decades. Nothing’s changed. It’s not like we wake up thinking about it. I
have my own life to worry about. My parents want me to get a job at
Samsung.
“You get a job with Samsung, Hyundai, LG, SK. Then your parents,
and society, say you’re a success and brag about you to their friends. If
you don’t get into Samsung, well, then you’re a failure and you don’t
exist.”
I was captivated by comments like these. Two generations earlier,
South Korea had been a dictatorship, and poorer than North Korea. Today
it is among the richest and most tech savvy democracies, a success story
that few would have predicted a few decades ago. Locals referred to South
Korea as the “Republic of Samsung.”
How could South Korea go from an agrarian nation to one of the
world’s most successful economies in two generations? What were the
effects on its people, its businesses, and its culture? I enrolled at Seoul’s
Yonsei University for an intensive period of Korean study, poring over the
most highly regarded academic books on the country. I befriended locals
in an effort to understand the Korean people better.
“Everyone on this street corner has a Samsung product somewhere on
them, or in their homes,” a former Samsung vice president told me
proudly. “In their pocket, in their living room, at their workplace, the parts
inside their Apple smartphones. Everyone.”
I discovered he was right.
Disembarking at airports in Mexico City, London, and Budapest, I was
hit with Samsung signage and advertising everywhere. I saw people in
Cambodia, Cuba, Russia, and Venezuela using Samsung phones. Outside
the airport in Vientiane in the sleepy Southeast Asian nation of Laos, I saw
a giant ad for the Note 7 months after the device had been pulled from the
market. On a trip to Pyongyang, North Korea, my regime minder showed
me a photo on his smartphone of his living room—where I spied a flat-
screen television with a Samsung logo. Samsung was the pride of South
Korea; to most, Korea’s success rested on Samsung’s success.
—
IN SEOUL, NEWS ABOUT the exploding Galaxy Note 7 hit the news shows
and websites on a minute-by-minute basis. I was inundated with calls from