The head of LG Electronics representative office in Ukraine
Smiling widely, Tae-Hon Ryu welcomed us into his LG Electronics office that occupies the upper floor of a round glass building with a stunningly beautiful view. The first floor, by the way, houses one of Tae-Hon’s favourite restaurants – Belveder.
As I found out, Tae-Hon Ryu works for LG Electronics as the head of the representative office. He has been with the company for 22 years, and Tae-Hon says LG is “the first and the only” career for him. Considering the number of different countries he has worked in, his resume appears much more varied. “I’m one of the most globalised people in LG,” he said, since he has lived in Belgium, Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Ivory Coast, and of course Korea, his homeland. Throughout his career, and through his work-related experiences, Tae-Hon has acquired a basic knowledge of French, Arabic and Russian, and he feels this is a real challenge because he had to deal with four absolutely different language systems.
Tae-Hon came to Ukraine in 2006 and said that “living here is more different than difficult.” I bet!
After living for eight years outside of your home country, you can easily adapt to new environments. The same story about nostalgia – according to Tae-Hon, he visits Korea quite often during his business trips and is even envied by his Korean friends for living “among multitudes of beautiful ladies going along the streets,” he remarked, laughing. As far as I understood, what makes trips to Korea even more important is that Tae-Hon’s wife lives in Korea along with their son, who is getting ready to enter university. Now he and his daughter are awaiting a family reunion that will take place in autumn.
Tae-Hon didn’t elaborate about the peculiarities of his job and, frankly speaking, I was glad, since I was excited to know more about the lifestyle and pastimes of a Korean, since they are not often interviewed for the Word With… feature.
Tae-Hon Ryu loves reading – among his favourites are books on Central Asian, Mongolian and Manchurian history, sociology, philosophy, fiction, poetry, and of course literature on marketing and managing, since he works in those spheres. Naming the American linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky his favourite author, Tae-Hon stressed that the writer attracts him by “giving strong opinion and critiques of modern politics and ways in different social environments,” he said.
Along with being an active reader, Tae-Hon is also an ardent writer and even plans to publish his essays in the next several years, after retiring. “About the time when I’m in my mid-fifties I want to have published my own books about my life, beliefs, and work experience,” he shared, and said that he manages to write at least once a week and pays a lot of attention in his writings to the latest political and social events.
Through his interest in sociological studies, Tae-Hon became interested in the mindset regarding Ukrainian marriages, which differ significantly from Korean ones.
“A lot of people in Ukraine marry and have babies early, also after living for some time together without getting married,” Tae-Hon observed. “The Korean environment, on the other hand, is strongly influenced by Confucian system, where stable family life is very praised and divorces or separations are not common,” he said. However, according to Tae-Hon everything changes in the course of time and the Ukrainian system of building relationships between genders – when boys and girls are raised together, go to the same schools etc., and then try to live for some period of time without getting married – can be helpful for understanding a future lifetime partner.
I couldn’t restrain myself from my favourite topic and pushed our conversation into the sphere of cinema. Being interested in Asian movies, I got to know the names of some new Korean directors unknown to me. Tae-Hon proved to be a fan of Sci-Fi films and said he actually prefers watching films from his large home DVD collection rather than going to the cinema.
Among his other interests, Tae-Hon Ryu loves golfing, and also enjoys trying new foods, which in fact, made it easy for him to adapt to the new environment.
“I enjoy salo (salted pork fat) with black bread, borsch, and varenyky, but fresh fish is something I miss here,” he said. According to Tae-Hon, there’s no good fresh fish in Kyiv compared to the diversity of the Korean market, so “you should be really patient to find good sashimi here,” he noted, though admitting that he can eat sashimi everyday and often visits two of his favourite Kyivan restaurants, Murakami and Tokio.
