundred year old pines to the left. “These people are lucky”,

she said. We drove to the end of the small road that goes through Sylvan to find the White Lake

lighthouse on the channel to Lake Michigan. It was just charming and seemed way too

expensive and exclusive for us. Indeed those people were lucky but as luck would have it we

were about to become two of those people.

– WWE –

The area originally presented itself in a guidebook of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and I had

cultivated a hobby of visiting a Wright building whenever one was near. White Lake had three

– one wooden structure in the style of his famous Falling Water with a living room that

spanned the road underneath and two smaller less innovative cottages – one, a carbon copy of

the other. Wright had worked in Japan at the turn of the century and was greatly influenced by

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a linear design style, different from European vertical styles that would become the Prairie

Style and his trademark in the United States.

But this trip would finish a negotiation, begun many months earlier, on our own little

piece of this Michigan paradise. Before the winter had set in the previous year I had been

informed by an attorney in the area that a property in Sylvan Beach area would be coming on

the market. This was doubly unusual because homes in this private community rarely traded –

many had been owned by the same families for over 100 years – and the bylaws of the

community forbid public listings – but the seller was unusually motivated and we were

intrigued.

One visit to the house sold us. It was a disaster, but Nancy loved it. A mansard roofed

rambling two story, built in 1895 it had been through only three owners in a hundred years. The

most recent, Phillip Arthurhultz, had bought it in the late 70s and apparently not touched it

since. The question of course was, why? Or why not?

Arthurhultz was a character all to himself. The Republican Senate majority leader of the

Michigan state Senate, an exotic car enthusiast and reportedly gay, he was a real anomaly and

reputed to be an elusive negotiator as well – stories of his attempted sale of the property were

littered with tales of jilted buyers, broken agreements and midnight price-hikes. Our deal had

been at least that much fun.

Essentially abandoned for seventeen years, the house was like a musical jewelry box

left in the attic for too many years. Tilted down the hill amidst the pine and beach trees it was

covered in boughs and hosted raccoons in the attic. Inside was like a Hollywood set,

Americana dripping from every corner – eagles painted on furniture, Betsy Ross table covers

Tiffany imitation lamps and lace curtains – like a cover story from the 1922 debut of Better

Homes and Gardens. Could a man really live here? Could anyone?

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 The answer lied in Phil’s need for a legal residence in Michigan. Of course he didn’t

live there but it had served his need for a registered property and was a handy storage dump for

his campaign yard-signs in the basement. But Phil was retiring and its usefulness was finished.

The price tag initially was somewhere in the three hundred thousand range but had you

seen the place, that was laughable. Yet, what was being purchased was not particularly real

estate or a building per se. What would be gained was eleven shares in the Sylvan Beach

corporation and the right to occupy the property in question – for a lifetime. And Sylvan Beach

was worth quite a bit – only seventy five cottages on a Department of Dunes and Natural

Resources protected parcel with no new construction permitted. It was a bona-fide piece of

history and guaranteed to stay that way for the next hundred years by state charter, not unlike

the 100 year the lease the British had held on Hong Kong. And the neighbors were an

interesting lot also; some relatives of Gerald Ford’s family, one of the President Roosevelt’s

grandsons and some other very interesting sorts.

We were told by the real estate agent that Phil wouldn’t even entertain a number less

than his asking price so our initial offer included all sorts of riders for roof repair, foundation

support, plumbing fixes and the like. Only because the number was right, he accepted it – but

then after months of trying to accomplish what amounted to an impossible task, threw the deal

back at us and said, “You fix it. Come up with a new number.”

Our trip that weekend was to close the deal with Phil. Judging by what we had heard

about him it was going to be a whole bunch of fun. Arriving at White Lake Realty, a small

office in a strip shopping mall we noticed that Phil had arrived in a classic Cadillac Eldorado

that dwarfed everything else in the parking lot. Much had been made of Phil’s car collection

and I found it odd that he had chosen this one for the task, like Boss Hog from the Dukes of

Hazard.

Seated at a table wearing a three-piece pin striped suite he began the meeting by stating
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that he owned two Cadillacs, a Ferrari and a few other collectables and that he didn’t need to

sell the house for money. So knowing a bit about car lovers myself I responded in kind, “Well,

you know Phil, the problem with that, is that the Ferrari you’ve got is not the Ferrari you want

– sell the house.” That line worked like a charm and we finished the contract in less than an

hour – a lot closer to two hundred thousand than three.

It rained later that day as we finished lunch and went out to sit on the porch of our soon

to be new home. I can still see Nancy’s face looking out to the foggy lake to the East. Peaceful.

Content. And probably wondering how we were going to fix the place up with me in Korea for

the next two years. Now, we were the lucky ones.

A L I T T L E B I T O ’ H E A V E N

Moline, Illinois sits on the Mississippi River at the only place where the famous North/South

river flows East to West into Iowa. There must be something to that positioning that sets

attitudes a little different from other places. Mother Goose Land in Davenport Iowa was a

children’s park of the early 1960s variety with all manner of fairytale creatures done up as big

concrete casts that kids could climb all over and go inside. The giant-sized shoe from the little

old lady who lived in it was David’s favorite. But on the way home, after the small-gauge train

ride, after the cotton candy, there was nirvana. On the way home there was his little bit of

heaven. The child was oddly transfixed by the strangest of things. Little Bit O’Heaven was the

creation of B.J. Palmer of the Palmer school of Chiropractic and it was his idea that it be a

contemplative garden for his students and public. B.J. was generally regarded as an eccentric,

homeopathic healer and quack, but the school eventually gained acceptance and the discoveries

of his father, D.D. Palmer would later be found closely linked to similar philosophies in

Oriental medicine. But B.J.’s passion was his art collection and boy, what a collection it was –

the finest cornucopia of Oriental sculpture, assorted bric-a-brac and weird bullshit the Midwest
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had to offer. What was just another roadside attraction to Ray and Doris would become a

reoccurring haven for David throughout his growing years. Giant Buddhas and Bodhisattvas

cavorted in an eclectic grotto of fantastically bizarre imagery, complete with a live alligator

pond, snake sculptures, European marble nudes and a giant clamshell for kid’s photo ops. It

was magical, stuck there in the middle of the cornfields. But it told another story, a story closer

to the heart of a young boy. It told him that there were

things, forces and manifestations that reached far beyond

the somewhat simple iconography of a Catholic education

– things that reached well beyond the Midwest and

certainly the US. Things that reached beyond the physical and into the metaphysical, the

transcendent and the unknown – for here was imagery that didn’t just appear in a dream. This

was real. The real thoughts and expressions of peoples from very far away, collected by a man

who was fascinated by what he did not yet know, transfixed, like David.

Doris told her son one day after church that the family priest, Father Tholl, had run

away – run away from the parish to marry a woman who had been a nun in the convent next

door. His name was Bernie Tholl now, not Father Tholl anymore and he lived in Chicago. The

boy imagined him mowing his lawn or fixing a broken pipe under a sink, no longer wearing his

collar and doing his “honey-do’s” in a soiled plaid shirt. Maybe he had found his own little bit

of heaven – not far from the middle-class of the Middle West he had been preaching to.

– WWE –

Nancy would remark to me later, on news of Princess Diana’s death, that she understood the

world was a very “complicated” place when Kennedy was shot in 63. That year would also

mark the delivery of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the Beatles invasion

of America. America would soon invade Vietnam and Tony Bennett’s recording of “I Left My

Heart in San Francisco” made him a star. Castro had become our enemy and Korea would elect

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Park Chun Hee, its fifth president in 10 years, after assassination of their fourth. Santa Claus

was still alive all right but he was having a hard time breathing and needed the care of a good

doctor, or maybe a good chiropractor.

G O E A S T Y O U N G M A N

The next month would be extremely busy with the house closing and my preparation for

Korea. A door had opened and I had chosen to see what was on the other side, leaving home

behind.

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 MARKETING OVERVIEW

In 2008 China hosted the Olympics and by 2020 will have the largest middle-class in the world
– buying American products from American companies. More American students than ever
before are studying overseas, many in Asia and over 8 million Americans are employed as
expatriates, Once the Olympics hit, interest in all things Asian will grow exponentially, so the
positioning for Wild Wild East will be greatly enhanced and aligned with America’s economic
interest in the Far East.
Additionally, reports from early readings of the text by target readers indicate that a
story written by a “regular guy” about a not-so-regular life is attractive because it comes from a
common viewpoint but grows and expands to involve the reader in worlds they would not
otherwise be exposed to. As someone said to me recently, “You’ve been rich and you’ve been
poor – but boy have you got a story to tell”

DEMOGRAPHIC TARGET
Primary: BabyBoomers, X-Gen 45-65 60% Male 40% Female
Secondary: 20/Thirtysomethings 25-40 60% Male 40% Female

PSYCHOGRAPHIC TARGET
Primary: University graduates
Adventure seekers
Secondary: Expatriates
Adventure seekers
Business, entrepreneurs
Business oriented
International experience
Travelers

PROMOTIONAL OPPORTUNITIES
Opportunities for speaking engagements and radio/on camera interviews can cover
the following categories and groups:
Advertising clubs, Entrepreneurial groups, Asian American groups, Motivational
speaking engagements, Personal Growth speaking engagements, Travel groups, International
business groups, Universities, Business Schools, etc.
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 COMPARATIVE/COMPETITIVE TITLES

The books on Asia and expat life in general come in two distinctly different forms – either
straight business/sociology from academics and journalists or amusing tales from people living
abroad. And since America has very few expats, most of the perspective is European.

Wild Wild East establishes a firm territory in not owing to any particular existing genre – a
personal tale, with a sympathetic protagonist that gives just enough history and background to
get on with the story, without getting bogged down in academic discourse. Also, a wide swath
of Asia is covered, (Korea, China, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Japan, Indonesia, The Philippines,
Thailand, Malaysia, Guam, Singapore and Vietnam) sometimes humorously, sometimes with
pathos but always with intelligence, a sense of place and with wit and style.

SIMILAR TITLES

1) Wild East: Stories From the Last Frontier (HARDCOVER) by Boris Fishman
http://www.amazon.com/Wild-East-Stories-Last Frontier/dp/1932112154/ref=sr_1_1/104-2216088-
3459950?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186646356&sr=8-1#capbody

Not competitive but about the Soviet Union and eastern bloc countries by a journalist
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #140,235 in Books

2) The Wild East by Margaret Lynn Brown (NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE HISTORY OF THE SOUTH)
(PAPERBACK)
http://www.amazon.com/Wild-East-Perspectives-History-South/dp/081302093X/ref=sr_1_4/104-2216088-
3459950?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186646356&sr=8-4

Not competitive. About the Smoky Mountains in the US.

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #665,986 in Books

3) Wild East: Travels in the New Mongolia (PAPERBACK) by Jill Lawless

http://www.amazon.com/Wild-East-Travels-New-Mongolia/dp/1550224344/ref=sr_1_13/104-2216088-
3459950?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186646356&sr=8-13

Not competitive but I will have a chapter on Mongolia towards the end
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #679,740 in Books

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COMPARATIVE TITLES

4) Expat: Women's True Tales of Life Abroad by Christina Henry De Tessan (Editor)
(Adventura Books) (Paperback)

Not similar but 22 vignettes of women’s lives abroad edited by a woman.

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #84,830 in Books

5) Above the Sea: Expat in China by Jim Bainbridge (Author) (Paperback)

http://www.amazon.com/Above-Sea-Expat-Jim-Bainbridge/dp/0595259294/ref=sr_1_18/104-2216088-
3459950?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186666937&sr=8-18

All about China over a one year assignment. Not as broad as WWE.
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,661,024

6) Max Danger: The Adventures of an Expat in Tokyo by Robert J. Collins (Author)

(Tut Books) (Paperback)

A fictional character based on the author’s experiences in Japan - Comedy

http://www.amazon.com/Max-Danger-Adventures-Expat-Tokyo/dp/0804815313/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-2216088-
3459950?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186667482&sr=1-1

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #122,862 in Books

7) The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies
by Michael Breen (Author) (Paperback)
http://www.amazon.com/Koreans-They-Where-Their-Future/dp/0312326092/ref=sr_1_51/104-2216088-
3459950?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186667987&sr=1-51

A series of business, political and cultural essays on Korea, not a personal journey like WWE
but a socioeconomic/political profile
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #160,604

8) Introduction to Korean History & Culture by Andrew Cl Hahm (Author) (Paperback)

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Korean-History-Culture-Andrew/dp/0930878078/ref=sr_1_1/104-1642514-

8289505?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194095811&sr=1-1

Exactly what it says it is – Academic social exploration, not personal experience

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,134,099 in Books

9) Asia Rising: Why America Will Prosper As Asia's Economies Boom

74
by Jim Rohwer (Author) (Hardcover)

http://www.amazon.com/Asia-Rising-America-Prosper-Economies/dp/078815477X/ref=sr_1_2/104-1642514-

8289505?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194118065&sr=1-2

Economic outlook by a Financial Times correspondent

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,747,130

10) The Handbook Of Eastern Asia by Michael Kort (Author) (Mass Market Paperback)
http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Eastern-Asia-Michael-Kort/dp/0761326723/ref=sid_dp_dp

A middle-school primer covering half the geography of WWE – not near as much fun

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,909,698

OUTLINE

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Structure: Part memoir, part travelogue, part historical guide and part American
business review, Wild Wild East follows the adventures of one
businessman in his quest to have his creative life make sense. From an
adoption agency in Manhattan to the board rooms of corporate America
and then on to the far east, WWE weaves a story from 1995 through 2005
and beyond with flashbacks from the authors life that grow
chronologically until they catch up with him in real time. Throughout
the telling the author travels the globe through over 30 countries and the
flashbacks occur every time he takes a trip, both before and after, usually
when he is on a plane when there is plenty of time for reflection. In this
way the story build upon itself in both complexity and understanding
from the reader as to why the central character makes the decisions he
does and travels the roads of fortune or less fortune as the case unfolds.

D A V I D E V E R I T T - C A R L S O N
Marketing, Branding, Advertising

76
CURRENT: Brand Provocateur, CarlsonCommunications, HCMC, Vietnam
That’s myself and the right partners for every job. We work as project specialists
to help clients brand, communicate and advertise.

2 0 0 6 – 2 0 0 7: Professor, Vietnam National University, HCMC

As Professor of Marketing with courses in Consumer Research
and Brand Management I structure my classes in a
student/company structure and have learners develop
campaigns as they would in an actual business.

1998–2005: President/CEO, CarlsonCreative, Inc., Seoul, Korea

Clients: British American Tobacco, LG, Hyundai, Samsung, Ministry of
Finance/Korea, Ministry of Planning and Budget/Korea.

Our company pitched and won BAT’s largest brand in Korea against much
larger multi-nationals. We created and managed magazine advertising, hotel,
retail promotions and original product promotion.
See:http://www2.gol.com/users/kilburn/entrep.htm

1995–1997: VP/Executive Creative Director, Leo Burnett, Korea

Clients: McDonald's, Reebok, Procter & Gamble, Kellogg's
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arJ0E80PKS8

1990–1995: VP/Creative Director, Leo Burnett Chicago, USA

Clients: Nintendo, Sony, Miller Beer, Kellogg's, McDonald's
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHTJAHHfGNw

1 9 8 8 – 1 9 90 : Creative Director/Team Leader, Earle Palmer Brown, Washington DC, USA

Clients: Marriott, USAir
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a_owH-c3XU

1989–1992: Associate Creative Director, Bozell, Dallas, USA

Clients: American Airlines, Armour Foods, The Dallas Mavericks
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_52x3j21-m8

1 9 8 2 – 1 9 8 4: Writer/Art Director, The Richards Group, Dallas, USA

Clients: 7-11 Stores, Banks and Real Estate companies

77
EDUCATION: BS, Corporate Communications, Southern Illinois University, USA

AWARDS: The Clios, The New York Art Directors Club, The One Show, The Addys and
International Film Festivals in New York and Chicago

PUBLIC SPEAKING: 2006 Vietnam National University, (Brand Management)

2005 KMLA, Korean Minjok Leadership Academy, (Advertising)
2004 AdClub, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, (No, I’m not kidding!)
2003 Hallym University, Korea (Marketing, Advertising)
2002 Yonsei University, Korea (Creativity in Marketing)
1999 Cheil Communications, Korea (Branding)
1998 Korea National University of Art, Korea (Multimedia Campaigns)
1997 The American Chamber of Commerce in Korea (Marketing, Advertising)
1995 Northwestern Illinois University, USA (Kellogg School of Management)

PRESS & TV: Discovery Channel/Asia 2006 Nokia MobiFilms contest Finalist

ADWEEK US Advertising Trade Publication, English

MEDIA Magazine/Hong Kong Advertising Trade Publication, English

Chosun Ilbo/Korea General Interest Newspaper, Korean

ADvertising Magazine/Korea Advertising Trade Publication, Korean

The Korea Herald General Interest Newspaper, English

CNBC Asia International Business TV, English

TV5 Mongolia General Interest TV, Mongolian

CONTACT: David Everitt-Carlson

Email: David.E.Carlson@gmail.com
HP: 84-90-234-9570 (Vietnam)

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