Everybody at my company ate hanwoo last Friday and I wasn’t there. That’s it, that’s the whole embarrassing story. Beef I didn’t get to eat is bothering me more than it should, and under that there’s a second thing bothering me that’s harder to say, which is what people probably thought when I wasn’t in the room.
Hoesik, the team dinner, is where a lot of your standing at a Korean company actually gets decided. Not in the review meeting, not on paper. Nobody writes down that you’re supposed to go — companies can’t officially require it, because if it’s outside working hours it starts to look like unpaid time you were forced into, and that’s not something a boss wants to explain to a labor office. So on paper it’s voluntary. In practice, whether you showed up or not gets remembered, longer than most things that actually happen during work hours do.
The structure is simple. Team dinner, decided that day or the day before usually, near the office because after 20:30 nobody wants to drive far, a table for eight to twelve people. Most nights it’s samgyeopsal or some jjigae place, I’d guess under 20,000 won a person, company card or split with the team budget, I’m honestly not sure which every time. But sometimes the boss picks somewhere nicer, and hanwoo is the nicer choice. Korean beef, way more expensive than the imported stuff — I think it runs something like 40,000 to 60,000 won a person depending on the cut, could be more if somebody orders without looking at the price. When hanwoo shows up as the plan, everyone already knows it’s a slightly bigger night. Good quarter, boss in a good mood, doesn’t really matter why. You go to that one especially.
Why I wasn’t there
I had other business that Friday. That’s really all I can say about it, it wasn’t anything I want to get into here. I found out after the fact it was hanwoo night, and I sat there annoyed at myself in two separate ways, which is a strange thing to notice about yourself but I noticed it.
First one’s simple. I like hanwoo, it’s not something I buy for myself, and I missed a free good meal. Plain disappointment, nothing complicated about it.
Second one is the one I keep turning over. It’s wondering how my not being there gets read. If some twenty-something on the team skips a dinner, nobody thinks about it twice, busy, tired, has plans, fine. If I skip one, in my head there’s a version where it gets filed under the same old thing — not because missing one dinner is a big deal on its own, but because there’s already a file with my name on it, and anything that isn’t crystal clear tends to get sorted into whatever’s already in that file.
The file that doesn’t close
Here’s the part that’s hard to explain if you haven’t lived it. I made a mistake at work a while back. I’m not going to lay out what it was, that’s between me and the people there, but I own it, it was mine to own. The thing about a mistake once you’re past fifty and the same fifteen people have watched you for years — it doesn’t stay in the past the way you want it to. It turns into a lens people look through. Something small later, forgetting a step, mislabeling a shipment, showing up a couple minutes late, normally that’s nothing. But once your boss and coworkers already have a story about who you are, the small thing gets pulled into that story instead of standing on its own.
I don’t think anybody’s out to get me over it. It’s just how memory works when you see the same faces every single day for years straight. People don’t reset their opinion of you every morning. They carry the last strong impression and update it slow, if they update it at all. Younger guys get “still figuring it out” as an excuse. Older workers don’t get that phrase said about them nearly as much — the assumption is you should already know better by now, so when you slip, it doesn’t read as a rookie mistake, it reads like a character thing.
I don’t have the exact number in my head but I know a lot of workplaces here look like mine now — older. Factories, fabrication shops, sites like the one I work at, plenty of guys in their 50s still doing physical work, not because they love it but because the birth rate dropped and there just aren’t enough younger people coming in behind us. What that means for me practically is there’s a lot of us sitting in these rooms getting watched through some old lens, and we’ve got fewer years left at the company to earn our way out of it than a 27 year old has. A younger guy can have a bad stretch and still have fifteen, twenty years ahead of him to slowly become someone else in everyone’s eyes. I don’t have that kind of runway here, and everyone including me kind of knows it without saying it.
What people get wrong about the fear
When people talk about hierarchy in Korea from outside, it’s always “the boss is scary,” some intimidating guy behind a desk. Sometimes true. But honestly the coworkers’ opinion of you is scarier day to day than the boss’s. The boss sees you in bursts, a report here, a meeting there, one hoesik. The coworkers see you all day every day, they’re the ones who notice a pattern forming, and their small comments and looks add up into an atmosphere you can feel walking in the door. A boss forgets things faster than the guy two seats over who’s watched the same thing happen three times.
The other thing people get wrong is thinking one mistake follows you around forever, permanently stuck to you. That’s not quite it. What actually happens is the chances to get it off you are rare. Nobody sits you down and tells you you’re forgiven. There’s no moment where it officially resets. It just takes a long stretch of being boring and reliable, and even then it’s other people who decide when that’s been enough — you don’t get to decide you’ve paid it off yourself.
And the culture around skipping dinners has actually loosened up, that part’s true. I remember hearing from older guys when I was younger that you basically didn’t say no to hoesik unless you were in the hospital, that’s just how it was back then. Now younger employees turn down the invite and nothing happens to them. But that loosening only really helps the people who don’t already have a file open. If you’re in good standing, skipping reads as respecting your own time. If you’re in my spot, skipping the exact same dinner risks reading as avoiding the team, or not taking it seriously — still. Same exact thing, read two different ways, depending on what came before it.
So what do you actually do
There’s no clean trick to it, honestly. What I do is show up to the ones I can show up to, even the cheap samgyeopsal nights nobody would notice me skipping, because just being there over and over is the only thing that slowly buys anything back. I try not to be the guy who leaves early. I don’t drink much anymore either — drinking used to be a bigger part of the whole bonding thing at these dinners, that’s just how it went for years here — but lately those nights aren’t fun the way they used to be for me, because I’m half enjoying the food and half watching how I’m coming across, and that second part is tiring in a way that’s got nothing to do with the soju.
I missed the hanwoo. I’ll go to the next one. That’s really the whole plan, if you can even call it a plan — keep showing up, keep doing the boring version of the job right, and hope eventually the new boring version of me weighs more than the old story in people’s heads. It’s slow. Some weeks I honestly can’t tell if it’s working. But I don’t know a faster way through it, and at this point in my life, faster isn’t really something I get to choose anyway.
Leave a Reply